WAKE FOREST – The Advanced Mobility Collective, founded in 2019, is a network of partners including SAS that operates as an economic development and public benefit initiative of the Wireless Research Center in Wake Forest, will launch a ForestTech Center in Winter Park, Colorado.
The collective noted in a statement that the center would be “the first of its kind,” and that it would address specific needs of wildland firefighters and forest managers on four fronts: mitigation of, detection of, suppression of, and recovery from wildfires.
“Experts and researchers will establish best practices for fire intelligence, spatial awareness, data processing, procedural excellence, and infrastructure testing,” the statement reads. “Best practices will be shared to scale throughout the nation and beyond.”
The state of Colorado created the Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting, or CoE, to lead development and testing for aerial firefighting technologies, and the CoE leads research and development efforts. The CoE is a partner in the launch of the ForestTech Center.
“One of the biggest challenges for firefighters is enabling communications technology in wildlands,” said Ben Miller, director of the Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting in a statement. “The ForestTech Center will establish a variety of communication services to be evaluated and lead to new systems to share data. The result will be the ability to design and deploy mesh networks of communication technologies that will interoperate and support rapid expansion.”
One early effort of the CoE was to improve safety and effectiveness during tactical operations, and it implemented the U.S. government’s Team Awareness Kit (TAK), according to the jointly issued statement.
According to the statement, advanced sensor systems equipped to unmanned vehicles can be deployed to better identify wildfires and to deploy suppressants, but need to be supported by technologies, communications, and an operational framework.
These efforts correspond to the work that the Wireless Research Center is leading on autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, in North Carolina, according to the statement. The organization is leading deployment and operation of advanced wireless 5G testbeds with a $24 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Initial testbeds for autonomous drone and mobility systems are planned in North Carolina, the organization noted in a statement.
“The ForestTech Center is another example of bridging the gap between research and proof of concept, leading the transition to the business community providing the next generation of products and services,” says Todd Spain, executive director of the Advanced Mobility Collective, in a statement. “Ultimately, this creates a framework that can be adapted to other natural disasters including flooding and healthcare emergencies.”
