California wildfire drones join the front lines

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In 2020, California experienced its worst wildfire season on record, with 4.1 million acres burned and four of the state’s five largest fires. And so far, 2021 is shaping up to be even worse: With record droughts affecting the state, more than 1.3 million acres have already burned and fire activity exceeds last year’s record totals.

Although firefighters remain overworked and underpaid, they may soon have some help in their task as Sisyphus thanks to Playa del Rey-based KSI Data Sciences and other drone companies that are additionally in addition on the front line.


This is the same basic idea that KSI is pushing forward with its technology, but with a serious emphasis on transmitting video streams from the air to the ground to a range of stakeholders and decision makers.

“If you can put a camera up in the air that can sense heat and relay that information to firefighters on the ground or command centers, then you’re really ahead of the game,” KSI CEO Jon explained. Gaster.

Drones offer a variety of benefits to fire departments and decision makers in the field. They can reach places inaccessible to winged planes and allow agencies to reduce risk by keeping human pilots away from dangerous situations.

Before a fire breaks out, drones can be used to monitor risk areas to provide topographic information and details of vegetation encroachment. During a fire, thermal sensors on board the aircraft can cut out the smoke and provide information about the intensity of the flames and the direction in which the fire is moving.

Dirk Giles, manager of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program at the U.S. Forest Service, said the growth in drone technology over the past six years has been tremendous. And he saw with his own eyes how replacing pilots in the air with pilots on the ground made work safer.

“From a safety perspective, we can now do it in smoke at night. We have crews flying almost around the clock now,” Giles said.

Once the fire has passed through an area, firefighters can use the technology to search for hot spots where flames could reappear.

Gaster said that a handful of departments in the United States and Europe are currently demonstrating KSI’s platform, known as “Mission Keeper,” but he is reluctant to disclose the exact number of organizations. until the technology is officially adopted. He would just say that his company “is getting a really good response.” (Neither Cal-fire nor the US Forest Service have reported using KSI technology.)

Having information from drones is one thing, but KSI is also working on artificial intelligence applications that analyze frame-by-frame video streams to synthesize and present air data to ground command centers in a format that is easier to understand and understand. use.

“Let’s say you have a circumstance where you are walking towards a building where there is a fire. What is the building made of? What are their permits there? What do they store there? What are the exit and exit routes? surrounding areas and traffic patterns like? ”Gaster explained.“ AI should allow you to bring computational intelligence to what you see and should allow you to make decisions with much better information with good better information than if you were just using an eyeball. “

This idea of ​​being able to separate signal from noise is a fundamental part of KSI’s technology, but it’s an idea that Gaster says is often overlooked in the tech world.

“There are thousands of failed AI projects because they don’t take into account the whole value chain,” he said. “These are great lab projects, but they don’t bring in the CFO, the production line guy, the engineer, the execution guy, the support guy.”

User-friendliness is a fundamental tenet of the business model as the company faces competitors such as DJI, Drone Amplified, Bridger Aerospace, Insitu (a subsidiary of Boeing) and Microsoft HoloLens.

In addition to the fire services, KSI has a diverse customer base in both the private sector (like AT&T) and the public sector (the US military). Although the company has raised $ 4 million since its inception in 2015, the LA core team remains small, with five full-time employees based in the United States, KSI also uses programming teams in Europe and America. South as needed.

Gaster’s pitch to his customers is simple: “If anyone is trying to figure out how to stream videos from anything to anything, give us a call,” he said.

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