About our Workshop

The aim of this workshop was to better understand how NASA and community expertise can be leveraged in the development of systems that monitor, assess, mitigate, and assure safety concerns of dynamic operations in challenging work environments.

The primary goals were to:

• Identify and prioritize top safety-oriented risks, gaps in capabilities, and emerging technologies to enhance wildland firefighting for both near-term and mid-term operational concepts; and,
• Engage the stakeholder community in defining emergent safety-oriented scope, roles, responsibilities, and procedures for agents undergoing increasingly complex wildland firefighting operations in information-rich but uncertain environments.

This workshop included keynote speakers, panel discussions, and interactive breakout activities.

Workshop participants included:

• State, local, tribal, and federal stakeholders involved in wildfire management planning and mitigation efforts
• Wildland firefighting and disaster response domain experts, including drone operators and designers
• Original equipment manufacturers and subsystems manufacturers for increasingly autonomous systems intended for disaster relief, autonomous systems domain experts
• Regulators, policy makers, and safety experts

About the System-Wide Safety Project

This workshop was sponsored by NASA’s System-Wide Safety (SWS) project and will inform the SWS Safety Demonstrator Series activities. NASA’s SWS Safety Demonstrator Series is a set of operationally challenging demonstrations to develop and demonstrate a system-wide safety framework that enables increasingly complex airspace operations in disaster-oriented and public-good operational contexts. First up in the SWS Safety Demonstrator Series is a wildland firefighting demonstration.