Qamcom details a low-cost autonomous swarm for ember-fire detection
Qamcom published a technical white paper today on Project Firefly, a Vinnova-funded system that uses a leader drone with a thermal camera and one or more surveyor drones to find and confirm ember fires. The demonstrated two-aircraft system runs flight control, sensor processing and mission logic onboard, synchronizes mission state over direct drone-to-drone links, and can continue if the ground-station link drops. Qamcom reports about ±10 m initial geolocation accuracy at 50 m and says the May 2026 Västervik demonstration completed detection and geolocation automatically after hand launch.
Fri, 2 Oct 2026
The architecture treats wildfire detection as a distributed systems problem rather than a single-aircraft sensing problem. Cheap sensors, append-only shared state and role separation can be useful when aircraft are expected to be replaceable and communications intermittent.
The demonstration used two drones, not a large swarm, and the reported field performance comes from the project team. Before extrapolating it to operational wildfire response, test larger fleet sizes, radio contention, smoke and terrain effects, false detections, geolocation error and battery reserves under realistic fire conditions.