Cody Chiverton has spent the past decade lighting fires. As a former firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, he participated in dozens of prescribed burns across the American West, in which fire-prevention teams would carry drip torches to ignite dry 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 all of the igniting. As it slowly moved along a hiking trail near Palo Alto, California, the robot turned anything in its path — brush, dry grasses, leaf litter — 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 star