Design and Development of an Autonomous Wildfire Suppression Firefighting Robot

Overview

My Science Fair project works towards creating a autonomous robot that can resist and combat wildfires autonomously and work in the extreme conditions that wildfires occur in. My project consists of two different parts. One is where I work towards finding the best combination of different materials that resist fire and can keep the internal electronics of my robot at manageable temperatures where the external temperatures can reach 500 c. The second part is to creating a robot that can uses YOLO v8n, a lightweight live image detection model in corroboration with a thermal imaging camera in order to seek and extinguish fires. I am experimenting with various different materials that have different properties that allow it to resist heat, whether they be insulating properties, or absorbing properties, and I hypothesize that a combination of a outside reflective layer, a insulating middle layer, and a heat absorbing inner layer will have the best success of properly protecting inner electronics from overheating. To conduct this experiment, I first developed a testing fire box in which I aimed a precision torch at that could heat a spot of the box to hundreds of degrees, and then protected the box with the different materials, seeing how long that it would take the thermocouple inside of the box to reach 50 degrees c, the failing temperature for electronics that would be inside a robot. From my experimentation I collected that the ceramic blanket had the best insulation, while the fiberglass heat shield had the best reflection and I can conclude from this that the combination of the successful materials combined with a robot that can accurately detect fires is something that will change the way that we combat forest fires and take out the human risk that kills firefighters every year.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Electronics & Electromagnetics (Senior Division) · Entry S-10-20

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