Mission requirements ยท updated 14 June 2026
EmberScope mission fit
The mission boundary for judging whether the camera concept is worth maturing: what is confirmed, what is a working assumption, and what AAO should confirm before the next optical design pass.
Requirements status
The current mission frame is specific enough to guide design work, with a few AAO decisions still open.
| Topic | Status | Current requirement or assumption | Design impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payload envelope | Confirmed | Target a 150 mm cube and a complete payload below about 2 kg. | Keeps optics, detector, electronics, housing, and calibration allowance in the same package trade. |
| Detection task | Confirmed | Detect smouldering heat sources over rural backgrounds. | Requires quantitative thermal evidence, not only operator-visible imagery. |
| Survey revisit | Confirmed | Use a one-hour revisit target for the same area. | Drives swath, GSD, route spacing, and fleet calculations. |
| Detector class | Working assumption | Use an uncooled microbolometer in the LWIR band for the first payload. | Supports a Boson+ 640 radiometric branch while leaving exact interface closure to the next pass. |
| False alarms | Needs AAO confirmation | Use 5 percent of sorties with a false alarm as the first operational tolerance. | Sets validation scene counts and acceptance reporting. |
| Flight parameters | Needs AAO confirmation | Altitude, speed, and operating weather remain derived values. | These values close the field of view, dwell, and radiometry budget; the 14 June decision packet turns this into a survey-vs-spotter choice. |
14 June decision checkpoint
The next prescription needs a mission answer before more optical optimization.
The latest F-number / aperture trade shows the committed 200 mm EFL prescription is a spotter-scale optic: about 1 cm GSD, about 7 m swath, and roughly 380 minutes for one drone to revisit a 100 ha reference block. It is not the area-survey solution implied by the one-hour revisit target.
The new mission decision packet and requirements closeout checklist ask AAO to choose the remaining fleet area, altitude, COTS-versus-custom, and airframe answers before the next fabrication-oriented optical prescription. The stakeholder answer pack now converts those open rows into recordable answer options for the review meeting, while the sign-off matrix shows which answer patterns unlock closeout, vendor quote work, prescription restart, or a required replan. The COTS quote packet now turns that vendor-quote branch into the fields, evidence, and pass/fail gates AAO should request before buying hardware, and the quote comparison register defines the hard-stop scoring before any COTS answer can close the item. The evidence intake ledger now records which stakeholder decisions, vendor fields, sample bundles, and final sign-off notes are still missing.
Current position
The concept is being judged as a deployable camera payload, not as an optics-only sketch.
Expert update
The next design pass has a target: a fabricable optical design for smouldering heat-source detection.
Mission envelope
Revisit the same area every hour, with altitude, speed, field of view, and route spacing derived from budget and performance.
Fleet budget
Use AUD 100,000 for the whole non-drone fleet as the current cost boundary.
Detection target
Optimise around a smouldering heat source detected over background, not only visible flame.
False alarms
Use 5 percent of sorties with a false alarm as the first operational false-alarm tolerance.
Detector path
Focus the first prototype branch on uncooled microbolometer hardware; exact core selection remains open.
Optical direction
Continue compact reflective/freeform work; the expert did not veto it and said this direction would be good.
Hard requirements
These are the items the design should treat as fixed unless the customer explicitly changes them.
| ID | Requirement | Why it is hard |
|---|---|---|
| HR-01 | Drone-mounted early-fire spotting payload for rural fire operations. | This is the stated mission, not a later engineering preference. |
| HR-02 | Detect very small early fires or hot spots, down to a few centimetres. | The target scale is the central performance driver. |
| HR-03 | Fit within roughly a 150 mm cube. | The payload must stay compatible with small-drone integration. |
| HR-04 | Keep the complete payload below about 2 kg. | The mass limit protects drone endurance and practical deployment. |
| HR-05 | Do not materially reduce drone range/endurance. | The package and mass limits are operational, not cosmetic. |
| HR-06 | Use thermal-infrared sensing rather than visible-only imaging. | The concept is explicitly framed as thermal/infrared. |
| HR-07 | Judge the design at camera level, not by optics-only scores. | Detector, processing, calibration, power, and operations all have to close together. |
| HR-08 | Revisit the same area every hour. | Survey geometry and fleet sizing should be derived from this target. |
| HR-09 | Detect a smouldering heat source over background. | This is the current target class for radiometry and validation. |
| HR-10 | Allow no more than 5 percent of sorties to have a false alarm. | Validation has a sortie-level false-alarm metric. |
| HR-11 | Keep the non-drone fleet budget at AUD 100,000 for now. | Detector, optical head, integration, spares, and calibration choices must stay fleet-cost aware. |
Working assumptions
These defaults keep the concept concrete, but they still need customer or test confirmation.
The current design work starts in the 8-14 um LWIR band, uses an uncooled microbolometer detector class, and treats compact reflective/freeform layouts as the baseline architecture family.
That detector reference is anchored to named thermal-core options instead of a generic provisional value, with `Boson+ 640 radiometric` the preferred current custom-optics branch unless mission evidence points elsewhere.
It also assumes diamond-turnable mirror routes remain plausible, carries one-drone and 10-drone survey concepts in parallel, and deliberately keeps multiple design candidates alive instead of collapsing to one early winner.
The remaining variables are more specific: derive altitude, speed, field of view, and exact detector choice from the one-hour revisit target, smouldering-source detection, 5 percent sortie-level false-alarm tolerance, and AUD 100,000 non-drone fleet budget.
Design impact
The mission need maps directly to detector, optics, calibration, and field workflow choices.
Small-target detection
Drives GSD, dwell, radiometry, false-positive handling, and detector choice rather than optics alone.
Drone packaging
Keeps volume and mass as first-order gates across layout, structure, housing, and power.
Thermal payload path
Forces calibration, detector access, window/filter choices, and field workflow into scope.
Reflective architecture search
Links the current concept geometry to broader candidate-comparison and manufacturability work.
Reviewable evidence
Requires actual files, metrics, and measurement outputs rather than design language alone.
Field deployment later
Keeps procurement, validation, calibration kit, and mechanical closure in the active backlog .
What this changes
The next useful work is a fabricable optical design tied to detector/radiometry performance.
The current optical geometry remains valuable because it shows the compact reflective direction is physically plausible inside the package target. It is not detector-ready, and the current requirements boundary keeps that limitation explicit.
From here, the clean next steps are a concrete uncooled microbolometer branch, a smouldering-source radiometry case, a one-hour-revisit survey-vs-spotter decision, and then stronger optical candidates packaged as fabricable prescriptions.