Slashdot Mirror
London's Robotic Fire Brigade
dustpan writes "The BBC has a story up about a quartet of robotic fire fighters that the London Fire Brigade is testing and with which have been achieving 'tremendous results.' The robots were developed by QinetiQ, which is a defense contractor. The LFB has been testing the units since last year and the machines are primarily used in fires involving acetylene canisters. The group commander for hazardous materials and environmental protection with the LFB says that the robots have cut the time to resolve these potential hazards from 24 hours to 3. From the article: 'Three years ago we were shutting down parts of London for over 24 hours every other week. Now it doesn't even make the news.'"
I fucked his ass last night but I couldn't feel anything and he kept pooping on me.
Its the same platform type police have been using for years now.
Nothing new here, other than the uniform of the operators.
Is it really a robot when its driven and operated by a remote human? It has no autonomous functionality.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
they have a robotic fire brigade pipe band.
http://nwbagpipes.com/
until you get crazed fireman robots with fire axes and that are on fire.
Now all they have to do is make sure they don't flip the switch on the robots' backs from "fight" to "cause".
The enemies of Democracy are
I, for one, welcome our new Robotic Firefighting Overlords...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
We are here to protect you.
The LFB has been testing the units since last year and the machines are primarily used in fires involving acetylene canisters. The group commander for hazardous materials and environmental protection with the LFB says that the robots have cut the time to resolve these potential hazards from 24 hours to 3. From the article: 'Three years ago we were shutting down parts of London for over 24 hours every other week.
Apparently there are a lot of rogue acetylene canisters catching fire in London on a regular basis. I weld as a hobby and in all the welding shops I've been in, in all the classes, I've never seen an acetylene tank go off. And with all the welders I've ever met in all those places, maybe one has ever seen a tank go off. Is it something with your gauges over there? The tank construction? Seems to happen a lot more there than it does here.
Acetylene is nothing you want to dick with. If it gets away from you, then I'd sure want a robot going in to deal with it.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
the fire.
It is awesome to seeing robots being used for peaceful purposes. That said, this looks like your typical military contractor--over budget and delivering substantially less than possible. Seriously, why do you need that many different robots? I can understand a couple--but that many seems overly complicated.
Did anyone else notice in the movie, when the robot set the cylinder down, it broke the regulator off? If it'd been charged, that would have created a quite avoidable mess.
Nothing new here. Trumpton had artificial firemen in the 60s. See!
Apparently there are a lot of rogue acetylene canisters catching fire in London on a regular basis.
It's not really surprising that their acetylene canisters are catching on fire when you consider their fire extinguishers.
This sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it; thanks to Google Books I'm remembering a pretty cool section in Robot Builder's Bonanza on DIY robot firefighters, building up simple circuits to ever more capable, fire-detection systems, control schemes, and automatically controlled extinguishing apparatus.
Obviously not quite the same thing, but it was pretty cool when I read it, and so I'm taking this opportunity to plug the awesomeness of building DIY firefighting robots. =]
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Now send them back in time to stop the Great Fire of London in 1666, and we have a plot for a new Terminator movie (without the terminating part, however).
Welcome our new fire-fighting robot overlords.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Interesting concept. Rubber Tires, Rubber Hoses; all I could think of was the pile of slag that the fire would make. I spit Tea all over my keyboard when the Robot carrying the Welding tank drops it and the pressure guage falls/breaks off. If that tank had been pressured, THEN there would have been torpedo fire, about 20 to 100 feet from the demo 'drop' site.
to convert these robots into flame-throwers and could they figure it out for themselves?
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
> Standard procedure when a fire is suspected to involve acetylene is to cordon off an area of 200m around it for 24 hours.
Bullshit. Do you know what we do here in Hungary, when welding gas bottles are involved in fires? We call in the police snipers, usually 2 or 3 of them and they rapidly put a dozen holes in the canisters using semi-automatic SVD Dragunov marksman rifles. The compressed gas will just escape to the atmosphere without exploding.
Britons armed with H&K G3 or FN FAL could do this equally well. However, it is important to fire many shots accurately and very quickly to allow safe venting, so don't try this with bolt action sniper rifles or with just a single marksmen.
You can't grapple them if they are on fire.
When they become self aware that man causes most fires we're doomed !
Awesome. What do you do if there's an electrical overload - fire a howitzer at the nearest sub-station? Call in an airstrike to take out the power lines?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These are remote controlled (by humans), purely mechanical devices.