Drones and wildfires. Somehow, no one in the world had succeeded in associating the two until Robert Atwood and Richard Sullivan met each other during their studies at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. It was their mutual interest in science and volunteer firefighting that brought them together. Later, after working to extinguish wildfires that had taken over British Columbia, they came up with the idea to change how wildfires are handled globally.
For decades, wildfires have been fought using a combination of extensive human resources and helicopters. Robert and Rich saw that drones had the potential to ease the reliance on both. So they designed an infrared scanning technology to swiftly and accurately process gigabytes of raw footage filmed by drones. They also envisioned and prototyped a crowdsourced platform where anyone can assist in detecting nascent wildfires, helping to snuff them out before the onset of irreversible damage. The only thing left was to let the world know about their breakthrough.