SBIR-STTR Award

ACME AtronOmatic, LLC is proposing development of an orbital data platform for improving household and community wildfire resilience. With a changing climate and near-urban environments, resilience requires access to actionable information about how to build, move, and/or fortify homes and communities: the proposed project would increase the resilience of stakeholders by clarifying through unique data the tradeoffs, risks, and likely outcomes when facing such decisions. The AI-enhanced hyperspectral measurements from ACME’s CubeSats (low-cost, miniaturized satellites), currently under development, provide insights about land and vegetation properties as they evolve on relevant length (10s of meters) and time (days) scales. With careful preflight validation and in-orbit calibration, these CubeSats may be used to generate dynamic risk maps for wildfire-related destructive forces that evolve at the same scales as the underlying phenomena. The risk maps, along with media outreach to contextualize how various risks may affect decisions, will be presented in ACME’s established market leading and free MyRadar application, providing a broad reach to over 13 million monthly active users. Specifically, we propose delivering: • dynamic wildland-urban risk factor maps that incorporate ACME’s CubeSat data • data feeds via our APIs and mobile applications that provide actionable information for stakeholders

The Orbital Wildfire Resilience (OWR) project comprises the innovative combination of MyRadar’s miniaturized satellite technology, onboard Artificial Intelligence (AI) processing, and wide-reaching dissemination platform to improve the wildfire hazard resilience of stakeholders. This research facilitates the development of new MyRadar commercial alerting, nowcasting, and satellite imagery products. The Phase II mission will be an orbital demonstration of multi-sensor data capture and downlink, and AIassisted low-bandwidth alerting, and training dataset generation. Phase II tasks will include the construction of two 1U HORIS small-satellite pathfinder flight models with ground-validated subsystems, cross-characterization of both flight model sensor suites, launch certification and deployer integration, orbital commissioning, and collection of orbital training data for AI model development. In a changing climate the impact of wildfire-related hazards is anticipated to grow significantly, straining the limited available resources to mitigate their effects, and testing the resilience of the American public and economy to the threats they pose. The R&D conducted within the OWR project serves to catalyze the addition of new consumer-facing hazard alerting products for the MyRadar app and the development of satellite data products to fill gaps in existing hazard reconnaissance as well as result in an increase the resilience of satellite hazard mapping capabilities.