It’s Time to Reimagine Fuel Treatment with Technology
BurnBot Aerial Ignition Drone
Fire has long played a pivotal role in the ecology of the land.
Biological diversity, soil invigoration, natural vegetation management—when burning can take place in safe ways, there are many benefits to “good fire”. And yet over time, fire became viewed as increasingly disastrous as the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) expanded and the risks of catastrophic wildfires turned into a threat to communities and critical infrastructure. In the last century, hardworking fire crews have responded to suppress fire impact. In parallel, vegetation has grown and become a seemingly insurmountable fuel challenge.
Paired with accelerating climate change, harmful wildfires are on the rise and affecting the health, property, and infrastructure along the WUI. Though collective forces have the will, we need a scalable way forward.
We can’t hire our way out of the problem.
Prescribed fire is recognized as a viable contributor to catastrophic wildfire mitigation, yet work forces are limited by the intensive skilled labor and weather dependent work that presents smoke hazards with risks of fire escape. Safe, precise, and scalable prescribed fire for fuel management is required to promote “good fire” at the rate needed alongside the incredible efforts of wildland firefighters. With a 10x-20x gap between our capability and the need for defensible acreage in the United States—the need to amplify our workforces is clear.
That’s why we created BurnBot.
“Our mission is to prevent destructive wildfires by scaling precise fuel treatment.”
Technology can accelerate the vast network of fire management.
We're firefighters, scientists, engineers, prescribed fire practitioners, ecologists, and community members who are answering the call to scale fuel treatment capacity. We created BurnBot as a system of technologies that uses remote prescribed burning machines for safe wildfire mitigation and vegetation management—all while maintaining the smallest ecological and logistical footprint possible.
We’re building with ongoing feedback directly from fire agencies, public infrastructure & utilities, agriculture, conservation, wildland firefighters, and the community. From these conversations, we understand the need for technology to amplify human efforts and address the necessary scale of fuels reduction and management. That’s why BurnBot combines hardware, robotics, drones, and state of the art software to deliver a system that expands force multiplication of fuels management programs.
“One of the things we definitely need in the prescribed fire world is to embrace emerging technologies that will help us be more effective when we conduct prescribed fires. These are what I like to call force multipliers. With the BurnBot technologies, we can send out a very small crew and we can do it more quickly and effectively than we do with a hand crew. They’re allowing us to be more effective in doing prescribed fire.” -Burn Boss, Phil Dye
Safe. Precise. Scalable.
BurnBot enables prescribed burns to be deployed near communities, power lines, roadways, and sensitive areas that are critical to protect. Remote operated mastication for any landscape and safe aerial ignition are paired with our blacklining technology, the RX1. Recently launched, the RX1 is a first of its kind technology that delivers precise and safe blackline burns, captures smoke, and enables small crews to cover larger territories. This modern fuel treatment system recognizes and supports conservation efforts with a clean, smoke-free process.
We achieve an agile approach to prescribed burns by deploying a small crew with the right machinery for the job. They are able to operate on unique terrain in most weather, creating larger treatment windows for the BurnBot system. No other fuel treatment system can safely go where BurnBot goes as a partner to wildfire management teams.
“We’re seeing how well BurnBot can work in Hoopa…We’re looking at using this in some of the Wildland Urban Interface areas. It’s more efficient and safer for our folks. We just did in 10 minutes what would normally have taken a couple people a half hour.” -Chief Greg Moon, Hoopa Fire Department
Returning to good fire.
We are proponents and supporters of the good fire movement, not the originators. Working alongside the many agencies, tribes, fire practitioners and communities who understand the needs of their lands best—BurnBot is a collaborator and an instrument.
”Fire is the most important tool for managing these hills in California. Almost all the plants evolved with fire. It seems contrary if you’ve been told the opposite about fire. But these plants evolved with fire, it was used as a tool all the time. With BurnBot, you can burn any time of the year because it’s so safe. The smoke is filtered so there is very little smoke, and it makes a clean burn. You get a beautiful burn that is perfect for new plants to start up in.” - Veronica Stork, Executive Director, Wildfarmers
Reimagining the way forward.
BurnBot has our sights set on reimagining a techforward fuel treatment. We see a world where we can take large landscapes and segment them flexibly with blackline operations allowing for more treatments, with smaller crews, at much lower risk. Imagine what it would be like if a highly skilled crew does blacklines, and community residents are able to do their own burning inside them with substantially less risk. Imagine how we could enable a Public-Private or Community-Agency partnership model that is fully consistent with the All-Hands All-Lands principle.
We believe this and more is possible. At BurnBot we envision a future where fleets of robots work collaboratively to amplify our workforce capacity. Reach out if you’d like to learn more or see a demonstration live.
