XPRIZE Wildfire winners spotted fires within 10 min—but couldn’t stop them
XPRIZE Wildfire winners spotted fires within 10 min—but couldn’t stop them
XPRIZE Wildfire 优胜者在 10 分钟内发现火情，但未能将其扑灭
Wildfire detection from space and firefighting drones featured among the finalists honored in the $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition. Although no team walked away with either of the two grand prizes, such technologies could prove helpful as the world grapples with the growing costs of worsening wildfire disasters.
在奖金高达 1100 万美元的 XPRIZE Wildfire 竞赛中，来自太空的火情探测技术和消防无人机成为了获奖决赛选手的亮点。尽管没有团队最终赢得两项大奖中的任何一个，但随着全球面临日益严重的野火灾害及其带来的巨大损失，这些技术已被证明具有重要的应用价值。
The competition’s First Prize track for space-based wildfire detection challenged teams to accurately detect all fires across a large swath of Australia within 10 minutes. A second Autonomous Response Prize track challenged teams to autonomously detect and put out a high-risk fire located somewhere within rural Alaska while ignoring decoy fires—all within 10 minutes of the fire igniting.
该竞赛的“太空火情探测”一等奖赛道要求参赛团队在 10 分钟内准确探测到澳大利亚大片区域内的所有火情。第二个“自主响应奖”赛道则要求团队在火灾发生后的 10 分钟内，在阿拉斯加农村地区的某处自主探测并扑灭高风险火灾，同时还要排除干扰火源。
“We want to be able to prepare and provide tools for firefighters to really allow them to do the best job,” Andrea Santy, program director of XPRIZE Wildfire, told Ars. “They’re great at what they do, but it’s unfair to continue to put them in harm’s way when there’s technology coming online that can help keep them safe, keep communities safe, and protect ecosystems.”
“我们希望能够为消防员准备并提供工具，让他们真正发挥出最佳水平，”XPRIZE Wildfire 项目总监 Andrea Santy 在接受 Ars 采访时表示。“他们非常出色，但当现有的技术能够帮助保障他们的安全、保护社区和生态系统时，继续让他们身处险境是不公平的。”
The competition saw 45 qualified technical submissions in the space-based detection track and initially drew more than 300 teams from around the world in the Autonomous Response track. The latter challenge, in particular, attracted a diverse array of proposed technological solutions in the early stages. “At the very beginning, we saw things like sound being able to put out a fire, lasers, and all sorts of robotics like robotic dogs,” Santy told Ars. “We had ground systems and aerial systems.”
此次竞赛在太空探测赛道收到了 45 份合格的技术方案，而“自主响应”赛道最初吸引了全球 300 多个团队参与。特别是在后者，早期阶段涌现了各种各样的技术方案。Santy 对 Ars 说：“起初，我们看到了利用声波灭火、激光灭火，以及各种机器人（如机器狗）等方案。我们既有地面系统，也有空中系统。”
But as the XPRIZE Wildfire judges focused on the most practical solutions for finding and suppressing a fire in 10 minutes, they weeded out technologies that would have a harder time meeting the time and geography requirements. “We want to be able to have technologies that can detect a fire before it’s detected by anyone else,” Santy said. “A 911 call is still the most typical way that we find out about wildfires, and on average, that’s going to be at least 15 minutes.”
然而，随着 XPRIZE Wildfire 的评委们将重点转向在 10 分钟内发现并扑灭火灾的最实用方案，那些难以满足时间和地理要求的技术被淘汰了。“我们希望拥有的技术能够在任何人发现火情之前就将其探测出来，”Santy 说。“拨打 911 仍然是我们发现野火最典型的方式，而平均而言，这至少需要 15 分钟。”
Space-based fire spotters
太空火情探测器
Space-based detection of wildfires can make use of multiple existing satellite constellations, but satellites designed specifically for spotting wildfires have just begun to come online. The German aerospace company OroraTech launched a dedicated wildfire detection constellation of satellites in March 2025, while the Google-backed FireSat program launched its first microsatellites in July 2026.
太空野火探测可以利用现有的多个卫星星座，但专门为探测野火而设计的卫星才刚刚开始投入使用。德国航空航天公司 OroraTech 于 2025 年 3 月发射了一个专门的野火探测卫星星座，而谷歌支持的 FireSat 项目则在 2026 年 7 月发射了其首批微型卫星。
“Current satellites are not built for wildfire detection—they’re built for a lot of other environmental monitoring and weather monitoring,” Santy explained. “So we’re always trying to look at how we take that data that’s not wildfire-specific and use it for a wildfire context.”
“目前的卫星并非为野火探测而建，它们主要用于其他环境监测和天气监测，”Santy 解释道。“因此，我们一直在研究如何获取那些非野火专用的数据，并将其应用于野火场景。”
Send in the drones
派遣无人机
Rapid detection of wildfires is one challenge, but getting firefighting resources to the scene fast enough to stop the spread is another. Teams competing in the autonomous wildfire response track put their technologies to the final test in the sparsely developed rural landscape of Nenana, Alaska, near Fairbanks in June 2026.
快速探测野火是一个挑战，但如何足够快地将消防资源送达现场以阻止火势蔓延则是另一个挑战。2026 年 6 月，参加自主野火响应赛道的团队在阿拉斯加费尔班克斯附近的尼纳纳（Nenana）人烟稀少的农村地区对其技术进行了最终测试。
The finalists typically deployed ground-based sensors and sometimes drones to help detect wildfires across a 386-square-mile area of Alaska, approximately the size of the San Francisco Bay Area in California or San Antonio in Texas. Once a high-risk fire was detected, they launched their own versions of firefighting drones that flew to the scene and attempted to suppress the fire.
决赛选手通常部署地面传感器，有时还会使用无人机，以帮助探测阿拉斯加 386 平方英里（约合 1000 平方公里）范围内的野火，这一面积大约相当于加州的旧金山湾区或德克萨斯州的圣安东尼奥。一旦探测到高风险火情，他们就会启动各自的消防无人机，飞往现场并尝试灭火。
All three finalists successfully detected the high-risk fire in under 10 minutes, while two of the three also deployed drones that attempted to put the main fire out. But none quite managed to fully extinguish the blaze, which is why the grand prize ultimately remained out of reach in this track as well.
三支决赛团队都在 10 分钟内成功探测到了高风险火情，其中两支团队还部署了无人机尝试扑灭主火源。但没有一支团队能够完全扑灭大火，这也是该赛道最终未能颁发大奖的原因。