UMD Team Contends in Semifinals of XPRIZE Competition to End Destructive Wildfires

A multidisciplinary team of students, faculty and staff from the University of Maryland participated in the last stage of semifinals in the XPRIZE Competition to End Destructive Wildfires—a four-year challenge to incentivize subject matter experts to design innovative technologies that detect, characterize, and respond to wildfires before they become destructive.

Team “Crossfire,” led by members of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering and xFoundry@UMD, advanced to semifinals earlier this Summer after demonstrating a system with a three-step approach: detection, reconnaissance and suppression. The team, which includes researchers in the Departments of Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Maryland Robotics Center, UAS Research and Operations Center (UROC), and the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute (MFRI) began the work for this system after entering the competition in the Spring of 2024.

“We started working on this project almost two years ago and, from the very beginning, we knew that the UMD ecosystem had a considerable amount of expertise relevant to this problem,” said Fernando Raffan-Montoya, an assistant professor in fire protection engineering and a team lead. “We are proud about the work developed by our students, and the competition has allowed us to expose them to a hands-on, multi-year project that aligns well with our mission: Engineering that changes lives.”

The proposed system works in multiple steps: an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) scans an area for active fires and, if detected, gathers information about it, such as location and size that it passes to a suppression vehicle. The suppression vehicle, also a UAV in Crossfire’s solution, navigates to the fire location and efficiently drops a suppressant—extinguishing the fire. The entire chain of events lasts only a few minutes.

Team “Crossfire” is competing in the $5 million Autonomous Wildfire Response Track, which focuses on the rapid and autonomous detection and suppression of a destructive, high-risk fire in an environmentally challenging area with great speed and accuracy while leaving any decoy fires untouched.

“We see this as a platform that could be useful anywhere from the Chesapeake watersheds to the high desert and dry forests out West. If successful, we may soon turn our efforts into a company and scale across Maryland, and the rest of the country, to help stop destructive wildfires in their tracks for good,” said Phillip Alvarez, associate director of ventures and partnerships at xFoundry@UMD.

XPRIZE Wildfire is focused on fighting extreme wildfire events, which account for 3% of all wildfires, but drive over 80% of total associated fire damages. These fires, which often begin in remote areas, are fueled by climate change-related extreme weather, such as severe drought, extreme winds, and heat waves. While low intensity fires are now understood as having a positive impact on the landscape, high-intensity destructive fires have a negative impact on the ecological system, the climate system, and are a threat to human communities.

The research bulk of this project is housed at the A. James Clark School of Engineering, while technology tests have been conducted at the MFRI testing facilities located in College Park and La Plata, Maryland.

Published October 20, 2025