Posted on 03/16/2012 6:30:11 PM PDT by cap10mike
The Navy has teamed up with Virginia Tech and the University of Pennsylvania to develop a humanoid robot to fight fires on-board its vessels.
The Navy Technology Center for Safety & Survivability at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., carries out research to solve Navy problems regarding combustion, fire extinguishing, fire modeling and scaling, damage control, and atmosphere hazards.
The robot, called the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, or SAFFiR for short, is designed to move throughout the ship, interact with people and fight fires. It will be charged with handling the dangerous firefighting tasks normally performed by humans. The humanoid robot will be able to maneuver well in the narrow passages and ladders unique to a ship.
(Excerpt) Read more at bizpacreview.com ...
But can it keep up with the rest of the crew at happy hour ?
There are priorities.
Ha ha ha! Indeed there are! And then there are always the friendly inter-service butt-whoppings!
The narrow passages rule out a fireproof Al Gore
The narrow passages rule out a fireproof Al Gore
I want one.
Indeed. So long as it can pay taxes and sign up for an abortion, 0 will bless off on all the Navy will buy.
Ironically, the humanoid shape is only rarely the best configuration for robots. If you think of the animal and insect kingdom from a purely mechanical point of view, for any given thing that a human can do, some animal can do it better.
So when you design a robot, why design for human “good” when you can design based on an animal “better”?
Another advantage of a robot is that it can do safe fire diagnostics, that is, how you fight a fire is based on what kind of fire it is, and what kind of threat it contains.
Personally, I think that in most cases below decks, a robot would spray high expansion firefighting foam and just bury the fire under it. For smaller fires, it could spray CO2 or Halon.
The critical thing is to get it to the fire ASAP.
Start with Obama. If he survives, it might be worth pursuing!
I suspect that it is built in a human-like shape because the environment it’s designed to work in was constructed for humans.
Great! In that case let’s use the one and only non-fireproof Al Gore!
Me too!
Wow! You make some great point with respect to robotic design. To that I’ll only add that I think a humanoid shape has a certain “creepy factor” that another design wouldn’t have.
I don’t know? Does he by any chance have a British accent?
Great idea!
A Kryten series driod would get rid of the masses of Mess Specialists and cranking/food service attendants.
I wonder if they could teach it to do housework.
Ahh, now there is something worth pursuing! They would have to find a way to extend that 30 minute battery life for my house, tho!
I would say “oriented to humans”, but at the same time what is made for humans can be used by many animals.
It is a longstanding problem with humanoid robots, basically that most anything a person can do is easier for a person to do; so what you want is a robot that can do things a person can’t do. Complementary function instead of supplementary function.
In this case, they mention that such a robot can see through smoke. Definitely a plus. It should also be resistant to heat and not be damaged by toxic smoke (perhaps self cleaning sensors). And it needs to be able to navigate around or over obstructions, even injured or dead people, water and fluids.
It must be able to carry the means to fight fires, likely also able to activate existing fire suppression equipment not being used but in the area, like fire extinguishers.
And, in a naval application, it needs to be able to open and seal doors.
This stuff adds up pretty quick.
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