FleetReady

Inspiration

Wildfires in California are more than just headlines to us—they’re personal. When one of our team members was forced to evacuate due to the Eaton and Palisades fires, we saw the chaos and urgency firsthand. Firetrucks and ambulances raced against time, but behind the scenes, crews struggled to stay prepared.

Then we heard something that stuck with us:

"We're always overbooked... we have 60 seconds from getting a call to getting out of the station."

– Erich Schultz, Fire Engineer @ UC Davis Fire Department

Sixty seconds. That’s all the time firefighters have to be out the door, heading toward danger. But in those sixty seconds, they’re also checking gear—hoses, oxygen tanks, medical kits—hoping nothing is missing. Because one missing item could mean the difference between life and death.

We knew there had to be a better way.

What it Does

FleetReady is a Computer Vision, multi-camera inventory tracking system designed to automate item management for firetrucks and ambulances. By using advanced object segmentation, FleetReady scans, identifies, and keeps records of life-saving gear in real time — ensuring that no critical tool is ever left behind.

~ Instant inventory checks before dispatch

~ Live, multi-camera monitoring for automatic tracking

~ Smart alerts when supplies are low or misplaced

~ Seamless integration into existing emergency vehicle setups

With FleetReady, first responders focus on the mission—not the checklist.

How we Built

We used next.js to handle frontend and backend logic, including API calls. On the Computer Vision side we initially used Google Cloud Vision for our item segmentation. However, we ended up changing over to a YOLOv8 model and used CVAT for image annotations.

Challenges

When using Cloud Vision we ran into challenges with overlapping items not being recognized and tracked correctly, affecting our inventory accuracy. We pivoted to manually labeling and tagging our items in CVAT and imported our annotations to the train the YOLOv8 model shown in our demo, skyrocketing our accuracy.

Accomplishments

We're proud to present a project with incredible real-life impact and use-cases. We were able to identify a clear product vision by conducting field research and talking to first-responders, which provided us with crucial user needs and pain-points to solve for.

What we Learned

Problem solving.

Ideate --> Vision for Minimum Viable Product --> Feedback --> Poke holes everywhere --> Iterate.

We found ourselves back at square one a million times before we were satisfied. And we wouldn't have it any other way.

Next Steps

Complete buildout of features.

Our demo is an MVP of the basic features of what we envision for FleetReady. From a beautiful UI to migrating our services to a scalable cloud backend, there's plenty to do moving forward. In our demo, we showed how FleetReady would work for a firetruck, so our next focus is work with hospitals to adopt integration for ambulances.

At the end of the day, we want to help our first-responders in any way we can.

In our case- that's staying ready with FleetReady.