Jane Edwards
A report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology presents several recommendations to modernize wildland firefighting and one of those is the need to adopt technologies that could help enhance situational awareness during active fires, American City and County reported Tuesday.
Anthony Robbins, vice president of NVIDIA’s federal arm, said automated drones and other technologies could be used to detect wildfires, which could help agencies achieve savings and reduce the need for personnel.
Robbins, a 2023 Wash100 awardee, said he expects to see wider adoption of sensors, signal processing and other technologies in fire service over the next three to five years.
“It makes you wonder about the possibility of instruments – more advanced instrumentation helps us in the area of predictive analysis,” he noted.
Robbins stated that fire officials could benefit from sensors and other instruments installed at high-risk forest areas by collecting data from such systems and using that data to develop advanced modeling that could be used in predictive analysis.
“That predictive analysis leads us to mitigation steps of preventing the wildfire before it starts,” he added.
