SBIR-STTR Award

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of western wildfires. The threat to people and infrastructure is growing with more population living in the wildland-urban interface. Advances in technology provide the opportunity to improve wildfire mapping accuracy timeliness and dissemination. An un-stabilized airborne fire mapping sensor is proposed utilizing an array of miniature thermal infrared and color cameras providing near hemispherical downward-looking coverage. A solid-state Inertial Navigation System (INS) is included to provide accurate sensor orientation for geo-referencing fire mapping data. The sensor is small and light enough to be conformal mounted on every airborne firefighting asset making all participating aircraft fire mapping nodes. An innovative image processing algorithm will automatically combine multi- aperture and multi-platform sensor data onto a common time-based 3D fire map. A prototype test sensor will be test flown to validate sensor sensitivity and INS pointing accuracy data. Fire imaging data will be processed and depicted on a time-based 3D map. The successful development and commercialization of the proposed technology will provide Incident Commanders improved time-based data for managing wildfires that threaten people and infrastructure. The end goal is to improve the efficiency of fighting wildfires. Damage costs will be reduced and lives will be saved by improving the situational awareness of firefighting personnel and the general public.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of western wildfires. The threat to people and infrastructure is growing with more population living in the wild land-urban interface. Advances in technology provide the opportunity to improve wildfire mapping accuracy timeliness and dissemination. An un-stabilized airborne fire mapping sensor is proposed utilizing an array of miniature thermal infrared cameras providing wingtip-to-wingtip downward-looking coverage. A solid-state Inertial Navigation System (INS) is included to provide accurate sensor orientation for geo-referencing fire mapping data. The sensor is small and light enough to be conformal mounted on every airborne firefighting asset making all participating aircraft fire mapping nodes. An innovative image processing algorithm will automatically combine multi-aperture and multi-platform sensor data onto a common time-based 3D fire map. During Phase I a Concept Demonstrator was built and test flown validating sensor sensitivity and INS pointing accuracy data. Fire imaging data was processed and depicted on a time-based 3D map. Phase II will complete the research required to implement a full functioning prototype system to include; real-time map processing map data download via data-link cloud processing and map distribution. The successful development and commercialization of the proposed technology will provide Incident Commanders improved time-based data for managing wildfires that threaten people and infrastructure. The end goal is to improve the efficiency of fighting wildfires. Damage costs will be reduced and lives will be saved by improving the situational awareness of firefighting personnel and the general public.