DARPA will partner with Texas A&M University to advance autonomous wildland firefighting technology, the entities recently announced.
Texas A&M University System’s George H.W. Bush Combat Development Complex will work with DARPA to develop technology under the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program which has successfully developed the ability to retrofit existing aircraft with the ability to fly autonomously. The Texas legislature recently committed nearly $60 million to BCDC to advance wildland fire mitigation.
“Working together with Texas, we have an opportunity to use autonomous helicopters to completely change the conversation around wildfires from containing them to extinguishing them,” Stuart Young, DARPA program manager for ALIAS said.
Since ALIAS began in 2013, its autonomy software has successfully integrated and demonstrated on several different platforms without any incidents. Most of the real-world demonstration time has been on the UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter. Officials said the U.S. Army is nearly complete with its retrofit of the UH-60L with the MATRIX software and is exploring autonomy options with the dual-rotor CH-47. In the past year, the Sikorsky, builder of MATRIX, has led proof-of-concept demonstrations of autonomous fire suppression in California and Connecticut.
“ALIAS helps us with a manpower problem, since it addresses and augments the pilot availability issues through the optional autonomy. It helps us with safety, because we can fly in more dangerous conditions. It helps us with throughput, because we can get more water on fires by fighting them 24/7, including when they’re most vulnerable; the sensors can see through smoke and darkness, so we can fight fires at night,” Young.
Testing the software on a larger scale will provide more insight into how to deploy the technology on a larger scale.
“Partnering on a testbed at the state level provides an unparalleled opportunity to rapidly field new technology and ensure outsized impact to Americans both in and out of uniform,” DARPA Director Stephen Winchell said. “The solutions achieved through collaboration with the Bush Combat Development Complex support both economic and national security while demonstrating complex fully autonomous capabilities in challenging real-world conditions.”