National Guard To Augment Fire-Spotting Drones With AI

As fires get larger and more dangerous, various government and private agencies have turned to AI to detect, and potentially predict wildfires. The National Guard has been carrying out reconnaissance flights in California during the late summer and fall for the pew years, but now the drones used to carry out these flights have received upgrades with AI algorithms intended to automatically generate maps of fires within a particular region. Creating fire maps is an incredibly difficult process that requires data analysis to map constantly changing fires as they move over rugged terrain. Both air and ground observations are used to make fire maps, and fire maps are typically only updated once every day or so. Large fires can move as far as 15 miles during a single day, as witnessed by some of the fires this fire season.