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Students Demo Firefighting Humanoid Robot On US Navy Ship

Posted by Soulskill on from the terminating-fires dept.

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.

4 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Humanoid? by jklovanc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Humanoid? by rgbatduke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because they already have that, and it is boring? Because robotics are cool and fundable even where they are pointless and useless? Because the people that approved it have watched too many WW II movies? Because automated fire suppression systems might be vulnerable to damage elsewhere, requiring some system capable of dynamically bypassing nearly arbitrary intermediate zones of damage by archaic means like "fire hoses" in order to deliver fire suppression? Maybe a bit of all of these?

      One can certainly imagine a scenario where a cruise missile or torpedo or even a shell strikes a ship in such a way that it knocks out most built in systems in some zone and sets that zone on fire, at which point sending humans in to fight the fire puts them at high risk and not sending humans in to fight the fire might put them at even greater risk from a sinking ship. At that point sending in a robot (humanoid or not) instead could be a lifesaver.

      One is reminded of any number of science fiction stories, though, by Asimov and others. Building a humanoid robot for this purpose seems incredibly stupid. One doesn't want a robot to run a vacuum cleaner as if it is a metal version of a french maid. One wants a robot that is a vacuum cleaner, or a vacuum cleaner that happens to be a robot. Take vacuum cleaner. Add mechanism for moving. Add mechanism for navigating. Add minimal hardware needed to perform standard operational maintenance (that is, dump the dirt and clean filters). Add judgement/programming (or not, make it remote operated by humans sitting in a chair somewhere by remote control). In the end, one is more likely to end up with R2D2 with a carpet-sweeping vacuum base and "arms" that ARE extensible, manipulable tubes with nozzle(s) than with anything that looks like C3PO pushing a Dyson. And ditto for fire-fighting, only even more so.

      rgb

      --
      Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
    2. Re:Humanoid? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A better question is why not just lay the plumbing for an automatic fire suppression system throughout every compartment.

      If the ship is attacked, the plumbing is likely to be damaged. You need defense in depth. During the USS Forrestal fire, the fire fighting equipment was mostly destroyed, and the crews trained to use it were among the first casualties.

      Fire fighting was a decisive factor at Midway. The Yorktown was able to suppress fires, and return to action. It was still launching sorties after the Japanese thought it had been sunk. The fires on the Japanese carriers quickly went out of control, igniting fuel and causing extensive secondary explosions.

  2. Robot for more hazardous firefighting by perpenso · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.