STARR Researcher Recruits Successful XPRIZE Team
Bureau of Economic Geology State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery (STARR) program research assistant professor Dr. James Thompson was instrumental in recruiting the so-far successful Texas-Soton team that was recently announced as one of only 29 teams worldwide to move to the next level of the XPRIZE Wildfire Autonomous Response competition. Texas-Soton is the only team from Texas, and also includes members from UT-Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering and from four other research institutions.
The XPRIZE competition is a global contest designed to encourage innovation and solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. It offers substantial monetary prizes to teams that can develop groundbreaking solutions in various fields such as climate change, health, space exploration, and more. These competitions are open to anyone, from scientists and engineers to entrepreneurs and students, fostering a spirit of collaboration and innovation worldwide.
The XPRIZE Wildfire competition is a 4-year, $11 million global contest aimed at developing innovative technologies to detect and suppress wildfires. The goal is to create fully autonomous systems that can quickly identify and extinguish wildfires before they become destructive.
The XPRIZE Wildfire competition’s $5 million Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, the track in which Texas-Soton is competing, seeks to transform how fires are managed and fought by rapidly and autonomously detecting and completely suppressing a destructive, high-risk fire in an environmentally challenging area with dramatically greater speed, accuracy, and precision than current best-in-class solutions.
Dr. Thompson is leading the effort to create drone sensors which would utilize infrared imaging spectroscopy to quickly identify potential wildfires before they reach flaming combustion stages and become destructive. The sensors would detect and characterize gasses being emitted from the early fire to confirm what is burning, and drones with specialized fire-fighting features would then be deployed to immediately suppress that particular type of fire.
STARR has contributed to concept development, will support Texas-specific first phase studies to provide an overall understanding of the wildfire threat to the state, and will help purchase the study’s initial thermal equipment.
“My passion and motivation in pursuing this research and competing for the XPRIZE,” Thompson said, “is to forever mitigate the loss of life and property as occurred in horrific Texas wildfires such as the Bastrop County Complex Fire of 2011 and this year’s 1.1 million-acre Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Panhandle.”
Texas-Soton has four more rounds of competition ahead of it before the ultimate award-winner is announced in November of 2026. For more information about the team and the competition, please see this press release from UT-Austin: https://news.utexas.edu/2024/07/15/ut-team-qualifies-for-international-xprize-wildfire-competition/
