UT’s Texas-Soton team is among 29 groups that qualified for the XPRIZE Wildfire Autonomous Wildfire Response competition, according to a July 15 press release. The four-year competition, with a prize of up to $11 million, aims to develop new technologies to combat wildfires. 

The team was formed in October 2023 and includes researchers from UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering, the University of Southampton, the University of Edinburgh, Delft University of Technology and the Texas A&M Forest Service. 

“Some folks in our development office at UT reached out to me, as I have a couple of wildfire projects in Central Texas, and asked if I’d be interested in helping to build a team to look at this solution in the XPRIZE competition,” said James Thompson, a research assistant professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences. “From there, we highlighted a couple of people within the UT space … and then brought in other folks we knew within the industry as well as other folks in the (United Kingdom).” 

The wildfire competition includes two different tracks. Track A, the $5 million Space-Based Wildfire Detection and Intelligence Track, focuses on enhancing fire detection capabilities. Team Texas-Soton is competing in Track B, the $5 million Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, which aims to transform how fires are fought. There is also a $1 million Lockheed Martin Bonus Prize for teams in Track B that demonstrate accuracy, precision and rapid detection. 

In Track B, Team Texas-Soton will have 10 minutes to detect and suppress a high-risk fire in a 386-square-mile area. Mohammad Soorati, an assistant professor at Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science, said the team’s solution involves deploying a diverse system composed of devices that deal with small parts of the experimental firefighting system. 

“What makes us unique in this competition is that we do not have a system that we already have built for other purposes that we’re just reusing,” Soorati said. “We are looking into what it entails for this specific challenge, trying to engineer the kind of aerial system we need for different parts of a system.” 

Cat Kutz, XPRIZE’s integrated marketing manager for biodiversity and conservation, said XPRIZE is a nonprofit foundation that holds competitions to solve problems in areas like health, climate, energy and waste. She said the teams are given milestone prizes throughout the competition to prove they’re working toward a solution. 

“The qualifying round is a paper submission where (the teams) were supposed to show what they’re working on,” Kutz said. “Our panel of judges individually assesses … and they discuss why they rank teams a certain way, what they’re looking for (and) what they’re valuing, and then they decide a cohort of teams moves forward.” 

This group of teams advancing will equally share a $750,000 milestone prize. 

Thompson said the team is focused on bringing in new researchers and inspiring them to develop new technology. 

“We’re an academic kind of group, and so we’re really encouraging and bringing in lots of undergraduates and graduate researchers … so they get to interact with these large projects,” Thompson said. “(It) also gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose when they’re doing these projects that … have a much larger part to play in a very significant problem.”