A flame-throwing robot, a tree sensor and FireSat take on wildfires

James Stewart's two-minute sponsored report, posted in late September, has drawn most of its audience in a single day.

Channel: BBC Earth Science Story of October 16, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video is running at 31,228 views a day, 76 times its usual pace (410).

Could a fire-breathing robot lead the fight against wildfires? 🔥

The robot starts fires. That is the point: BurnBot RX, a remote-controlled tracked machine from a San Francisco company, runs propane torches over dry brush and keeps the smoke and sparks contained. The idea is to burn away fuel on purpose before a wildfire can use it.

James Stewart, the BBC Earth Science specialist who hosts the report, opens with the scale of the problem. "Wildfires today burn twice as much tree cover as they did two decades ago," he says. Of the robot, he admits it "Sounds like a Will Smith film."

The video went up at the end of September and stayed quiet. Then it added roughly 31,000 views in a day, far past its usual trickle and more than everything it had gathered before. Across the rest of the channel, the day looked ordinary, with recent uploads about solar storms, supernovae and meteorites carrying on at their normal pace. It is not clear what sent people to this one.

The robot is only the first of three tools. Dryad Networks, from Berlin, attaches small solar-powered sensors to trees that sniff out the gases released while a fire is still smoldering. Then the report goes to orbit with Muon Space's FireSat, a 200-kilogram satellite that Stewart says "very aptly, can detect fires as small as five square metres." FireSat is built with Google and the Earth Fire Alliance.

The segment is sponsored, with Speed & Scale named on screen.

The comments turned to history rather than hardware: older practices of controlled burning, a century of putting fires out quickly, and one practical worry about satellite links failing in the very storms that bring lightning.

Published on Trari

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The numbers

A September upload that had been drawing a few hundred views a day suddenly gathered most of its audience at once, while the channel as a whole kept its usual pace.

views per day, this video

typical day

410

now

31,228

subscribers

1,820,000

no significant change in the last 7 days

total views

316,222,613

views per day

228,956

typical day: 241,675

the video

views

37,856

likes

479

comments

11

days online

16

subscribers: this channel and similar channels

Animagraffs

1,940,000

Scott Manley

1,870,000

BBC Earth Science

1,820,000

Undecided with Matt Ferre…

1,810,000

Chris Boden

1,790,000

The Modern Rogue

1,720,000

As of October 16, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.