彭博报道AI与无人机消防技术演进，Lockheed Martin旗下Sikorsky与Rain合作被提及

Max Brodie was 12 years old when a lightning strike near his hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia, ignited a wildfire that a thousand firefighters and a fleet of waterbombers couldn’t stop. As hot ash filled the sky, the boy scrambled up a ladder to help his father anchor soaker hoses to the roof to keep it wet. The house survived, but 33,000 residents, including Brodie, were evacuated during that 2003 firestorm. Fifteen years later, he was living in San Francisco and wondering what to do after selling his second software startup when, 180 miles to the north, another monster burst from the forest. That blaze killed 85 people, reduced Paradise, California, to ashes, and awakened his boyhood trauma. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, nothing’s changed,’” he says. Now he knew what to do.

The next year, Brodie and two partners formed Rain Industries Inc. to develop the software an autonomous aircraft would need to find a fire and put it out before it spread. Four years of research and development and a couple of funding rounds later, Rain teamed up with the Sikorsky unit of Lockheed Martin Corp., the world’s largest defense contractor, to help turn a Black Hawk helicopter into an autonomous firefighting machine, using artificial intelligence to deliver the quick response that is firefighting’s Holy Grail.

“The tech is evolving fast, and we need it,” says Brian Fennessy, the veteran fire chief appointed in January to lead the newly formed US Wildland Fire Service.

These days it can feel as if the Earth itself is burning. Twenty miles down the lake from Brodie’s boyhood home, another mass evacuation earlier this month forced 20,000 people to flee from a fire incinerating vast tracts of forest. Some of the fires now ripping across North America are greater than 100,000 acres. “That used to be a career fire,” Fennessy says. “You saw one in your lifetime. I’m now fighting four.” Stephen Pyne, an environmental historian of fire, has coined a term for our overheating epoch: the Pyrocene. “Man is the fire creature,” he says. “It’s our place in the chain of being, and we’re not handling it very well.”

As the climate gets hotter and wildfires grow in frequency and intensity, hundreds of millions of dollars are being poured into new ways to fight them. According to Mark Niemeyer of the Western Fire Chiefs Association, 660 tech companies have entered the firefighting sector in less than a decade, employing a dazzling array of strategies. Last year, Harvard University lofted an instrumented balloon into the stratosphere that researchers claim finds and tracks wildfires more precisely than satellites. A German startup has designed solar-powered electronic sniffers to detect gases from an emergent fire in a forest even before its smoke is visible. Many new technologies are still developmental, but others are ready to be deployed by the firms that created them.

One of these is Amor Fati Industries Inc., a robotics company based in Sausalito, California. Doing business as Seneca, it makes a 400-pound autonomous quadcopter that Colorado’s Aspen Fire Protection District will be the first to deploy, beginning this month. The drones, which can navigate on their own or be piloted by tablet or cell phone, use infrared cameras and AI to locate hot spots and a high-pressure cannon to blast them with foam. Andy Fisher, AFPD’s deputy chief, says the devices will likely be most useful on steep mountainsides and in other hard-to-reach places. “What we have is a program in its infancy,” Fisher says. “The drones get here, and the training starts, at first in flat-ground situations and then in terrain a little more like what you find plunk in the middle of the Rockies.”

Another new technology promises to put out fires by disrupting their oxygen supply. Incaendium Initiative Corp., a private company doing business as Sonic Fire Tech, uses an acoustic generator to pump low-frequency infrasound waves into a building through concealed ceiling ducts the moment the system detects a flame. This causes oxygen molecules to vibrate, making it impossible for the fire to consume the gas, which is essential for combustion. Developed from principles discovered at NASA, the technology is more expensive to install than sprinklers, but it’s independent of the water supply, which can fail, as it did in the Eaton fire in Los Angeles County last year.

