Robotics Cats joined the Fire Foresight team to travel to the U.S. to attend the XPRIZE Wildfire Team Summit from October 14 to 17. The teams spent a week in the Bay Area and Lake Tahoe before the summit and then visited San Diego after the XPRIZE event.
This business trip was very productive and fruitful. We’re grateful that we met many great people and saw some important things.
Oct 7th: UC Berkeley and Valley Christian School
Our CEO, Andre Cheung , travelled to UC Berkeley on Monday morning and then to Valley Christian Schools in the afternoon. Robotics Cats has been participating in the CITRIS Workforce Innovation Program since 2022. Andre took this opportunity to meet some CITRIS colleagues and interns in person. He visited the CITRIS Invention Lab and learned inspiring stories about how students 3D printed their creative ideas into useful tools. He had a joyful lunch meeting with the CITRIS team at the historic Faculty Club.
Andre met the Wildfire Quest Team at Valley Christian Schools (San Jose). They are one of the 28 XPRIZE Wildfire Track B Qualified Teams and the only high school team. The school executives shared with Andre how the educational institution leveraged XPRIZE competitions to drive STEM education and help students use technology to solve important real-world problems. XPRIZE Wildfire is their sixth XPRIZE participation!
Oct 8th: Santa Cruz
With support from Santa Cruz Works, we had good discussions with the UAV ecosystem in Santa Cruz. We met DART, Parallel Flight Technologies, EIVIE Corp, and Joby Aviation, and saw some drone demos at AirSpace Integration.
Oct 9th: Martis Camp
We flew from San Francisco to Reno early Wednesday morning and then drove to North Lake Tahoe. We visited Martis Camp, a community with 550 houses spread across a 2,200-acre area in Truckee. Martis Camp has been using LookOut Wildfire Detection SaaS since 2022. They shared with us how they employ technologies, sustainable forest management, and annual wildfire training programs to improve their climate resilience.
Oct 10th to 11th: Sierra Nevada Regional Meeting
We attended the Sierra Nevada Regional Meeting hosted by the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. The 1.5-day conference focused on collaborations between government agencies, local businesses, and tribal communities to reduce wildfire risks, conserve wildlife, and improve public access and recreational values of the natural environment.
October 14th to 17th: XPRIZE Wildfire Team Summit
The Fire Foresight Team attended the XPRIZE Wildfire Team Summit in Salt Lake City. 28 qualified teams of the Autonomous Wildfire Response Track (Track B) met and learned from each other. XPRIZE organized valuable training sessions about next year’s field test, as well as FireTech industry trends and dynamics.
It was the first time that the core working members of the Fire Foresight team — Rob Vernon of Indicium Dynamics, Andrew Davies of Taz Drone Solutions, Rishabh Chaturvedi of Little Place Labs, and Andre Cheung of RoboticsCats — met in person since the team was formed to pursue the XPRIZE Wildfire competition last October!
The Fire Foresight Team shared its collaborative solution in the Team Presentation session. The solution comprises four major elements:
– Little Place Labs: Uses satellite and remote sensing technology to identify high wildfire-risk areas and recommend strategic locations for placing wildfire detection cameras.
– Indicium Dynamics: Deploys surveillance cameras and drone docks, connecting them to Indicium Cloud. Indicium Cloud moves data between cameras, AI wildfire detection systems, drone docks, and micro-climate monitoring networks to autonomously respond to wildfires.
– Robotics Cats: Analyzes image input from Indicium Cloud to detect early-stage wildfires using machine learning classifications and returns detection results in real-time.
– Taz Drone Solutions: Its flight system launches drones from drone docks upon receiving wildfire locations from Indicium Cloud. Surveillance drones and suppression drones work in concert to control early-stage wildfires promptly.
October 18th to 19th: UC San Diego and Cleveland National Forest
We flew from Salt Lake City to San Diego on Thursday evening. On Friday, we visited La Jolla Shores, had a refreshing breakfast at Caroline’s Seaside Cafe, and toured UC San Diego —Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jacobs School of Engineering, and Qualcomm Institute.
We met with the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) and ALERTCalifornia teams. They shared their experiences with different sensor technologies and how they use surveillance cameras to provide real-time situational awareness of wildfires to Californians.
We continued our San Diego journey on Saturday by visiting Palomar Observatory, Boucher Lookout Tower, and Mt. Laguna Observatory. There are HPWREN cameras at all three locations.
We drove through Cleveland National Forest and spent some time at the Inaja Memorial Picnic Site near Santa Ysabel.
“The Inaja Fire marked a turning point in wildland firefighting. From that time forward, the study of fire behavior evolved into a sophisticated science.” — The Fire Outside My Window: A Survivor Tells the True Story of California’s Epic Cedar Fire, written by Sandra Millers Younger.
As we conclude this remarkable journey, we are thrilled about the exciting partnerships and collaborations ahead. The connections we’ve made will drive our mission forward, allowing us to develop innovative solutions for autonomous wildfire detection and intervention. Together, we look forward to creating a safer and more resilient future for our communities
Want to learn more about XPRIZE Wildfire and RoboticsCats? Please contact us at info@roboticscats.com
