MOMENTUM - April 2024 - 26

TODAY'S
ENGINEERING
As wildfires continue to increase their rate of destruction, AI-powered drones may hold the key to effective suppression management.
WILDFIRES VS.
AI-POWERED
DRONES
EACH YEAR, WILDFIRES RESULT IN THE LOSS OF
THOUSANDS OF LIVES, millions of acres, and hundreds of
billions of dollars. And they're only getting worse.
As one firefighter wrote in TIME magazine, " The amount of
preparation that goes into organizing and deploying strike
teams is equivalent to fighting a war. " Even the language
around it is combative: you fight a fire, perform structural
triage, arrange strike divisions, engage in tactical deployments.
With forest fire temperatures often exceeding 2,000 °F and
greedy three-foot-plus flames reaching ever higher, ever
further, fighting a wildfire is nothing short of brutal.
For Omer Bar-Yohay, a former military member turned tech
entrepreneur, these challenges brought one question to mind:
How could he leverage his experience developing eVTOL
aircraft technologies to mitigate the destruction?
This meaningful question quickly became something he
couldn't let go and it's what inspired him to launch Data
26 April 2024
Blanket, a Seattle-based startup developing small fleets of AIpowered
drones to autonomously carry out missions for
assessing wildfires and relaying vital information to
commanders.
" Data Blanket started off and is aiming to go to market with
first and foremost digitizing the space, " Bar-Yohay said in a
MOMENTUM
Airsight
Blanket Data

https://time.com/102270/fighting-a-wild-fire/ https://www.datablanket.com/ https://www.datablanket.com/

MOMENTUM - April 2024

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