It was that disaster that brought Remington Hotchkis, Sonic’s head of commercialization, into the firefighting business. As the flames came roaring off the mountains spewing embers, Hotchkis had rushed to help relatives evacuate their house in Altadena. He was profoundly struck by the devastation. “I had recently sold a house there,” he says. “It was the house where I’d raised my kids. Any of those destroyed houses, that could have been me.” In the wake of the Eaton fire, he joined Sonic, which is developing an exterior system intended to establish a protective envelope around a house. Sonic says it has sold more than 40 in-house systems and has commitments for a further 1,200. The company has also distributed 100 backpack versions of the tech to firefighters to test in real-event conditions.

This summer, Coulson Aviation, one of the world’s biggest modifiers of aircraft for firefighting, has been testing the latest tech from its EmberWorks R&D unit. One evening in late July, a Coulson Citation aircraft took off from Billings, Montana, and flew northwest for 20 minutes until it reached a fire burning at the eastern end of the Little Belt Mountains: the Twin Sisters fire. The jet dropped to 2,500 feet and circled the blaze. The fuselage bristled with thermal sensors and infrared cameras. An unprecedented volume of fire data poured into the plane’s computers, enriching and refining the satellite data already streaming into the onboard Starlink. The system’s AI hoovered everything up and turned it into what Britt Coulson, the company’s president and chief operating officer, says were the most finely articulated fire maps he and the research team had ever seen. Over two days they circled the fire 85 times, producing up-to-the-minute perimeters from the almost 20,000 images the system collected, and crucially, predicting where those perimeters were headed. Coulson is offering what it calls its Orbit system free to anyone who leases its aircraft.

“One of the most important things a commander on the ground can get is an up-to-date perimeter,” says US Wildland Fire Service chief Fennessy. “If I’m on the ground with my tablet and I can see changes in real time — that’s huge. Did we hold the fire? Did it get over the ridge? We are trying to make that mental map every second.”

None of this comes cheap. At $10 a square foot for the area covered, the systems Sonic has installed so far have averaged $35,000 each. On Seneca’s subscription model, each drone costs the AFPD $100,000 a year (though the department will pay for the five it’s getting with donations from private foundations). Retardant is expensive too: A single heavy tanker with a 4,000-gallon tank can drop more than $200,000 worth a day — and even more if the fight continues through the night. According to Coulson, it costs $5 million to lease one of its firefighting tankers for four months, and almost $7 million for six. The charges include the plane, fuel and crew, on standby 24/7.

As high as those figures are, they can suddenly look like bargains if a fire gets out of control and an agency has to scramble for extra planes at the much pricier call-when-needed rate. “Avoiding the commitment may look cheaper within one budget line,” Coulson says, “but it’s enormously more expensive at the incident level.” A large tanker, he says, could cost as much as 70% or even 80% more at the call-when-needed rate, driving a daily charge of $32,000 a day up to $55,000. “And paying more later,” he adds, “won’t buy back that initial-attack window. That opportunity has been lost.”

For Brodie, the Rain co-founder who escaped the fire near his British Columbia hometown, the sound of optimism 23 years later was the clatter of a helicopter. In July, at the sprawling Sikorsky campus in Connecticut, he watched a 6-ton Black Hawk loaded with his tech charge back and forth at 90 mph between a fire and a water source, its massive bucket swaying at the end of a 40-foot line. (The helicopter can also be equipped with a 1,000-gallon water tank that a retractable syphon can fill in less than a minute.) As the helicopter roared off from a refill, sensors mounted on the fuselage geolocated the fire, half a mile away, and streamed video to a command tablet. In testing, the level of autonomy is known as “human in the loop,” where an operator approves an action — dropping water, say — that the system itself has proposed.

Sikorsky won’t say what the autonomous aircraft, with Rain’s software layered onto the Black Hawk’s own system, will cost when it’s finally mission-ready, but last year San Diego County paid $38 million for a Firehawk, a crewed firefighting version of the Black Hawk. (The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has 16.) As the effects of climate change worsen, says Ramsey Bentley, director of strategy and business development for Sikorsky Advanced Programs, he foresees a future in which remotely positioned autonomous aircraft like this one could stop a fire in its tracks: “The market definitely has open potential.”