Controlled burns are crucial to conservation efforts, but setting them can be dangerous to firefighters. In fact, five have lost their lives in the past eleven years during such efforts. A team from the Nebraska Intelligent Mobile Unmanned Systems (NIMBUS) Laboratory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is seeking to make the job safer by removing humans from the equation.
Lighting controlled fires is one of the best ways of managing invasive species and protecting vast ecosystems. However, doing so is dangerous work. Rugged terrain and the inherent risks of fire pose a risk to those who light the prescribed burns. Professors Carrick Detwiler and Sebastian Elbaum, along with their team, have created a system that removes the need for a firefighter to physically light such burns. The system uses special chemical balls carried in a hopper aboard a drone, which then injects them with a second chemical that causes them to burst into flames after about a minute, allowing them the necessary time to be dropped where desired. The beauty of the system is that it can be programmed to drop the balls in a very precise pattern, all without the need for human intervention.
A recent test on April 22 successfully burned 26 acres of tallgrass prairie at the Homestead National Monument of America. Dirac Twidwell, a researcher who studies prescribed burns, notes: "There's nothing that can do what fire does." Thus, the ability to use controlled burns in a safer and more precise manner would be a huge boon. Detweiler notes that the future of the research is promising, with interested parties including landowners, conservation organizations, and businesses.
