Cody Chiverton has spent a decade lighting fires. As a former firefighter with the US Forest Service, he participated in dozens of prescribed burns across the American West, in which fire-prevention teams use drip torches to ignite vegetation, leaving flames and smoke in their wake.
But in June, Chiverton did a prescribed burn with no flames and no smoke. Instead, a tank-like robot pulled by a remote-controlled tractor handled the igniting. As it moved along a hiking trail near Palo Alto, California, the robot turned anything in its path into a dark trail of ash.
“It’s a cool tool,” says Chiverton, 31, who this year joined San Francisco-based BurnBot. The startup doesn’t sell its robots (it has made two so far). Instead, forest managers, property owners and utilities book them on demand, at prices that start in the neighborhood of $1,000 per acre.