(Bloomberg) — Cody Chiverton has spent the last decade setting fires. A former U.S. Forest Service firefighter, he’s been involved in dozens of controlled fires across the American West in which fire crews use drip torches to ignite dry vegetation, leaving behind flames and smoke.
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But in June, Chiverton conducted a controlled burn without flames and smoke. Instead, a tank-like robot pulled by a remote-controlled tractor did 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 trail of ash.
“It’s a cool tool,” says Chiverton, 31, who joined BurnBot in San Francisco this year. The startup doesn’t sell its robots (it has made two so far). Instead, forest managers, landowners and utilities book them on demand, at prices that start at about $1,000 per acre.
Controlled burns – fighting fire with fire – have long been used by indigenous groups to reduce the risk of wildfires. Removing excess vegetation reduces the amount of fuel a forest has, making it less likely that a fire will start or spread quickly. But it is a labor-intensive process. BurnBot’s burn in June involved a five-person crew burning an area the size of an American football field. Chiverton says without the robots, it would have taken 10 people to do the same job.
“This way we can have more controlled fires to clean up our landscapes and make them more resilient,” he says.
There is an urgent need to improve fire management around the world. Greece, Turkey and Canada are battling multiple wildfires this summer, and California is battling one of the worst fires in the state’s history. On August 1, the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) issued a warning about “extreme levels” of fire activity in the West this year. According to the NIFC, wildfires in the U.S. have burned an average of 7.65 million acres per year over the past five years, 52% more than two decades ago.
That’s partly because decades of wildfire suppression have prevented natural forest thinning that reduces the supply of fuel for future fires. But climate change is also exacerbating the conditions that make fires larger and more frequent.
More and larger wildfires mean more communities and infrastructure are at risk, and more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere as forests are destroyed. (Last year, Canada’s wildfires emitted more CO2 than all of Mexico.) Larger fires also increase pressure on firefighters at a time when the industry is facing a labor shortage. California alone has seen an exodus of nearly 1,000 federal firefighters since 2020.
“There is a fundamental mismatch between the area to be treated and today’s workforce capacity,” says Anukool Lakhina, CEO of BurnBot, who founded the company in 2022 with co-founder Waleed Haddad.
BurnBot is part of a fledgling but fast-growing “fire tech” sector focused on preventing, detecting and fighting wildfires. San Francisco-based Pano AI uses artificial intelligence cameras to detect fires earlier, while Santa Monica, California-based Rain is building autonomous helicopters to fight fires from the air and French company Shark Robotics is building firefighting robots for the front lines.
BurnBot’s special machine is designed to make controlled fires easier and safer. In addition to reducing manpower requirements, the robot also maintains combustion in its combustion chamber, where propane burners and air blowers reach flame temperatures of up to 1,000 °C (1,832 °F). Industrial fans create an upward airflow that contains flames and embers and reduces the risk of fire spreading outward.
That’s a key concern: It’s easier to ignite vegetation in dry weather, but firefighters often prohibit it because of the risk of a fire getting out of control. In 2022, two controlled fires combined to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history.
BurnBot’s burns are also largely smoke-free. The intense heat combined with a highly concentrated oxygen stream destroys fine dust. Lakhina describes it as “burning the smoke.”
That feature has already piqued the interest of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, California’s largest utility, which typically avoids controlled fires near its 18,000 miles of power lines because the smoke poses a safety hazard. The utility gave the green light to a demonstration of BurnBot’s technology last year. Kevin Johnson, an analyst who tests innovative wildfire solutions for PG&E, says he “couldn’t see or smell the smoke.”
BurnBot offers several automated solutions to reduce wildfire risk, with the controlled burn robot being the first solution developed entirely in-house. The company also uses drones and laser imaging to assess landscapes for firefighting opportunities and has a dozen chipping machines that can remove fallen trees and thin out undergrowth. Through its range of services, BurnBot has cleared over 2,000 hectares of land.
The company, which has raised $25 million so far, operates in California, Oregon and Nevada and will begin operations in Australia next month. Lakhin said the plan is to expand to six more U.S. states and Canada next year and to manage 1 million acres annually by 2035. (Even that would be less than a quarter of the 4.3 million acres the U.S. Forest Service managed last year.)
There are still some technical issues to be worked out. The machines are still wobbly on rocky ground. And in a controlled burn last year, the robot managed a thicket of wet grass by raising the flame temperature so high that it also melted its own components. (Lakhina says the newer version is heat-resistant.)
Then the challenge is getting more fire safety officers on board. In an industry where 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 experts like Chiverton who can serve as both responders and advocates for technology-enabled wildfirefighting. Lakhina says the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided billions of dollars for fire management in the U.S., is also drawing more attention to fire prevention solutions. The same goes for the plight of overworked firefighters.
“The tide is turning,” says Lakhina. “Firefighting technology is being recognized as a category.”
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