VUlcan project

Vulcan is our custom drone platform performing autonomous re-seeding missions after a wildfire strikes.

Our club’s mission is to develop an open-source, low-cost, autonomous drone stack and use it to solve real problems in California.

To test our technology, we are working with CalFire and the United States Forest Service to help provide relief to areas affected by wildfires.

After talking to industry experts from these organizations, we learned that current drone efforts are having trouble scaling because of the massive operational costs associated with them: purchasing a drone may cost only a few thousand dollars, but flying missions requires training and paying a human pilot to manually fly it at all times.

After the mission, hundreds of man-hours are spent scouring through footage to gather structured data.

Our Lumen autonomy software solves this problem. Given a simple English task, drones powered by Lumen carry out missions fully autonomously. With this setup, humans are not manually flying one drone at a time; instead they are able to orchestrate dozens of drones at once.

This significantly reduces the OPEX unit economics and allows drones to be used at scale. 

Our Vulcan drones will be deployed to areas affected by wildfire and autonomously map the terrain and, using onboard sensors and cameras, determine suitable spots to drop seeds of plants that were destroyed in the fire.