Alchera, an artificial intelligence (AI) company specializing in image recognition, announced on the 11th that it has successfully completed an autonomous flight test for early fire response in collaboration with Rain, a wildfire suppression system supplier in California, USA, and aircraft manufacturer Sikorsky Aviation.

Rain is a wildfire response system company founded by American firefighters, and includes firefighters including the White House Deputy Director for Emergency Response. Sikorsky Aviation is on par with Boeing in the field of military helicopter manufacturing.

ALCHERA X, Alchera's US subsidiary, is supplying FireScout, an AI solution for early wildfire detection, starting in Sonoma County, California.

Rain and Sikorsky are developing autonomous aircraft and systems for wildfire fighting. Rain announced the ability to integrate its system with Alchera’s FireScout to efficiently dispatch autonomous aircraft after early detection of wildfires.

This method detects smoke from a forest fire through Fire Scout, identifies the location of the fire, and then inputs the flight path and water discharge timing. In this test, all processes of wildfire response, including early detection of wildfires, dispatch, route planning, flight, targeting, and suppression, were performed automatically.

It is expected that it will be expanded to be applied as an efficient and safe response solution to respond to nighttime forest fires where securing a path and visibility is difficult in the future or fires in terrain that are difficult for people to enter.

Alchera FireScout is a wildfire surveillance SaaS solution based on image recognition AI. It analyzes wildfire smoke images input by cameras using AI to detect smoke within a 50km area with 99.9% accuracy within 3 seconds.

Alchera has over 10 million wildfire data and boasts high performance through continuous learning based on numerous detection success cases.

In particular, it is reported that in 2022, the company supplied solutions to PG&E, the largest power company in the western United States, and detected the first ignition of the large-scale coyote wildfire that occurred in Siskiyou County, California in September of that year about 2 hours and 3 minutes earlier than the signal call, supporting a rapid initial response.

“Fire Scout will be commercialized stably in Korea in the near future,” said Hwang Young-gyu, CEO of Alchera. “In addition to forest fires, we plan to expand its application to indoor fire detection in tunnels, warehouses, factories, and electric vehicle charging stations.”