Overnight. Multi-Asset. Escalation-Tiered.
The first jurisdiction exercising multi-asset governance and degraded-mode discipline. Overnight autonomous perimeter monitoring where comms degrade, batteries cycle, and the fire does not wait. The hardest problem — and the lead demo target.
FireLaw exercises every governance primitive simultaneously: multi-asset coordination, degraded-mode authority contracts, escalation tiers, overnight endurance, and real-time evidence generation under stress. If the architecture governs wildfire monitoring, it governs everything downstream. The hardest problem proves the platform.
Every phase is governed. Every transition is logged. The monitoring lifecycle runs from setup through debrief with full audit continuity across battery swaps, task handoffs, and escalation events.
Operator defines fire perimeter, sectors, priority zones, and SOP escalation thresholds. Authority envelope locked before first launch.
Fleet deploys to assigned sectors via task leases. Each drone receives a bounded assignment with explicit duration, altitude band, and scan pattern.
Continuous thermal scanning with deterministic hotspot classification. Detections are georeferenced, timestamped, and severity-scored before escalation evaluation.
Detections trigger risk-proportional escalation. Routine detections are logged silently. Critical detections require operator approval. Emergency detections notify the Incident Commander.
Battery swaps and task handoffs maintain continuous coverage through the night. Lease transfers preserve audit continuity. No gap in the evidence chain.
Six evidence reports generated for after-action review. Complete chain of custody from first thermal detection through final sector clearance.
Not every detection is an emergency. The escalation model maps detection severity to response authority. Unacknowledged escalations auto-promote per the timeout ladder. No detection is ever silently dropped.
Detection logged in the evidence chain. No operator notification. Sector coverage continues. Baseline thermal activity captured for trend analysis.
Operator notified via push notification. Detection queued for review. Monitoring continues at increased scan frequency in the affected sector.
Operator approval required before any response action. Drone holds position and continues observation. Escalation timer starts — auto-promotes to Tier 4 if unacknowledged.
Incident Commander notified. System enters conservative mode — fleet returns to safe altitude, scan patterns widen, and no new task assignments are issued until IC acknowledges.
Unacknowledged escalations auto-promote to the next tier per the configured timeout ladder. A Tier 2 detection that remains unreviewed becomes Tier 3. A Tier 3 detection without operator approval becomes Tier 4. No detection is ever silently dropped from the queue.
Sectors divide the fire perimeter into bounded monitoring assignments. Each sector is assigned to a single drone via task lease. Hotspot detections are georeferenced and severity-classified in real time.
Multi-asset operations require coordination without centralized control. Task leases provide bounded, auditable delegation with four governance principles that prevent authority escalation through the back door.
A task lease cannot grant authority that the assigning entity does not possess. Delegation preserves the authority ceiling. Law 2 enforced at every lease creation.
Every lease has a bounded duration. When the lease expires, the task returns to the unassigned pool for reassignment. No indefinite holds. No orphaned tasks.
The operator can revoke any task lease at any time without negotiation. The drone acknowledges and releases. Revocation is logged with full context in the audit trail.
When a task transfers from one drone to another during battery swap or reassignment, the audit chain links both lease entries. No gap in the evidence record.
Overnight operations will encounter degraded communications. The authority model responds by contracting the autonomy envelope — never expanding it. Six states map communications quality to operational constraints.
| State | Lease Duration | New Assignments | Escalation | Video |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominal | Standard | Yes | Full | Yes |
| Reduced Bandwidth | Shortened | Yes | Delayed | No |
| Intermittent | No renewal | No new | Queued | No |
| Drone Isolated | N/A | N/A | Local only | No |
| GCS Isolated | N/A | No | Suspended | No |
| Full Partition | N/A | No | Suspended | No |
FlightLaw provides the safety floor. FireLaw provides the mission ceiling. As communications degrade, the mission ceiling drops toward the safety floor. In full partition, only FlightLaw's safety floor remains active. The autonomy envelope never expands without explicit operator restoration.
Every overnight monitoring operation produces six evidence reports. Together they provide complete after-action accountability from first detection through final sector clearance.
Every state transition from activation through termination. Phase entries, escalation events, operator decisions, and system mode changes in chronological order.
All thermal hotspots: GPS coordinates, thermal imagery, severity classification, escalation tier, operator decisions, and resolution status.
Per-sector scan freshness over time. Coverage gaps identified with root cause: battery swap, degraded comms, task reassignment, or weather abort.
Per-drone task assignments, battery cycles, communications quality metrics, and degraded mode transitions. Complete operational history for each asset.
Every escalation event with detection trigger, assigned tier, notification sent, operator response, response time, and outcome. The decision audit trail.
Communications outages, GPS degradation events, failsafe activations, and environmental sensor anomalies. Infrastructure reliability over the monitoring period.
Task leases, escalation tiers, and degraded-mode authority contracts are domain-agnostic primitives. FireLaw is the proving ground, but the same patterns apply to infrastructure inspection fleets, agricultural monitoring, and defense swarm coordination. Every jurisdiction inherits the primitives that FireLaw proves under the most demanding conditions.
FireLaw is the lead demo target because it exercises every hard problem in autonomous governance: multi-asset coordination, degraded communications, overnight endurance, and risk-proportional escalation. The architecture that solves fire monitoring solves everything downstream.