The number of wildfires are increasing at an alarming rate and dramatically impacting the environment, communities, infrastructure, and the economies across the globe. Last year, the CZU lightening complex fire burned 97% of Big Basin and over a thousand homes and structures. Wildfires require an enormous amount of resources and displace hundreds of thousands of humans, wildlife, and businesses. Traditionally, wildfires are detected by lookout stations, reports from the general public, air patrols, and infrared technology. 

Robotics Cats aims to help property owners and businesses, especially those with homes, factories or infrastructures in WUI (wildland-urban-interface) protect their families and assets with wildfire detection tools that they can use with their existing cameras and phone.  They developed LookOut, a wildfire detection service (formerly named AI-Cloud) to provide customers with an easy to deploy solution to detect wildfire in their areas. 

Lookout is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to detect wildfires using RoboticsCats AI Wildfire Detection algorithms on the images provided by customer’s cameras. No new hardware or server software is required to use LookOut. Instead, Lookout leverages customer’s existing IP network cameras to provide visual images of the environment. It requires a simple camera setup to send images to LookOut’s Machine Learning object detection system and operates in the cloud or on the edge. It will not interrupt existing video surveillance processes. Users can get real-time alerts and images of wildfires via the ReportFires mobile app. Robotics Cats is offering a 6-months of LookOut wildfire detection standard service for free to Santa Cruz Works members.