Student working on forest fire monitoring software

Sophomore Dmitry Sorozhkin hopes to offer a new tool for environmental drone surveillance.

His pitch was shown last week at Archipelago 2023, a startup accelerator event in Novosibirsk, Russia. Sorozhkin has been working on drone surveillance for agriculture for two years. This new project is a joint initiative with 11th grade high schooler Konstantin Volkov.

“The uniqueness of our project is in that thanks to the ability to analyze a large number of specified parameters (temperature, wind, precipitation, etc.) online with the help of artificial intelligence, we will be able not just to identify a fire focus, but to predict its occurrence and promptly respond to the threat of fire. With the help of our development, foresters will be able to simply launch a drone and detect fires or possible hotbeds without having to walk around large areas with their fee,” comments the student.

Sorozhkin says that the product is a software based on an artificial intelligence model for drones equipped with IoT (Internet of Things) sensors. The artificial intelligence model, in turn, is equipped with computer vision and machine learning. With the help of such software, it is possible to determine climatic changes in a wide range of parameters: from temperature regime to analyzing soil quality. In addition, the application of the software can be extended and used to track forest belts, detect illegally cut forest areas, assess the caused damage, etc.

Currently, a minimum viable product is ready and testing is underway in closed mode. The startup hopes that if the testing results are positive, the development will be launched in pilot mode in one of Russia’s regions. To make the project a reality, funds are needed to purchase equipment and provide remuneration to engineers. The authors hope to receive a grant from Start-AI-1 contest of the Innovation Support Foundation (FASIE).