Tech Startups Deploy Robots and AI to Combat Wildfires
TWAIN HARTE, Calif. — The Sierra Nevada is currently a tinderbox. Early June, the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air shimmers above dead trees and brush. In the Stanislaus National Forest, logging roads wind through firs and ponderosa pines, passing by burn piles, each containing tons of wood waste. On the front lines of fire prevention, a timber crew thins the forest, and a tech startup is working on automating the machines they rely on.
They are called skidders: imposing machines on four massive wheels, with a bulldozer-like blade on the front and a tree-size grapple in the back. These worker bees haul felled logs from the forest to landing sites, where they are delimbed and loaded onto trucks bound for the sawmill. Usually, a single driver operates them for a 12-hour shift.
Engineers at Kodama Systems have adapted a Caterpillar skidder by adding cameras, radar, and internet connectivity to create a remote-controlled machine. This system can perform the more basic tasks of a timber crew while simultaneously teaching itself to operate semiautonomously using lidar to map the forest.
Joe Lerdal, the head of operations for Kodama Systems, a forest management startup, checks the equipment on a remotely controlled logging skidder in the Stanislaus National Forest, near Sonora, in northern California, July 26, 2024. High-tech entrepreneurs are trying to use new forms of technology to solve the problem of mega-wildfires in the age of climate change. (Ian C. Bates/The New York Times)
Kodama has raised $6.6 million, fueled by the reality that our forestland is packed with fuel.
What happens when you set a region full of technology entrepreneurs and investors on fire? They start companies. Dozens of startups, backed by climate-minded investors with over $200 million, are developing technology to tackle a fundamental challenge of the warming world.
Merritt Jenkins, founder of Kodama, moved to Twain Harte, California, two years ago to understand the timber industry. (The town is named after Mark Twain, who said he accidentally ignited his own Sierra timber claim in the 1860s.)
For years the response to wildfires was simple: Put them out. This strategy has created unnaturally large stockpiles of biomass in California forests. Foresters and firefighters began realizing that battling wildfires requires “treating” their fuel in advance: thinning forests and underbrush with mechanical tools and controlled or prescribed burns.
“There’s been a huge leap in the last five years,” said Stanford conservationist Esther Cole Adelsheim.
“There aren’t enough hands,” says Kate Dargan, a former CalFire chief and entrepreneur who now works on wildfire resilience for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. “This is not a high-paying industry, it’s a hot, dirty, hard industry … where technology can help assist human production capability, it’s really important.”
If Kodama’s vehicles work as planned, they could expand existing efforts. The near-term goal is for one operator to drive two skidders, and to run a second shift at night. In June, Jenkins demonstrated the ability to operate the skidder from an employee’s home miles from the logging site. He later ran it from London.
Start-Ups Addressing Climate Change.
Bill Clerico, founder of the payments app WePay, is trying to make fire tech happen. After selling WePay to JPMorgan Chase, he bought a home in Mendocino County and was introduced to wildfires. In 2020, Clerico volunteered with the local fire department, directing traffic in the woods and researching investments in technology to respond to climate-change-amplified infernos.
The complexity of the problem reminded him of the early days of fintech. In 2022, Clerico and his partners founded Convective Capital in San Francisco, raising $35 million to back startups focused on climate tech. This includes AI-enabled cameras to spot wildfires (Pano) and autonomous helicopters to quench them (Rain); satellites and drones to monitor forests and weather (Overstory, Treeswift); and software to help people fireproof their homes (Fire Aside).
To keep pace with the need to treat more acres each year, treatment would need to grow by a third this year.
Flames escape during a test run of a Burnbot, which has been described as a giant, upside-down propane grill that facilitates controlled burns, on grasslands at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., June 27, 2024. (Ian C. Bates/The New York Times)
A logging skidder, controlled remotely by a Kodama Systems worker, transports logs in the Stanislaus National Forest, near Sonora, in Northern California, July 26, 2024. High-tech entrepreneurs are trying to use new forms of technology to solve the problem of mega-wildfires in the age of climate change. (Ian C. Bates/The New York Times)
On another hot June afternoon, a different robot is torching grasslands on the Palo Alto campus of Stanford University. Four wildland firefighters operate BurnBot, a giant, upside-down propane grill. Inside a metal box, a dozen jets blast flames at the ground, generating temperatures near 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
An autonomous tractor pulls the box along the hillside, leaving a 5-foot ribbon of charred ground. This protective line could help prevent ignitions caused by cars and can allow for controlled burns that would usually require many people and ideal weather conditions.
CalFire Chief Jim McDougald said firebreaks like these gave his firefighters time to protect the community of Shaver Lake during the 2020 Creek fire.
“We were able to get in there and fire along Highway 168 and just burn back to that ridge,” he said.
BurnBot is the brainchild of Anukool Lakhina. In 2018, when the Camp fire blanketed the Bay Area in smoke, he realized the problem could offer an opportunity. After failing to gain traction with an idea of using sound waves to suppress fire, he and co-founder Lee Haddad turned to controlled burns. Now, backed by millions in funding, BurnBot plans to treat 3,000 acres this year.
A wildland firefighter looks at a video of a test burn transmitted by a Burnbot, on grasslands at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., June 27, 2024. High-tech entrepreneurs are trying to use new forms of technology to solve the problem of mega-wildfires in the age of climate change. (Ian C. Bates/The New York Times)
Looking to Washington for Support
These tech CEOs also have to persuade the public sector to support new markets. Megafire Action, an advocacy group, organized a July delegation to Washington, D.C., that included Clerico. Matt Weiner, CEO of Megafire Action, said after pitching officials on the sector’s solutions, “There’s a growing recognition that we’re not currently on track to get the job done.”
Kodama’s approach to fuel treatment is essentially logging. Kodama is experimenting with a plan to bury felled timber, storing its carbon over the long term and selling credits against it.
“We should think about new business models,” Lakhina said. “I think the insurance carriers have a role to play in financing or catalyzing at least maintenance treatments. If it’s reducing risk, that’s allowing them to underwrite more properties at a better margin.”
Earlier, in the Stanislaus National Forest, Kodama’s skidder cut its own trail, shoving logs into burn piles. Working on Kodama’s autonomous technology in the woods, Joe Lerdal is teaching the machine but learning from the timber crew.
These machines are only the start of fire tech’s vision; the bigger aspiration is to use technology to turn megafires against themselves.
Dargan envisions a future in which sensors in space and on the ground cue autonomous vehicles to redirect the fury of wildfires to benefit the landscape. Climate scientists believe Western forests will face ever-drier conditions for decades to come.
“It is critical that we burn as much as we can by 2050,” she said. “After that, it may be too late.”
