The giant, remote-controlled vehicle — somewhere between a tractor trailer, a tank and a Zamboni in appearance — slowly rolled across the dry, brittle grass growing between the tangle of freeways making up the 101 and 23 interchange in Thousand Oaks.
Inside the beast, fire churned. And as it rolled over the land, that fire incinerated any brush it encountered, leaving only a thin smoke cloud billowing from the top of the machine, some flashes of orange and red from behind its metal skirt and, in its wake, a desolate, smoldering black line.
BurnBot isn’t the fastest way to rid a landscape of dangerously flammable vegetation (it tops out at around 0.5 mph) but it can do something that traditional vegetation management techniques cannot: with almost surgical precision, it can kill the flammable brush sitting within feet of homes and highways on even the hottest and driest days and with virtually no safety risks or disruptions to daily life.
On a recent summer afternoon, as wildland firefighters maneuvered the machine and mopped up the charred earth on a stretch of highway about 30 miles west of Los Angeles on the 101, a who’s who of SoCal’s wildfire leadership looked on — from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, local fire departments, Caltrans, the U.S. forest and park services, Southern California Edison and state Legislature. The sweet smoky smell of wildland fire permeated the hot midday air. The onlookers quietly took notes.
“We have to do everything we can to try to figure out ways to lower our wildfire risk in a psychologically friendly way — we don’t want to just turn this beautiful environment into concrete,” state Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica) told the crowd while standing atop BurnBot’s metal skirt. “We’re looking for innovative solutions, and I’m just glad to see this kind of work.”
As humans ignite fires with increasing frequency in Southern California — and continue to build deeper into fire-prone areas — wildfire policymakers and scientists are racing to better understand how to manage the crisis.
Private investors are throwing millions of dollars at the problem, and consequently, a slew of entrepreneurs and former firefighters are trying their hand at developing high-tech solutions.
Few of the emerging technologies — including BurnBot — have faced rigorous scientific scrutiny yet: Fire researchers in Southern California still haven’t collected enough data to settle on which broad strategies are most effective, let alone which companies are best at carrying them out.
Nevertheless, BurnBot has caught the eyes of the departments and organizations spearheading wildfire mitigation in California.
“We’re always looking at what new technologies there might be that we can utilize to enhance our vegetation management program,” said Andrew Dowd, public information officer with the Ventura County Fire Department, which sent a small crew to check out the bot.
BurnBot is the brainchild of computer scientist Anukool Lakhina and physicist Waleed Haddad.
After the 2020 Northern California fires, the two put their heads together to develop a technology solution for the state’s crisis. They settled on essentially a “Roomba for the forest” (as one onlooker at the August demonstration put it).
Haddad built a prototype of BurnBot in the kitchen of Lakhina’s San Francisco home to convince fire scientists and investors that the idea might actually work. Its first meal: Lakhina’s backyard.
Today, the company has built five full-size BurnBots — called the RX, shorthand for the “prescribed” in “prescribed burn.”
While the tech was developed and primarily tested in Northern California, Lakhina thinks it can help Southern California address its two unique wildfire risk-reduction goals: lower the number of ignitions and create strategic fuel breaks to slow fire and give firefighters access to the region’s fire-prone wildlands.
BurnBot hopes to thwart human–started fires by removing flammable grasses along common ignition points, like roadways and power lines. Vehicles and electrical equipment have historically caused roughly 2% of fires in the region. Arson, unsupervised kids and various agriculture, construction and landscaping equipment have been responsible for the lion’s share; however, even those are much more common along roadways and near developments, where BurnBot hopes to operate.
Currently, agencies such as Caltrans often rely on routine mowing to fight the flammable grasses along transportation corridors and in populated areas. But mowing doesn’t completely destroy the grasses; it just gives them a haircut. Their seeds stay hidden underground, and the grasses grow back quickly.
Herbicides, another common technique for managing invasive grasses, are often expensive to purchase and can leave toxic chemicals in the environment after treatment.
Meanwhile, prescribed burns can cover a lot of ground and, if they burn hot enough, can destroy invasive seeds. However, traditional prescribed burns can require road closures for safety reasons, and fire crews typically only perform them in cooler, wetter conditions to limit the risk of a powerful, runaway fire.
BurnBot RX, however, can safely run any day, Lakhina said. Its most recent demo was Aug. 27, during peak fire season in sweltering 90-degree weather. The only traffic control was a few cones placed along the highway’s shoulder. No road closures; no blocked lanes creating congestion.
The bot’s handlers can also finely control the heat of the burn, ensuring the seeds of invasive plants hiding the soil get scorched too.
While the research evaluating BurnBot’s success is limited right now, Lakhina said his company is working with Stanford researchers to evaluate how land recovers after a visit from BurnBot. So far, they’ve seen anecdotal evidence that after a burn, fire-resilient native species often return instead of invasive grasses.
The company plans to keep its five currently functioning BurnBot RXs in the family, where their experienced technicians and wildland firefighters will use them to complete wildfire risk reduction work across the state. In the coming years, they plan to aggressively grow the size of their operation. Lakhina said the company plans to build 15 next year and 50 the year after.
“Unlike other kinds of disasters, we have a lot of agency here: … Take out the fuels, reduce the risk,” Lakhina said. “California has wildfires, but California also has innovators. Shame on us if we can’t sort our way out of this.”
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