Firefighting is a dirty job, so let's give it to a robot. SAFFiR stands for shipboard autonomous fire-fighting robot, which is a bipedal robot created by engineers at Virginia Tech for the Navy to help put out dangerous fires with less risk to naval crew, according to Defense One.
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) started working on SAFFiR in 2011, and in November they began controlled tests on a decommissioned ship, the ex-USS Shadwell.
A video describing the experiment was released on Wednesday.
"The objectives for the demo on the Shadwell were to show that the robot could walk over a very uneven floor, that it could orient itself to the fire, that it could autonomously handle the hose, operate the hose, aim the hose and suppress the fire, which it succeeded in," said Tom McKenna, program officer at the Office of Program Research.
SAFFiR combines three technologies: LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), GPS (Global Positioning System) and IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit).
"We can identify the fire and locate its extent," McKenna told Defense One. "We can measure the temperature field with thermal imaging and extract [a sense of where] flame is from that. We can also sense flames that are outside the visual field by reflections."
The technology has many supporters who are still wary about giving control to a robot during a blaze.
"The basic logic of augmenting sailors' damage control efforts with a firefighter that's less susceptible to smoke, toxicity, oxygen-deprivation, and - to a degree - heat makes a lot of sense, but how widely the fleet adopts robots will depend on the cost of procuring and sustaining the systems developed to meet this challenge," President of the Center for International Maritime Security Scott Cheney Peters told Defense One.
"Outside of costs, the two keys to firefighting robots' success will likely be their reliability - no one wants to troubleshoot a complex system with a fire raging - and their ability to smoothly interact with human teammates. Until firefighting is nearly all autonomous, interaction with humans will make the difference between the robots helping rather than hindering damage control efforts."
SAFFiR is currently operated remotely and has a battery life of 30 minutes. ONR is working on voice and gesture interaction with SAFFiR and McKenna is confident progress will be rapid.
