Five teams are transforming wildfire response with cutting-edge technologies designed to detect and suppress fires autonomously, before they become destructive.
XPRIZE is pleased to announce the five Finalist teams advancing in the $5 million Autonomous Wildfire Response Track. These innovators are developing autonomous solutions to detect and suppress high-risk fires in 10 minutes or less, a rate 4 times faster than current best practices, to shorten the time between detection and rapid response to inform management practices and minimize negative impacts.
This track is one of two complementary tracks in the $11 million, 4-year XPRIZE Wildfire competition. The Autonomous Wildfire Response Track is spurring innovation in sensor, drone, and AI, while the Space-Based Detection & Intelligence Track is advancing satellite detection, rapid data processing, and AI to improve the characterization of fires.
The Impact
Wildfire is an essential, natural process for ecosystems. Today, humans cause the majority of wildfires. As our changing climate and human-modified environments cause wildfires to be more frequent, intense, and severe, XPRIZE Wildfire is incentivizing innovators from around the world to develop new technology solutions for this global problem.
Innovation to detect and manage wildfire events has not kept pace with the mounting challenges, but it is beginning to close the gap. New tools and technology are urgently needed, with many in development. Together, they could reduce detection times, improve characterization and access to hard-to-reach areas, enable operations in extreme weather, and accelerate wildfire response. That means responders can contain more fires before they become destructive, helping save lives in fire-prone communities and among frontline wildfire responders.
Meet the Finalists
After rigorous testing since 2023, five teams representing three countries advanced to the finals from a pool of more than 300 global registrants. These teams have demonstrated integrated, autonomous systems that move beyond concept. Their solutions combine rapid detection, intelligent navigation, adaptive decision-making, and targeted suppression without human intervention, even in challenging environments and conditions.
Finalists include:
- Location: Costa Mesa, California
- Anduril's modular Lattice software platform automates the data integration and tasking of fixed Sentry autonomous sensing towers and aerial Ghost-X autonomous drones to enable real-time wildfire detection through machine learning, predictive modeling, precision location alerts, and early aerial suppression. Lattice ensures that the wildfire response platform is inherently scalable and software-defined, allowing users to easily add additional sensing and response platforms to the broader network to vastly increase the area that can be monitored.
- Location: Bellevue, Washington
- Data Blanket provides a rapidly deployable autonomous drone swarm system that enables instant wildfire detection, real-time perimeter mapping, actionable intelligence for incident commanders, and targeted early-stage suppression to reduce escalation.
- Location: Eberswalde, Germany
- Dryad’s Silvanet is a large-scale, solar-powered sensor network that uses embedded AI to detect wildfires as early as the smouldering stage, triggering autonomous Silvaguard drones to confirm fire locations and deliver targeted early-stage suppression.
- Location: Squamish, BC, Canada
- FireSwarm Solutions in partnership with Solaris Suborbital, Trident Sensing, Exo Drone and SenseNet offers an autonomous, drone-agnostic wildfire detection and suppression platform that uses infrared sensing and swarm intelligence to localize fires in real time and coordinate ACC Innovation ultra-heavy-lift drones for precise, autonomous suppression.
- Location: San Jose, California
- Valley Christian High School’s team, in partnership with SensoRyAI and Kaizen™ Aerospace, uses a network of AI-enabled multi-sensor detectors to precisely triangulate wildfires in their incipient stages—with or without line-of-sight—and a proprietary path-planning algorithm to autonomously guide heavy-lift suppression drones through dynamic environments for accurate detection and response.
To learn more about the teams, view the Team Lookbook here.
What’s Next: Real-World Testing and Impact
Teams advancing to the finals will compete for the $3.5 million grand prize to accelerate and scale their innovations. XPRIZE will also award a $1 million Bonus Prize, sponsored by Lockheed Martin, for exceptional performance in accurate wildfire detection.
Autonomous Wildfire Response Finalists will travel to Alaska this summer to perform live fire finals testing. XPRIZE is coordinating test trials in collaboration with the Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration (ACUASI) and will serve as the real-world, robust validation that defines XPRIZE competitions. In addition, Finalists in the Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence Track will complete finals testing in Australia this spring.
To win, Finalists must autonomously detect and suppress a high-risk fire within 10 minutes in a 1,000 km², environmentally challenging area, without disturbing any decoy fires. Live fire final testing requires teams to demonstrate their autonomous end-to-end wildfire response system, including smart detection, autonomous navigation and safety, and autonomous suppression, along with an overall technical readiness and scalability assessment of their system.
Reaching this goal will transform firefighting. Integrating autonomous, unmanned aerial systems could improve the safety and efficacy of wildfire response. Each year, destructive wildfires claim lives, damage communities and ecosystems, contribute to long-lasting health impacts, and, in the U.S. alone, result in hundreds of billions of dollars in costs and damages.
Following the prize, XPRIZE will drive adoption and integration of the innovations developed during the competition into real-world wildfire management practices. This 12-18 month Impact Phase is the critical, final step to translate proven technology into durable, deployable solutions. By accelerating the adoption of Finalists' technologies, we can ensure wildfire management professionals have the solutions they need to meet the challenge of increasingly destructive wildfires and safeguard communities and ecosystems worldwide from destructive wildfires.
From launch through impact, XPRIZE Wildfire is propelling the advancement of cutting-edge technologies and building the next generation of wildfire response that saves lives, protects communities and the environment, and reduces the need to send human crews into the harshest and most volatile conditions. Through this competition, we are advancing a world where people and wildfires can safely coexist.
For more information about XPRIZE Wildfire, visit xprize.org/wildfire. To learn more about the Impact Phase and explore opportunities to partner or support the initiative, please contact Andrea Santy, Program Director, XPRIZE Wildfire at ([email protected]).
XPRIZE Wildfire is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Pacific Gas & Electric, Minderoo Foundation, Lockheed Martin, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Costa Navarino, American Family Insurance, Fairfax Financial, the Roddenberry Foundation, and individual benefactors.