Of course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown larger than this drone can handle.
Yeah, I'd like to know how it's spotting these fires
The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
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Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time. Something that works some of the time is significantly better than nothing, and if the times it works saves millions then the price is likely worth paying. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is version 0.1 - it will get much better. Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.
Anything?! This implies they have thought of everything which is a dangerous assumption. I think it's important to ask questions, even (especially?) ones that seem obvious.
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#23I do wonder about the range given the payload is by necessity pretty heavy
Also not going to work well with lightening / thunderstorm based ignitions, or in high wind in general
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time. Something that works some of the time is significantly better than nothing, and if the times it works saves millions then the price is likely worth paying. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is version 0.1 - it will get much better. Anything you can think of, they’ve thought of and it’s on their roadmap.
Lofty ideas, supported only by hope. People can dream up solutions as much as they want, doesn't mean it's going to work.
99% of startups fail, this one will be no exception to the stats.
Sure, they might succeed, but there's no guarantee they'll make it past this super basic PoC.
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#25Plus, it's a complete aerial surveillance network for wildnerness. What it doesn't prevent in fires it makes up for in policing and governance. Fire marshalls and fire codes have been used for warrantless searches on activists for decades because they have fewer restrictions than police. I once met an environmental investigator in government who was regularly brought in by regional police to do drone flyovers with FLIR/IR looking for grow ops and do paralell construction when they were more illegal as well.
Wildfire suppression is a super interesting use case for drones, and one that could scale to much larger UAVs, though the business case for them is plausibly closer to the more general enforcement case.
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#26This is great! Sounds like they are solving the problem of detecting tiny fires in vast wilderness[0]. Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems. [0] https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fi...
It looks like a practical use-case for drones even if the dropping of suppressive poke-balls probably needs improvement.
Rough numbers: 3 million acres of forest in USA, one drone could ultimately cover 500 sq km (13 km radius) 6000ish drones call it 10k for redundancy
Even at 10k per drone including base station that’s roughly $100M in hardware to cover the entirety of US forestland.
PG&E is your first customer.
edit: Even if I’m low by an order of magnitude on costs, PG&E is your first customer: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-p...
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#27Plus, it's a complete aerial surveillance network for wildnerness. What it doesn't prevent in fires it makes up for in policing and governance. Fire marshalls and fire codes have been used for warrantless searches on activists for decades because they have fewer restrictions than police. I once met an environmental investigator in government who was regularly brought in by regional police to do drone flyovers with FL…
It's a nice effort, but not terribly practical. They can't have the drones performing surveillance over wild lands for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a crashed drone could start a fire. They also make noise that can disturb wildlife and humans enjoying the wilderness.
Plus, they're a ready made platform for dropping stuff from the drone, so immediate military and terrorist uses.
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#28Of course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown larger than this drone can handle.
Yeah, I'd like to know how it's spotting these fires
Satellite fire detection can find ignitions pretty darn quick -- much quicker than I would expect.
Also, some ignitions come from known sources (e.g. powerline downing), and monitoring and localization already exists in some cases (PG&E).
Re: The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
#29Hi guys/gals, (I know HN typically prefers comments with more substance but) I just want to praise what an amazing project this is and I like how this has a real potential of saving lives, property and ecosystem. I wish you are able materialize your mission!