Christine Thropp
NVIDIA and Lockheed Martin are jointly working on efforts that seek to help governments address wildfires by responding to and predicting the said disaster with the use of artificial intelligence and simulation capability.
Anthony Robbins, vice president of the federal business at NVIDIA and a four-time Wash100 Award recipient, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday that the companies are collaborating with the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and Colorado state’s Division of Fire Prevention and Control on applying AI and digital-twin simulation to enhance their understanding of wildfires and how to contain it.
The partnership is also establishing a Silicon Valley-based AI development laboratory that will use a Lockheed-made end-to-end planning and orchestration system and NVIDIA’s expertise in data analysis and simulation. The Cognitive Mission Manager platform work to provide fire spread prediction by combining real-time fire sensor data with information about fuel vegetation, topography, wind and other factors.
“The lab will serve as an open collaboration space for industry and users to concentrate talent and resources for CMM design and rapidly develop prototypes in NVIDIA Omniverse,” said Robbins.
The Omniverse is designed to provide fire behavior analysts with a digital twin of the environment and Lockheed uses the NVIDIA technology to visualize fire movement predictions and flow dynamics.
“Colorado Fire is also providing historical fire data for modeling visualizations in NVIDIA Omniverse,” added Robbins. “Through this continued partnership Lockheed Martin engineers will be able to process data and make predictions through the CMM from an active wildfire observed by the aircraft in real time to assist the onboard fire responders.”
