With accelerating climate change, the risk of wildfires in boreal forests is growing. Countries in the Nordic-Baltic region are increasingly affected by rural fires, which threaten forest ecosystems, biodiversity, industry, and local communities. To prevent major wildfire-related disasters, we require faster and smarter wildfire preparedness. Traditional fire monitoring systems are too coarse, missing local fire ignition risks, and often reacting too late.
Project INFORM aims to address this challenge with high-resolution wildfire risk maps created using data collected by teams of autonomous robots, such as drones and ground vehicles, equipped with advanced sensors and AI-based decision-making systems. Unlike satellites, these robots can gather fine-grained information beneath forest canopies, offering detailed insights into vegetation, terrain, and fire-prone conditions. We envision multi-robot systems collaborating with human (such as landowners, first responders, and public agencies) to create a flexible, real-time risk monitoring system.
INFORM also develops safety tools to ensure the trustworthy operation of these AI-robotic systems in dynamic, unstructured environments like forests. Key project activities include identifying what types of data are needed for reliable fire prediction, and then adapting robotic sensing technologies to operate in forests for measuring and gathering the requisite information to build usable wildfire risk maps. These maps can then be further enriched, or utilized robot teams in cooperation with human decision-makers for smart forest monitoring. We will develop the underlying control algorithms that enable such a human-multirobot collaboration, as well as develop methodologies for runtime verification for such complex systems to operate safely in uncertain, dynamic scenarios.
INFORM is a collaboration between leading Nordic-Baltic universities (namely, Aalto University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Estonian University of Life Sciences, and Norwegian University of Life Sciences), with strong support from strategic stakeholders in forestry, civil protection, and environmental agencies. By combining robotics, AI, and forest science, INFORM lays the groundwork for a smarter, safer, and more sustainable future for forests.
