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Students Demo Firefighting Humanoid Robot On US Navy Ship
An anonymous reader sends this report from Robohub: In fall 2014 in Mobile Bay, Alabama, Virginia Tech engineering students made history during a five-minute demo that placed an adult-sized humanoid robot with a hose in front of a live fire aboard a U.S. Navy ship.The robot located the fire and sprayed water from the hose. Water blasted the flames. The demo, four years in the making, is part of a new effort by the U.S. Navy to better assist sailors in fighting fires, controlling damage, and carrying out inspections aboard ships via user-controlled unmanned craft or humanoid robots. The firefighting robot is named SAFFiR, short for Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research envisions a future — long off, but tangible — in which every ship has a robot as a tool for firefighters.
puts out fire, "You've been fired", austrian accent optional
So now one remote-operated robot accompanied by a team of support humans managing it's umbilical can fight fires as effectively as one human moving in super-slow motion. This changes everything!
An interesting v0.001 version of the technology though, I'm sure eventually it will reach the point of actually being useful.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
man overboard!
Why does it need to be humanoid? Wouldn't a quadruped with a single arm to control and direct the water be a much more stable platform?
Firefighting at sea can involve a lot of tight spaces and areas such as fuel transfer spaces where sending in a robit would be preferable to sending in a fire team. The team can follow the robot if needed but the robot has the advantage of being able to stay for rxtenesed periods; pesky things like running out of air in an OBA doesn't bother it.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Acronyms are great, "backronyms" are stupid, "hackronyms" and "recursonyms" are fucking retarded.
SAFFiR for "Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot" takes the fucking cake though. Why not SAFER for "Shipboard Autonomous Fire Extinguishing Robot"?
Or how about just Firefighting Robot?
Having been both a squid and a robotics researcher in a previous century, this has issues. Shipboard fires truly are environments where no human wants to be, as anyone could easily believe. Somewhat fewer people know all of the factors involved: Navy ships are not stable platforms in anything but dead-calm water, which rarely occurs. Next, passageways are designed with 'walking through them' as an afterthought. You have to step over and duck under something every few feet belowdecks. While the ship is bucking and rolling, remember.
Navy ships can be quite large and can have large interior structures that you need to go the long way around. Unless you pre-position an entire horde of walking robots all through the ship, they won't have time to get to the fire.
As a way to send some money so a robotics program can build something physical it is admirable. It is not the future of shipboard firefighting.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
When I first read the title to the article I was expecting a group of students that are showing how to defend a ship from an attacking humanoid robot using fire. Which would be cool too.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
What a load of shit. Holy crap, who has been lying to these kids their whole lives? That clunky thing, on a ship?
That reminds me, I need to get that fire-starting robot project moving along!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Good thing they finally got one of these. Now all they have to do is train their swabs how to control the thing after they get the whole ship wired up. Why is it this makes me think of the robot in this Bugs Bunny cartoon (start at the 5:30 mark).
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I love robots, and I understand this is still in development, but wouldn't their money be better spent on making a fireproof exosuit for a human firefighter? This robot is slow, awkward, and ponderous. It's not really autonomous at all, requiring a team of human operators. it's tethered by a large cable. And it looks like even with the flimsy suit they dressed it in, it's wires and electronics would be highly vulnerable to burning/melting.
A robot can get closer to the source of some fires than crew members, even crew members completely outfitted in firefighting gear.
Plus since we are talking warships there are also issues of live ordinance. There was at least one, maybe more, fires on board aircraft carriers in the 1960s where a dozen or so crew members fighting a fire on deck were killed when an aircraft's bombs cooked off and detonated.
>> Humanoid Robot Fights Fire On US Navy Ship
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> Why does it need to be humanoid?
It doesn't simply need to be humanoid. She needs to be a gynoid per se. Otherwise it would be difficult to make "robotic schoolgirls run warships" themed anime, that sells "Arpeggio of Blue Steel" exclusive Blu-ray boxes and PVC figurines.
By the way, "Girls und Kreuzer" is rumored for 2016, another milestone in Japan's quest for the infantilization of armed conflicts. (Which initiative seems to be secretly financed and schemed by the russian state intelligence services via cover story companies like WoT, if "Girls und Panzer" anime is any indication.)
your mom
that squirts seamen?
There is no way this thing is half as efficient as a team of trained sailors manning firehoses etc. Here someone will say "what about toxic gas or heat? To which I point out fire fighters have had gas masks and protective clothing for awhile. And if the heat is overwhelming the clothing the your little robot is going to melt too.
Add to that... all you need to stop a fire is to cut off the oxygen in most cases. Very few fires even on a military ship are going burn without oxygen. So... what makes more sense? This robot? or slamming the bulkheads shut so they're airtight... not hard on a military ship since those bulkheads should be airtight anyway. And then flood the rooms with something that isn't oxygen. Carbon dioxide, nitrogen, whatever.
Here someone will say "but what about the sailors dramatically caught in the rooms you're sealing? Well, they should be able to get out in most cases. Those that can't are either going to have to use some sort of breath mask that provides them with a personal oxygen supply or they're just boned.
The robot though... dumb dumb dumb. If something like this isn't practical in homes or cities then it is doubly stupid on military ships where they have lots of trained manpower on hand and the time pressure is a good deal more critical.
Possible uses of a firefighting robot.... I'm coming up with a blank. I think robots are generally really bad at disaster recovery because they don't improvise well. If everything is really predictable and consistent then robots are pretty good at dealing with it. But the more unpredictable things get the worse they do.
As fires especially in a military ship are not something you want to happen... when they happen and how they happen tends to be pretty unpredictable. They have contingencies mapped out but they don't know that that a fire will happen in a specific place. They just have a general policy for dealing with fires.
This is a text book human job until we get AI strong enough to improvise. At which point, you might as well just staff the entire ship with robots.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...for that radioactive fires in the reactor room! And by the nuke missiles, too.