Firefighting drones in the works as wildfires plague US nearly year-round - Ars Technica

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Drones capable of spraying water and fire retardants have been practicing how to snuff out wildfires early in California and Alaska this summer—demonstrating a possible rapid-response tool for firefighting as climate change transforms wildfire season into a nearly year-round risk for much of the United States.

Most drones are significantly smaller than crewed aircraft and have shorter flight ranges, meaning they cannot replace large airtankers in delivering massive payloads of water or other fire-suppressing payloads to remote wildfires. But companies and fire agencies—along with organizers of the $11 million XPRIZE competition—are testing whether drones can help firefighting crews respond more quickly to small fires and put them out before they become more destructive.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as CAL FIRE, ran its own field test involving five autonomous drones that worked together to deploy between 500 and 1,000 gallons of foam combined for suppressing fires on July 15, according to the TV station KPMH. The demonstration was organized with the help of the nonprofit FireWERX and the California-based company Seneca, which is making the drones commercially available starting in 2026.

Each of Seneca’s Argo-1 drones can carry about 100 pounds of water or fire retardant while working together in swarms of four to six drones. Once a human operator uploads a GPS waypoint, the autonomous drones fly toward their target and use onboard sensors to spot the heat signature of a fire, HeliOps Magazine reported. The drones then find the best hovering altitude before each lining up to spray the fire, one after the other.

The fully loaded drones are limited to a round trip of 10 miles while flying at about 30 miles per hour on average, which means they would ideally need to be prepositioned in fire-prone areas or first transported by ground vehicle. But each drone can fit in the back of a pickup truck with the tailgate down, and two people can even manually carry the empty drones.

Seneca told HeliOps Magazine that the goal is to enable firefighters to refill a returning drone’s payload and swap in a fresh battery so that it’s ready to fly again in two minutes. The company previously demonstrated its drone technology for San Bernardino County Fire in December 2025.

Testing in the Alaskan wilderness

Separately, the XPRIZE Wildfire competition gave another firefighting drone system its own trial by fire in finals testing just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska in June 2026. The Silvaguard autonomous firefighting drone system—developed by the German company Dryad Networks—worked with the Dryad’s Silvanet wildfire detection network to autonomously detect and suppress a wildfire within the competition’s 1,000 square kilometer test area.

Dryad’s detection system consists of solar-powered sensors attached to trees that are designed to detect the smoke from a smoldering fire. When a sensor triggers the alarm via a wireless mesh network to an Internet-connected border gateway device, a prepositioned Silvaguard observation drone launches to confirm and geolocate the fire using infrared and optical imaging sensors, while also ensuring that it’s not a false alarm.

That sets the stage for a Silvaguard suppression drone to take off and deploy up to 26 gallons of fire suppressant onto the fire. The drones can be prepositioned inside solar-powered, spherical hangar pods.

Dryad’s Silvaguard drone.

The ultimate test for whether Dryad’s system or Seneca’s drones can nip fires in the bud will come if fire agencies deploy them during the lengthening wildfire season. The Aspen Fire Protection District in Colorado has become an early customer by already committing to a $5 million contract for deploying five of Seneca’s drones over five years.

CAL FIRE has not signed up any firefighting drones just yet, but it represents another large potential customer. The California fire agency already operates the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet with more than 70 crewed fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, along with using AI-powered camera networks and supporting development of the FireSat constellation designed to spot wildfires from space even faster.

Jeremy Hsu

Tech Reporter

Jeremy Hsu

Tech Reporter

Jeremy Hsu is a reporter exploring a wide range of topics across deep tech and AI. He has previously written for New Scientist, Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum,...