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Future Firefighters May Be Guided By "Robots On Reins"
Zothecula writes When firefighters need to enter smoke-filled buildings to conduct search or rescue, they frequently suffer from low visibility and often need to feel their way along walls or follow ropes reeled out by the lead firefighter. With a limited supply of oxygen carried by each firefighter, being slowed by the inability to see can severely limit their capacity to carry out duties in these environments. Now researchers from King's College London and Sheffield Hallam University have developed a prototype robot assistant for firefighters that can help guide them through even the thickest smoke.
Current robots have a hard time navigating even the most basic terrain. It seems highly unlikely to me that a ground-based robot would be of any use in a burning building full of completely unpredictable and changing debris, tight spaces, random layout, etc. I doubt the prototype shown could even climb a stair, much less climb over debris.
A very small "robot" controlled by a human (aka a glorified RC helicopter) may be of some use in surveying the situation, though.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
They don't need a guide dog... too slow, hard to maintain, and move around. An infrared HUD would be perfect for this
why not provide augmented reality goggles to the firefighters that have visual sensor overlays? The robot is just a really complicated way to communicate alternative visual information to the firefighter, lets cut out the middleman and beam it straight into their eyes!
http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=85459
Get yer robot firefighter here
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wouldn't the resources expended in this "research" have been far better used in creating sensors for the firefighters themselves (say, a high resolution combination sonar and infrared visor) than building an awkward haptic extension with the clumsiness and poor maneuverability of current state of the art robotics? I know robots are becoming trendy, especially in the tech media, to the point of fetishism, but I sure hope no tax-backed grants supported this project, one that is ultimately a substitution of Goldbergian complexity and impracticality for a blind man's cane.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Great. Arsonist hackers will start fires and then guide the Firefighters into danger.
Some things need to be said...
The article gets right that visibility is limited. Let me be more clear. Visibility is often zero -- as in you may as well close your eyes. If you get there before the engine crew is actually putting water on the fire and the smoke layering is still undisturbed, you may have visibility at floor level, but often not. The minute water gets to the fire -- or a heating pipe solder joint melts and the pipe sprays water -- the building fills with steam and the layering is disturbed and conditions are zero visibility. It's also very loud, between the sounds of the fire and the sound of your breathing through the respirator mask.
Now, imagine what's on your living room floor, or your kids rooms, or blocking your hallways. Imagine you don't know the layout of your house and you're blindfolded. Try searching under those conditions, keeping in mind that seconds count as your knees are sticking to melted plastic toys and you're feeling ahead of you to make sure there's no open hole in the floor, stairway, or other hazard, and you're checking to make sure that the engineered joists holding the floor you're crawling across haven't become weakened by the heat to the point where you'll fall through into a burning basement. While doing all that, you've got one hand on the person's gear leg ahead of you (or perhaps a hose line being led by someone ahead you can't see) and your other hand is trying to sweep the floor around you with your tool, and a third hand may be trying to look around with a thermal imaging camera to find a patient on the floor, under a bed, or in a closet. You've got 20 minutes to find what you need before your low-air alarm starts going off and you've got to head out with your crew while another comes in. Meanwhile other crews are banging around trying to put the fire out before the house comes down around you.
Call me skeptical, but I don't see any current robot technology that can do all those things -- let alone do it in several hundred degree heat.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
In all the images the people are walking behind the robot. You are not going into any low visibility, high heat environment standing up. You are down on your hands and knees or even lower on your belly.
I hope they call it Rudolf.
I am a former fire fighter and a electronics engineer.
1) I can see this being useful along side 2 completely isolated IR systems (one for each eye) that have a hard battery disconnect in case the LCD/w/e "Aliens" style thermal imaging goggles go into a "dim screen" failure mode (I.E. software crash), which could obscure your vision. If a regular TIC fails in a survival situation you always have the option to throw it away, it is not glued to your face (imagine if you had a little LCD screen in front of your face that bugged out and went black, your vision could be seriously obscured. It would need to be ensured that under no power the LCD screen went dark, and that there was no circuit board failure mode, such as a capacitor drain resistor failing open circuit, could cause the LCD screen to remain dim even when you disconnect the battery.
This of course assumes a google glass type setup that can get reasonably bright.
2) The limitations of a TIC must be understood. I was shown a training film about this, which told us to frequently take the camera away from our faces when operating in a fire, as the camera will not show a naked flame well, the training video showed us how a handheld modern TIC camera could show a hallway that is engulfed in flames to not be. You still need to be looking for signs of flash over and such, which may not show up well on a TIC. A multispectral camera system would need to be tested in real fire conditions, and extreme hazard conditions such as flash over.
3) I would not mind having a robot friend, the more easy to use survival tool you have the better, especially if the robot can help you pull a 300lb individual out after you attach webbing to him.
4) What if a beam falls out from the ceiling, hits your head, cracks your mask, you start seeing tweety birds flying around. You pump up your air supply for positive pressure through the crack, which prevents smoke from getting in and suffocating you, but it rapidly depletes your air supply. You won't have much time left if there is a gaping hole in your mask, which will require you to really turn up your mask pressure and rapidly drain air to keep out smoke. You might pull your hood up over your mask in this case, sacrificing your vision for increased air supply.
At this point the mental map you were making could be knocked out of your head and you might lose your right hand/left hand rule orientation (firefighters are trained to keep to the right or left side of the wall at all times, so when their low air alarm goes off they can just reverse direction and get out of a labyrinth if necessary)*.. You might even loose consciousness for a bit, or be knocked unconscious (hopefully very temporarily).
* During any kind of training you will not pass if you do not follow which ever convention your officer chooses. If you go in right hand rule, and then you mayday on the radio, or your alarm goes off, the rescue team (hopefully there is one! volunteer departments do not get such luxuries always), will go in and search for you in the direction that you went in, and they should always maintain that protocol.
Perhaps for firefighters less trusting of their robo pals could have a dead man switch, which would prevent the robot from pulling anything heavy (like you) unless you allow it. The switch could have a radio over ride, so the commanding officer could perhaps allow the robot to attempt to pull you out, if you are presumed unconscious, there is a structure collapse immanent and the fast team is told to GTFO, so your dead and the robot is your last chance. If the robot does not have the strength to pull, perhaps it can lead a rope to the outside, for people to pull/follow to your location in order to extract you.
I would not mind some kind of low flying drone that makes a map (like prometheus lol), a ground base drone to pull you out/lead you/deploy rope or perhaps carry your non essential tools. I would not give it my axe/halligan bar, but perhaps the bot could hold a K tool, sledge hammer, pole cam