As part of its Silicon Valley-based laboratory, NVIDIA has initiated work to simulate and fight fires with NVIDIA DGX and Omniverse systems. The goal of this research is to better understand wildfires and stop their spread. The research involves NVIDIA and Lockheed Martin, as well as the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control (DFPC), using artificial intelligence and digital simulation.

The lab uses NVIDIA AI infrastructure and the Nvidia Omniverse advanced visualization and virtual world simulation platform to process the size of a fire and predict its progression. By recreating the fire in a physically accurate digital twin, the system will be able to suggest actions to better suppress the fire.

The AI development lab includes Lockheed Martin’s Cognitive Mission Manager (CMM) system, an AI-based end-to-end planning and orchestration platform that combines real-time sensor data about the fire with other data sources about vegetation, topography, wind and more to predict fire spread.

NVIDIA Omniverse allows fire behavior analysts to see predictions in a digital twin of the environment. Using the real-time, multi-GPU scalable simulation platform, Lockheed Martin creates visualizations of predicted fire movement and studies their flow dynamics across a digital replica of the landscape. This allows his team to use NVIDIA Omniverse in several areas.

The firefighting industry relies primarily on tools derived from the Rothermel surface fire spread model to predict fire progression. The Lockheed Martin team is working with the group that created this model, the Forestry Service Missoula Fire Sciences Lab, to examine how AI can improve existing methods of predicting the fire front with speed and accuracy.

Bhushan stated:

“In Omniverse, you have a virtual world that represents a photorealistic digital environment. In it, we can visualize fires and the aspects that affect them, such as terrain, slope, wind and more In the near future, we may generate synthetic data by flying virtual assets through the Omniverse scene. In addition, the Omniverse simulation becomes the basis for creating additional AI-based models to explore response behaviors.”

Lockheed Martin and NVIDIA will continue to collaborate, both physically and within the digital twin environment, to develop and mature the CMM. For the company, one solution could be in unmanned aerial vehicles that would quickly respond to and suppress emerging wildfires.

Translated from Lutter contre les feux de forêts : comment NVIDIA et Lockheed Martin collaborent contre les incendies