Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

xprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#61

Post by alfor »

mrandish wrote: post #7

On one hand this effort sounds like a good way to generate some interesting concepts. On the other hand, as a long-time resident of a rural, wildfire-prone area, it's also important to educate the public and politicians that there is a large body of proven land management best practices that can already significantly improve prevention, control and mitigation. While we can always do better, we often aren't sufficient…

This. In some place it’s the natural order to have forest fire from time to time.

If we prevent them long enough a huge one will happen at the worst time (dry, windy with lots of material to burn. At this point there very little you can do.

In the east cost there is rain regularly, so the usual thing is that wood, leaves rot instead, fires happen rarely.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#62

Post by baseline-shift »

I've read a lot of answers which suggest the usual things that are considered in the wider community, so it is a bit surprising that there are no AI type solutions put forth in this site for hackers.

Surely some way to detect and extinguish the beginnings - where these escape notice far from human eyes and noses - has a coding or robotics solution?

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#63

Post by davidbanham »

baseline-shift wrote: post #62

I've read a lot of answers which suggest the usual things that are considered in the wider community, so it is a bit surprising that there are no AI type solutions put forth in this site for hackers. Surely some way to detect and extinguish the beginnings - where these escape notice far from human eyes and noses - has a coding or robotics solution?

Yeah a bunch. Satellite monitoring of lightning strikes has been happening for years.

We also have hot spot detection from himawari and other satellites.

Also very common to have aircraft do FLIR camera runs over the bush on high danger days.

A few startups/researchers are looking at distributed sensor arrays with microphones and thermometers to detect ignitions earlier. That’s mostly in plantation forestry at this stage.

There’s also some work being done to enable the thermal/linescan flights from drones rather than aircraft. Idea being to bring the cost down and thus coverage up.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#64

Post by fwlr »

jpgvm wrote: post #25

Wildfires aren't really the problem on a global scale. They are a bit of a pain in Australia, and US West coast sure. The real problematic fires are currently man-made and entirely purposefully lit, i.e slash and burn agriculture. They are destroying the air and huge amounts of rainforest and jungle in places like Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Brazil, etc. So while I commend the effort I think the big…

Eh, I think they’re more than “a bit of a pain” in Australia. Bushfire season always kills a few people every year, but it’s only because of us taking fires very seriously and having defense in depth and early evacuation protocols that it doesn’t kill way more. There are cases like 2009 where more than 170 people died, which still may not sound like much for a population of 20 million, but it was mostly in the Kinglake and Marysville areas (roughly 100 deaths out of the area’s population of several thousand). It is a very grave risk with very serious mitigation efforts that largely work. If fire management and response were to break down even a little bit, though, the number of deaths will skyrocket. XPRIZE success on wildfires will be deeply appreciated here.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#65

Post by elbigbad »

ortusdux wrote: post #35
RandallBrown wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the context of fires big enough to matter the only tools in your toolbox that are sufficiently scalable are very low tech. Isn't that the whole point of this X Prize, to improve the tools available?

The #1 tool in our toolbox is prevention. This is a multipart prize, with $5m going to fire detection, and $5m going to fire response. To me it feels like pushing for research into reducing fevers when the virus is the problem. The low tech solutions are typically fuel load reduction, fire breaks, controlled burns, and community education. The first two are standard techniques used by the forestry industry, and they…

“ The #1 tool in our toolbox is prevention” right now, but perhaps that changes with this prize.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#66

Post by ListenLinda »

I worked with a friend competing for a 0.5M prize to build a robot to collect material on the moon. The project was sponsored by NASA. After that experience, I would be hesitant to enter these kinds of completions. At first it seemed straight forward but as things got closer to the end, tiny details about how to the communicate with the robot and other things were changed. It was discouraging to put in all that work, have everything tested perfectly and then at the last minute some rule change comes along or they change things in the environment that was already tested in.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#67

Post by defaultcompany »

hedora wrote: post #60
mrandish wrote: post #7

On one hand this effort sounds like a good way to generate some interesting concepts. On the other hand, as a long-time resident of a rural, wildfire-prone area, it's also important to educate the public and politicians that there is a large body of proven land management best practices that can already significantly improve prevention, control and mitigation. While we can always do better, we often aren't sufficient…

All of these work better than suppression: - Bury your power lines. If only PG&E would invest in fire safety… check list of funders in TFA… scratch head. - Rake your forests. (Or “remove ladder fuels”, as it is now called.) - Controlled burns. I’d like my $11M now. Can we spend it on burying lines under an emergency order that bypasses California permitting?

"Raking the forest" while a totally viable approach in very specific strategic areas is just way way too expensive and time consuming in the general case. California has like 30 million acres of forest land. Removing brush from a single acre is a multi-day job with the right equipment. It just can't scale.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#68

Post by martyvis »

defaultcompany wrote: post #67
hedora wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these work better than suppression: - Bury your power lines. If only PG&E would invest in fire safety… check list of funders in TFA… scratch head. - Rake your forests. (Or “remove ladder fuels”, as it is now called.) - Controlled burns. I’d like my $11M now. Can we spend it on burying lines under an emergency order that bypasses California permitting?

"Raking the forest" while a totally viable approach in very specific strategic areas is just way way too expensive and time consuming in the general case. California has like 30 million acres of forest land. Removing brush from a single acre is a multi-day job with the right equipment. It just can't scale.

After the devastating bushfires in Eastern Australia in the summer of 2019/20 I started sketching ideas of a robot to that do that. My idea is that would identify fuel that could be ameliorated (possibly harvesting and burning in the machine, or mulching and burying). If it was solar powered it could possibly just plod along. That said I think more controlled burns such as were practised by our indigenous people seems to be the most practical.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#69

Post by jpgvm »

fwlr wrote: post #64
jpgvm wrote: post #25

Wildfires aren't really the problem on a global scale. They are a bit of a pain in Australia, and US West coast sure. The real problematic fires are currently man-made and entirely purposefully lit, i.e slash and burn agriculture. They are destroying the air and huge amounts of rainforest and jungle in places like Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Brazil, etc. So while I commend the effort I think the big…

Eh, I think they’re more than “a bit of a pain” in Australia. Bushfire season always kills a few people every year, but it’s only because of us taking fires very seriously and having defense in depth and early evacuation protocols that it doesn’t kill way more. There are cases like 2009 where more than 170 people died, which still may not sound like much for a population of 20 million, but it was mostly in the Kingla…

Yeah I grew up in rural Australia. I get why it would be useful.

Just travelling opened my eyes to much bigger fire problems is all. The pollution caused by slash and burn is estimated to cause ~11k deaths a year in Thailand alone, I imagine the numbers are much worse in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.

I'm not saying I don't appreciate improvements in detecting and maybe preventing bush fires just trying to raise awareness of a larger more dangerous issue in the world that gets little to no attention because it's outside of Western media sphere.

Re: xPrize Wildfire – $11M Prize Competition

#70

Post by manfre »

elbigbad wrote: post #65
ortusdux wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The #1 tool in our toolbox is prevention. This is a multipart prize, with $5m going to fire detection, and $5m going to fire response. To me it feels like pushing for research into reducing fevers when the virus is the problem. The low tech solutions are typically fuel load reduction, fire breaks, controlled burns, and community education. The first two are standard techniques used by the forestry industry, and they…

“ The #1 tool in our toolbox is prevention” right now, but perhaps that changes with this prize.

Prevention is always more impactful than treatment/reaction. It's still important to improve the reaction because prevention is rarely 100% effective.
Post reply on HN