Zhaodan Kong, the newly appointed associate director of CITRIS at UC Davis, and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Davis, will use a 2025 CITRIS-CDSS Innovation Fellowship and AIC Award to roll out a pilot project in Grass Valley, California, to detect wildfires earlier in wildland-urban interface (WUI) regions.
In California, over 80 percent of wildfires are first reported by the public, rather than automated systems. Kong’s device, FireFly, is a ground-air wildfire warning system that identifies fires before people do. It uses a ground sensor to detect smoke and deploys an AI-enabled drone to confirm and verify. The system alerts firefighters with the location, source, surrounding area and directions to the fire.
“We cannot prevent fires, but we can essentially detect fire as well as possible to reduce the possibility of large, uncontrolled, disruptive fire,” Kong said.
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