XPRIZE Wildfire

Valley Christian’s Wildfire Quest team was initiated in July 2022 and is composed of nine talented students led by an expert in aerospace engineering. The four-year international competition offers a total prize purse of $11M for the top teams. The team’s tight cohesion, fostered by three diverse sectors, drives student innovation, contributing to the development of their collaboration solution. Despite being the sole high school team among companies and graduate students, the Wildfire Quest team exudes confidence in their solutions and capabilities to emerge victorious.

The Global Issue

“Globally, Extreme Wildfire Events (EWEs) are becoming more frequent. EWEs burn bigger, at a higher intensity, and can quickly sprawl out of control. While they represent only around 3% of all wildfires, EWEs account for 80% of total associated fire damages and are increasingly contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions and worsening health impacts from pollutants.
These large and destructive wildfires wreak havoc on ecosystems worldwide, especially in the expanding Wildland-Urban Interface, where homes, businesses, and major infrastructure are most at risk, and where wildfire control and suppression activities are increasingly outperformed.”

XPRIZE Wildfire - The Challenge

The XPRIZE organization, recognizing this problem, initiated the XPRIZE Wildfire. XPRIZE Wildfire is a four-year international, multimillion-dollar competition with the goal of autonomously detecting and suppressing wildfires within a ten-minute timeframe.

Solutions Focused

Our team approaches this problem and competition in the unique manner of four separate sub teams: communications, suppression, detection, and business all focusing on a systems-based engineering design approach, made to set and then meet requirements based on the competition guidelines. 

1. Our detection team is focused on methods of detecting the fire, spanning across three different mediums.
2. The suppression team takes the detection information and acts to minimize and suppress the fire.
3. Our communications team serves to create the central hub through which all the previous systems communicate. 
4. Our business team is unique in these efforts as they manage strategic partnerships, profits, timelines, and competition submissions. 

Competition Status

Team Wildfire Quest was formed in July 2022 and recently received notice of their Top 30 team status in passing the first round of the competition!