Robots are starting fires in California — and that’s a good thing

Cody Chiverton has spent the last decade starting fires. As a former U.S. Forest Service firefighter, he has attended dozens of prescribed burns in the American West, where fire prevention crews carried drip torches to ignite dry vegetation, leaving flames and smoke in their wake.

But in June, Chiverton did a flameless, smokeless prescribed burn. Instead, a tank-like robot pulled by a remote-controlled tractor handled all the ignition. As it moved slowly along a hiking trail near Palo Alto, California, the robot turned everything in its path — brush, dry grass, leaf litter — into a dark streak of ash.

“It’s a great tool,” says Chiverton, 31, who joined San Francisco-based BurnBot this year. The startup is not selling its bots (it has made two so far). Instead, forest managers, property owners and utilities reserve them on demand, at prices starting at about $1,000 an acre.

Prescribed or controlled burns – putting out fire with fire – have long been used by indigenous groups to manage fire risk. Clearing excess vegetation reduces the fuel load of the forest, making it less likely that a fire will start or spread quickly. But it is a labor intensive process. BurnBot’s burn in June covered an area the size of an American football field using a crew of five; Chiverton says the same job without the robot would have required 10 people.

“This is one way we can start doing more prescribed fire to clean up our landscapes and make them more resilient,” he says.

There is an acute need to improve fire management globally. Greece, Turkey and Canada are dealing with multiple wildfires this summer, and California is dealing with one of the worst wildfires in state history. On August 1, the US National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) issued a warning of “extreme levels” of wildfire activity in the western part of the country this year. Wildfires have consumed an average of 7.65 million acres per year in the U.S. over the past five years, 52 percent more than two decades ago, according to the NIFC.

Some of this has to do with decades of fire suppression, which has prevented the natural thinning of forests, which reduces the fuel load for future fires. But climate change is also exacerbating the conditions that make wildfires bigger and more frequent.

Growing fires mean more communities and infrastructure at risk, and more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere as forests are destroyed. (Last year, wildfires in Canada spewed more CO2 than all of Mexico.) Bigger fires also put more pressure on firefighters, just as the industry faces a labor shortage. California alone has seen an exodus of nearly 1,000 federal firefighters from the territory since 2020.

“There is a fundamental mismatch between how many acres need treatment and the capacity of the workforce today,” says BurnBot chief executive Anukool Lakhina, who started the company in 2022 with co-founder Waleed Haddad.

BurnBot is part of a nascent but rapidly growing sector of “fire technology” that focuses on the prevention, detection and suppression of wildfires. San Francisco-based Pano AI uses artificial intelligence cameras to detect fires earlier, while Santa Monica, Calif.-based Rain makes autonomous helicopters to target fires from above, and France’s Shark Robotics builds firefighting robots for the front lines.

BurnBot’s signature machine aims to make prescription burns easier and safer. In addition to reducing labor needs, the robot maintains combustion in its combustion chamber, where propane torches and air blowers bring flame temperatures up to 1,000C (1,832F). Industrial-scale fans create an upward flow of air, trapping flames and embers and reducing the risk of fire spreading outside.

This is a key concern: setting vegetation on fire is easier in dry weather, but fire services often prohibit it because of the risk of a fire getting out of control. In 2022, the fire escaped from two prescribed burns turned into the largest wildfire in New Mexico history.

BurnBot’s burns are also mostly smokeless. The intense heat, combined with a stream of highly concentrated oxygen, destroys the particles. Lakhina describes it as “burning smoke”.

That feature has already caught the interest of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, California’s largest utility, which typically avoids prescribed burns near its 18,500 miles (30,000 kilometers) of transmission lines because smoke is a safety hazard . The utility released a demo of its BurnBot technology last year. Kevin Johnson, an analyst who looks at innovative wildfire solutions for PG&E, says he “couldn’t see the smoke or smell the smoke.”

BurnBot offers several automated solutions to reduce fire risk, although the controlled burn robot is its first fully in-house creation. The company also deploys drones and laser imaging to assess landscapes for fire treatment, and has a dozen masticating machines that can remove downed trees and thin timber. In its range of services, BurnBot has cleared over 2,000 acres.

The company, which has raised $25 million to date, operates in California, Oregon and Nevada and will begin rolling out services in Australia next month. Lakhin says there are plans to expand to six more U.S. states and Canada next year and serve 1 million acres annually by 2035. (Even that would be less than a quarter of the 4.3 million acres on which the US Forest Service helped treat last year ).

There are still some technical wrinkles to iron out. The cars are still wobbly on the rocky terrain. And during a controlled burn last year, the robot tackled a thicket of wet grass, raising the flame’s temperature so high that it also melted its own components. (Lakhina says the new iteration is heat resistant).

Then there’s the challenge of getting more fire authorities on board. In an industry whose tactics rarely evolve, Lakhina says it can be “very difficult to introduce new approaches.”

To make progress, BurnBot has recruited dozens of former firefighters and forestry professionals like Chiverton, who can pull double duty as an operations crew and advocate for technology-assisted wildfire control. Lakhina says the Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated billions of dollars for fire management in the US, is also focusing more attention on fire prevention solutions. So is the situation of overworked firefighters.

“The tide is changing,” says Lakhina. “Fire technology as a category is noted.”

Top Photo: As it moves, BurnBot’s robot turns everything in its path into a trail of ash. Photographer: Philip Pacheco/Bloomberg.

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