Week 0 Blog
February 3, 2025
Hello! Welcome to my senior project blog. Today I wanted to talk a little bit about my backstory, which I hope gives some insight into why I decided to do this project.
My interest in working on engineering projects to benefit the environment began in 8th grade. One of my close friends invited me to a high school nonprofit called Beyond Terra, where we first worked on a project called the seedball. Through a series of experiments, we determined an optimal formula for the seedballs to maximize the health and vitality of the seeds inside. We actually generated a significant amount of interest, both from the press and potential customers, but our next question was, where do we go from there? We had a few ideas for engineering projects, such as a drain sock, but none proved feasible to implement with our resources.
Four years of thinking finally led to a new idea—a drone that could assess an area’s proneness to forest fires. Sources like DroneLife and MITSolve show that drones are currently focused on early detection of fires that have already been started, as well as combating fires. I detected a gap in that many of these drones area focused on mitigation rather than prevention, one I intend to bridge.
In addition, I’ve loved working with autonomous vehicles and image detection algorithms throughout high school. On my robotics team, I used detection models such as TensorFlow Object Detection, and built-in cameras such as HuskyLens to solve randomization tasks that required shape or color input. The past summer at MIT I worked with autonomous underwater vehicles, using edge detection of the lines at the bottom of the pool in order to navigate pool currents and enable my vehicle to traverse the pool in a straight line. This required a different type of camera orientation, where the camera had an upward perspective on the features of interest, which is similar to what a drone or satellite camera would experience when hovering overa tree canopy. Having immersed myself into land and water vehicles, it would seem obvious that the logical next step is drones and aerial imagery!
So now…about my project…
Through this project, I’ll design a model that analyzes factors such as vegetation dryness, density, and other fire-risk indicators using satellite and drone imagery–as well as relevant quantitative data. This project is a proof of concept, with the final product showcasing a website where users can select certain Northern California forest areas to determine forest fire proneness. The platform will provide visualized risk levels, offering a valuable tool for early detection and mitigation planning.
I hope to explore the possibility of preemptive wildfire prevention on a large scale. By combining high-resolution data from drones with large-scale satellite imagery, my aim is to demonstrate an accessible, modular system that can be integrated seamlessly with commercial drones. I hope this system will empower local communities, park rangers, and environmental agencies with precise, data-driven insights to better predict, assess, and mitigate wildfire threats before they escalate. In the long run, this project could help bridge the gap between cutting-edge technology and practical wildfire prevention efforts–as well as teach me about the intersection of the two.
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