Sanat Pandit
6th Grade, Greenhills School
Ann Arbor, MI
Project Soteria: A Low-Cost Fire Mitigating UAV Implemented Through Stereovision, Sonar and Path Planning Algorithms
Sanat designed an unmanned aerial vehicle to help fight wildfires. He built a drone with a water launcher. With the help of sonar and sensors, the drone aims at the hottest point in a blaze. His model put out between 80 and 90 percent of candles in his tests.
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Project Background
A few years ago, Sanat’s aunt and cousins lost their house to a wildfire. Then he heard about the Los Angeles fires in 2025. “With 10+ million square miles of fires across the world annually, fire fighters need help,” he says. Sanat also knew that fighting fires was both dangerous and expensive. He wanted to use his passion for modified planes to see if he could come up with a less expensive, unmanned aerial vehicle that could assist firefighters, spraying water or fire retardant over a burning area.
Tactics and Results
Sanat started with a drone, which he fitted with a dual thermal camera. He also used a path-planning algorithm which builds a map of its environment using sonar to fly the drone. He then added a water launcher to the drone that could spray water over a blaze. The goal is for the drone to identify the highest temperature area within its sensor range, and to spray water over it. Sanat tested his drone and water launcher on 20 candles both indoors and outdoors. He showed his water launcher could shoot water at 8.37 meters per second. It could extinguish 18 candles outdoors and 16 indoors, and cost $300 to make. It also only deviated from its path by an average of 0.4 meters, showing that it could fly and aim autonomously.
Beyond the Project
Sanat has been seeing the power of robots for a long time. “One summer, in my first grade, my family, 50 volunteers, and I set out to clean an extremely polluted river in India,” he says. After five hours, they had cleared a small section. “It occurred to me that if we would have small automated machine warriors across the river to support us, we could have probably done this in a matter of minutes.” He’s been looking to science to solve problems ever since. He also enjoys model rocketry and would like to be an aeronautical engineer.
