Drones Tackle Wildfires in XPrize Competition

To the untrained eye, it did not look like a particularly complicated mission. A large black quadcopter drone, more than two meters spanning the propeller tips, sat parked on the grass. Nestled between the legs of its landing gear was a red balloon filled with water. Not far away, on a concrete pad, a stack of wood pallets was ablaze, the flames whipping around in a heavy wind. A student at the University of Maryland (UMD) would fly the Alta X drone all of about 25 meters to the fire. There it would drop the water balloon to extinguish the flames.

In the XPrize contest, drones must distinguish between dangerous fires—like this one—and legitimate campfires. Jayme Thornton

But, of course, it was complicated. The drone needed to hover at about 13.5 meters overhead, and the balloon was configured to detonate at a specific point in midair to ensure optimal water dispersal, as calculated by UMD’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering. On a signal, Andrés Felipe Rivas Bolivar, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering, launched the Alta X toward the fire. As a second, smaller drone outfitted with a thermal camera surveyed the scene from above, Rivas maneuvered the balloon-laden drone to the proper position. After about a half minute, he released the water bomb…and the balloon plummeted to the ground just wide of the platform, bursting with a thwaaaap.

On this warm but blustery day in mid-October, a team of about 20 UMD students and professors were gathered at a fire and rescue training center in La Plata, Md., to demonstrate the building blocks of what could be the future of wildfire fighting. They called their team Crossfire. Their guests were a handful of officials from the XPrize Foundation, which has organized a pair of competitions to vastly speed up wildfire detection and suppression. Twelve other teams are competing with Crossfire in the semifinals for the autonomous wildfire-suppression track of the competition. In the final round, to be held in June 2026, five of those teams will have to find a fire within 1,000 square kilometers of what XPrize calls “environmentally challenging” terrain and then navigate to and extinguish it, all within 10 minutes. The winner collects a US $3.5 million purse—and, hopefully, the world’s wildfire-fighting armies get a powerful new weapon for their arsenals.

The Wildfire Problem

Wildfires are growing more severe and affecting more people worldwide. The November 2018 Camp Fire that burned down 620 square kilometers of Northern California, including most of the town of Paradise, was the most deadly and destructive in the state’s recorded history, and it sent Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant utility responsible for starting the fire, into bankruptcy. XPrize had long been based in the Los Angeles area, so that catastrophe was undoubtedly on the minds of its staffers when they formulated the competition in 2019. “This was just something that was really personal and close to a lot of the…