Firefighting Robot Snake Flies on Jets of Water
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
1. you have to transport all this stuff. Fire trucks have a notorious tendency to be overloaded and all these stable hoses and jets additionally take a lot of space on the truck (which is also rare)
2. Assembly (and maybe operation) seems to be kind of complicated. When being under adrenaline and pressure to quickly save people and buildings/goods, that is very counter-productive
3. Firefighting techniques try to evolve into using water as effective as possible, this does not seem the case here. Apart from being an environmental and infrastructural issue (e.g. pressure surges bursting water pipes and/or connectors and simply using up the available water supplies), water damage on building is often higher and more problematic than the damage done by the actual fire and smoke, so it is key to just use only as much water as neccessary to extinguish a fire, especially inside of buildings. I don't think flying your equipment on water jets towards the fire will help with that :-)
I see this as the first baby steps to where things will ultimately end up. This may not be the exact tech, but it's a start.
Also for fighting fires inside buildings I think there may be scenarios where robots can bring advantages and safety to firefighters. However, in most of these cases the primary objective is not to extinguish the fire but to search and rescue for people still missing in there. This is often a task an order of magnitude more difficult, especially for machines (we have problems detecting moving people on open roads, try that with unconcious people in a room filled with smoke and fallen over funiture and items - neither normal nor IR cameras will tell you the whole truth. This is even very hard for people), so your mileage will vary from mission to mission. I don't have a problem with the idea of using robots for this, in contraire, I would like to have the opportunity more often, I would however have them in a different form factor - more the mars rover kind or what we have seen from boston dynamics, with flexible hoses that are better to store and maneuver in small spaces. Also, as I said, using water for propelling will do a lot of damage we are actively trying to avoid.
EDIT: Mainly because of that there is also much work done from the inside, with fully independend respirators and heavy heat gear. A few decades ago, you used to say "spray in on top until the water coming out on the bottom is cold", however the damage is then about as big as if you just would have let the house burn down, so with getting more high tech materials, everything started switching towards more precise actions using less water, often even deconstructing the parts of the house affected by the fire (e.g. had a mission last week where we were ripping apart the roof insulation and opening spots in the roof of a house in a fire after lightning strike, only applying water to the really burning parts).
I would like to see a progress towards a way of working as you mentioned it, but I'm not sure if we would end up exactly there. On a site, there is so much going on that I don't think one person could handle a whole mission remotely. More of a smaller team going out, handling the dangerous stuff from a safe distance very effectively through specialized robots. Firefighting is also a lot about giving the affected people the feeling that someone is there for them and rebuilding their feeling of safety, handling everything fully remote might not be helpful with that.
20 years ago the tech we have today was science fiction. The idea that every person on the planet could have a multi-camera internet connected device would have been ludicrous.
But I understand your perspective, you seem to actually at the sites where you can see how hard it would be for a robot to achieve the same results as a human. But isn't the hope (for geeks anyways) of the future of tech that robots will be able to save _more_ lives than humans alone?
Also, there's a fire fighting game that got popular a few years back. If this is a harbinger of things to come, firefighters in the future may be using xbox controllers to fight fires, just like they use them to fly drones in war.
One hundred feet of five inch large-diameter fire hose (LDH) with water in it weighs over 900 pounds.
That said, I don’t see anything here that wouldn’t be done faster and easier with a hose on a boom.
This is purely a first step in a long process of potentially making a robot snake that can fight fires in specific scenarios. A worthy goal, but it’s a long way from being useful.
As for future directions it could take (no pun intended): "Since the nozzles are steerable, each module can direct itself independently, letting the hose weave itself through small gaps deep into a structure in order to find the source of a fire... The 2-meter long prototype in the video above is intended to be a single segment in a robot that can be extended to an arbitrary length by just adding on more segments"
The article concedes "What’s happening here might be complex to implement in practice"
The problem of the full firetruck can be solved if you use a special companion truck exclusively for having a fully mounted robotic hose for special cases (no need to put clothes, axes, hoses, etc in the same truck). All you need is to paid a driver and maybe a second worker to remotely manage the robot so would be cheaper (after you pay the, probably, expensive robot) than adding a second team of fireworkers.
if one combines it with one of a Boston Dynamics creatures, may be only the last 10ft is all what would be necessary to cover.
An electric cable would put electricity and water together, create sparks that could reignite some areas, and add new dangers in form of chopping rotating blades and maybe swinging cables.
A drone in form of a flying fire extinguiser could be a better idea than a hose-drone, but still would need to fly and keep stability against powerful convection currents caused by the fire.
And of course you can forget anything with combustion engines or hydrogen fuel on it if you plan to put it in a fire.
"What’s happening here might be complex to implement in practice, but in principle, it’s not too complicated" did they check how much water was used to extinguish the fire vs how much water was used to fly?
"[...] a single segment in a robot that can be extended to an arbitrary length by just adding on more segments". It seems like it would be subject to something analogous to the rocket equation -- the more segments, the more water required for levitation, which again makes the whole thing heavier. Not trying to middle-brow this, and I am certainly neither a rocket- or robot-engineer, nor a firefighter, but wouldn't a series of obstacle-crossing robots carrying a hose be more feasible?
Another way to look at this, instead of the water escaping the hose of the firefighter on the street-level, you could steer the whole water column with this thing.
> wouldn't a series of obstacle-crossing robots carrying a hose be more feasible
It's possible but there's a lot of problems there too. There's all the problems of room + obstacle navigation that's vexed robotics for a while at the same time pulling a long flexible object weighing a few hundred pounds (in the case of a regular fire hose, less if you use a high pressure misting system like the post but that is still going to be fairly heavy to avoid damage) in a way that won't bind on some obstacle. All of that in a very challenging environment where any light based system is going to have trouble because of smoke and heat.
Picture a long chain of VVVVVV you can move one side of that V at a time. Based on the video you could probably move 20 feet at a time without many issues, if you get those 20 feet moving at say 20 mph that's 100 feet moving at 5 MPH.
It's a High Tech WHAM-O Water Wiggle to put out Fires, I like.
But it needs the Silly cartOOn Smiley Face on the front so it won't scare children, always think of the children.
Oh no, the house is on Fire!
Don't panic, the Water Wiggle Fire Dept is here to put it out, YAY!
"I really hope they got permission to ruin the lawn"
I would have thought it was generally understood that it's worth the small price, even for neighbors.
It's understood that the cost of repairing this damage is preferable to having to deal with a claim from a neighbor who's house ALSO burned down.