Three teams have won XPRIZE awards for autonomous wildfire-response systems tested in Alaska in June. The challenge asked entrants to detect and fully suppress a high-risk fire within 10 minutes while leaving nearby decoy fires untouched; the public results distinguish Dryad’s end-to-end system from AURA Foresight’s detection result, but do not give team-by-team suppression times.
XPRIZE says the finals ran for two weeks near Nenana, Alaska. Its rules set a demanding test: systems had to operate across a 1,000-square-kilometer area and autonomously detect and suppress a fire, with human supervisors allowed to monitor and abort but not direct the response.
Anduril Industries received first place and $1.2 million for a Lattice software platform that connected cameras, sensors and drones in a detection-to-suppression pathway. The company also won a separate $1 million bonus for multi-sensor fire detection. XPRIZE did not publish the team’s detection times or suppression scores alongside the award.
Dryad Networks received $800,000 for combining its Silvanet network of 170 field sensors with Silvaguard drones; XPRIZE said the system demonstrated end-to-end autonomy. AURA Foresight received $500,000 after demonstrating autonomous fire detection and meeting the 10-minute detection gate. The University of Bristol, which is part of AURA, says the team’s deployment covered 700 square kilometers, while XPRIZE describes a 1,000-square-kilometer competition area. The two releases do not explain the difference.
The public results do not reveal how often each system found the target fire, avoided decoys or extinguished an ignition. XPRIZE’s rules called for timestamped logs or post-test reports, but its public award summary does not include those results.
XPRIZE says the next phase will evaluate the technologies in further field trials and work toward durable wildfire-management deployments. The Alaska awards show the judges recognized field-tested system integration, but do not establish that autonomous systems can reliably suppress wildfires in routine operations.
Sources
- XPRIZE Foundation, “Awardees named in XPRIZE Wildfire competition to transform the future of wildfire response,” September 23, 2026
- XPRIZE Wildfire, Track B Rules and Regulations, finals testing and verification criteria
- University of Bristol, “Bristol robotics team awarded international XPRIZE for wildfire drone technology,” September 24, 2026
- Lead image: Bureau of Land Management thermal drone footage of the North Umpqua Fire, 2018; U.S. federal government work, public domain. The image is illustrative and is not from the XPRIZE tests. Image and rights record.