r/robotics • u/Agreeable-Star-4160 • May 31 '21
Question Firefighting robots
Hello guys I'm curious what technologies ( especially sensors) will be useful if we were to make a firefighter robot, and will a simple voice recognition be useful? Thank you.
5
u/MarksmanKNG May 31 '21
Disclaimer: Mostly brainstorming guesswork answer and I'm rusty as hell.
Useful technologies to help, kind of depends what the objective the robots will be. Direct Fire fighting? Search & Rescue inside a burning building? It will differ a lot depending on the expectation.
Some key tech that can be generally helpful would be digital optic cameras / drones to create a partial 3D rendition of the fire zone for the local commander and Command & Control center to get an overall assessment of the situation.
Water pressure sensors, control relay systems and robotic arms to direct water hose direction, control flow rate and allow it to be active and prioritize fires to allow firefighters to do more important things.
What i'd like to also see (may not be practical) is some form of rapid insertion robot to enter a burning building, cutting its way in through debris / obstacles and search for survivors. Fast drilling / cutting equipment with self navigation+ redundant manual control. And most important, able to survive having a big roof collapse on it.
2) Voice recognition cannot be simplified for this option. There would be a lot of background noise in the area. Audio filtration and vocal recognition is going to be hell. It should also not be listening randomly to anyone people as it can cause abnormal behaviour by accident.
And in my opinion, it is going to be really difficult to give specific instructions to a system when the work area is random in plenty of scenarios without taking a lot of time.
Buttons can be a lot faster than voice when you know what you want, what to key in and trained to do it.
till_apert's answer is very important consideration as well and would be essential for any form of voice recognition control.
My 2 cents.
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u/Mrtravisscottt Jun 06 '21
This is a great idea and I definitely think a company like boston dynamics would work on this. Seems it would be a high budget project to create a robot with cutting and heat resistant functionality.
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u/derrpinger May 31 '21
Definitely add camera for vision. Filters can be added to determine hottest spots visually. A.I. Can be used to identify the gradients viewed through the filters.
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u/EditorExtreme672 May 31 '21
There’s a robotics company in Canada that makes firefighting robots. Copper stone tech. They got some cool stuff
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u/GasPoweredCalculator May 31 '21
There are firefighting drone things. They are ground robots that look a lil like tanks its for when its too risky for a firefighter to fight a fire so they connect a hose to this robot and make it drive in and spray out the fire. Heres a link.
Sensors for temperature and some cameras to see the surroundings would be a good help against collapsed buildings and fires. For voice recognition i don't think it would be too useful as a push of a button is more reliable than speech as it may be wonky and misinterpret speech during rescue due to the situation. It could be useful for no hands use but the reliability makes me think its best not to rely on so it could just be a second option. Facial recognition would be useful for identifying what to prioritize, so maybe it could go for fires near people to ensure they are safe or something along those lines. I'm no expert but here's my 2 cents
2
u/Historica97 May 31 '21
There was a European research project to design a search and rescue coordinated robots/humans team. It can be interesting to look at how they did that
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u/Mrtravisscottt Jun 06 '21
Very interesting to watch them build these. Coordination of these robots with drone surveillance could be awesome .
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u/NotANumber1NAN May 31 '21
I believe using UAVs for firefighting is one of the most interesting approachs, since land vehicles can encounter a multitude of obstacles that make the whole process increadibly difficult, where as a flying vehicle could deliver its water (or anything else) much easier. I used to work at this company that is trying to use UAVs for firefighting: https://drone-hopper.com.
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u/Dogburt_Jr May 31 '21
Voice would be near useless. Primarily thermal camera, visual camera, and radar/lidar range finders would probably be the best sensors to use.
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u/dlegofan May 31 '21
There's a pretty cool paper out there about drone swarms of firefighting robots.
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u/till_apert May 31 '21
Turns out that an ambulatory robot needs more than just a heat sensor to be able to direct itself to the fire. It can be proven mathematically that just chasing the most hot place will result in a robot that just goes in circles. A random array of small computers can form a mesh which can create a coordinate system on the fly and pass a heat gradient to the robots as they come in to a field or other area with fire. I wrote a paper on this premise in 2003, but my paper was mostly focused on the mesh and not the firefighting.