The alarming increasing extremity of wildfires during the year of 2018 when destructive and devastating fires featured regularly on the news, prompted Carsten Brinkschulte, CEO and Co-Founder of Dryad Networks to think about how technology could be harnessed to fix this issue. And thus, Dryad Networks was born.
The company is made up of seven co-founders, Brinkschulte told IoT Insider, each with their expertise from telecommunications (Brinkschulte’s own background) to electronics and finance, and more.
“The fires in the news … were a trigger for me to think about the role of IoT and technology to solve these issues,” he said. “So we’re doing just that at Dryad, using technology to protect the forest.”
The company, which is classified as a startup and is based in Berlin, Germany, developed its first working prototype in 2020, which is now in its third generation. At the time of speaking, Dryad Networks had recently raised €6.3m in seed funding which the company will pour into its project of developing a drone-based system to tackle wildfires.
Dryad’s tech
The technology in question being used to protect the forest, to borrow Brinkschulte’s words, is Dryad Networks’ wildfire sensors, which are deployed in forests across the world to detect gases, temperature, humidity and air pressure, which provide early indicators of wildfires, and its mesh LoRaWAN gateways.
“It’s like an electronic nose that you can stick in the forest,” Brinkschulte explained, in reference to their sensor. “You can attach it to trees. It runs embedded AI or machine learning to recognise patterns in the gas that it’s exposed to.”
Although one of the forming ideas behind founding Dryad Networks was acknowledging that each household will have their own fire detector capable of detecting fires early before they grow into a larger problem – so why can’t forests? – the technology behind the sensors is fundamentally different to those in residences.
“It’s a gas sensor that looks at hydrogen, carbon monoxide and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and then uses embedded machine learning to identify the patterns it sees … We have a lot of challenges that we need to solve that a normal fire detection system would not have,” he noted.
These challenges included the technical, such as ensuring the technology, which is solar-powered, can operate within a forest, where sunlight can be sporadic.
“But you still need to have radio communications, which requires energy. Energy management and building an energy-efficient solution was a big challenge.”
Another challenge was keeping the bill of materials (BOM) and total cost of ownership down, so the solution could be scalable.
Communicating with LoRaWAN
LoRaWAN is the chosen networking protocol for the sensors and gateways to communicate, which Brinkschulte decided upon for the advantages he’d observed.
“I was fascinated by it, as it works in the open spectrum, with no licensing required and it has very good penetration because of the sub gigahertz frequencies that it is using,” he explained. “The only thing it was missing is mesh [networking] … we added that as a proprietary extension of the LoRaWAN system.”
Dryad Networks have created their own networks by deploying their gateways, as existing communications in forests are virtually nonexistent – as I’m sure you can imagine. “We do this to enable the sensors to communicate, and we do this with mesh technology, so that the gateways can mesh with one another,” he said. “Normally, LoRa has a star network architecture and we have a mesh network infrastructure so we can extend the reach of the LoRaWAN networks into the depth of the forest … and cover really large areas.”
“We’re like the Nokia of the forest,” Brinkschulte added.
IoT network infrastructure
For a company that was officially founded in 2019, Dryad Networks has a lot to address – from continuing to develop proprietary sensor technology that can be used for wildfire detection to making sure these devices can continue to communicate with one another in forests with thick canopy cover – but they seem to rise to the challenge, exhibiting that infectious, indomitable startup spirit.
“We’re starting to show our traction, revenue and growth,” Brinkschulte commented. “That’s the next challenge you need to go towards; profitability and scalability.”
“The network we’re building is not just a fire detection network,” he continued. “It’s a generic IoT network infrastructure for the forest, and so we’re opening up our networks now to third party sensors so that we can also integrate other sensing technologies into our network.”
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