
Firefighting Robot Snake Flies on Jets of Water - confiscate
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/firefighting-robot-snake-flies-on-jets-of-water
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oxygen0211
The idea is nice and all, but as a volunteer firefighter of 12 years I don't
think that's very practicable because

1\. you have to transport all this stuff. Fire trucks have a notorious
tendency to be overloaded and all these stable hoses and jets additionally
take a lot of space on the truck (which is also rare)

2\. Assembly (and maybe operation) seems to be kind of complicated. When being
under adrenaline and pressure to quickly save people and buildings/goods, that
is very counter-productive

3\. Firefighting techniques try to evolve into using water as effective as
possible, this does not seem the case here. Apart from being an environmental
and infrastructural issue (e.g. pressure surges bursting water pipes and/or
connectors and simply using up the available water supplies), water damage on
building is often higher and more problematic than the damage done by the
actual fire and smoke, so it is key to just use only as much water as
neccessary to extinguish a fire, especially inside of buildings. I don't think
flying your equipment on water jets towards the fire will help with that :-)

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RobertRoberts
This would normally be my first reaction as well. (and it was for a moment)
But if this kind of tech gets developed for a couple decades? You'd have a
single firefighter that sits in an office, sends out a self driving firetruck,
connects itself to the main, and sends out a couple dozen hoses that fly
_into_ the fire and put it out faster than any human could do today from
_outside_ the house.

I see this as the first baby steps to where things will ultimately end up.
This may not be the exact tech, but it's a start.

~~~
oxygen0211
I think there is potential for using robots, drones and so on to a certain
degree. I was myself also part of bigger training missions where drones were
used to get an overview of the site, quickly identify hazards, locate fire and
so on.

Also for fighting fires inside buildings I think there may be scenarios where
robots can bring advantages and safety to firefighters. However, in most of
these cases the primary objective is not to extinguish the fire but to search
and rescue for people still missing in there. This is often a task an order of
magnitude more difficult, especially for machines (we have problems detecting
moving people on open roads, try that with unconcious people in a room filled
with smoke and fallen over funiture and items - neither normal nor IR cameras
will tell you the whole truth. This is even very hard for people), so your
mileage will vary from mission to mission. I don't have a problem with the
idea of using robots for this, in contraire, I would like to have the
opportunity more often, I would however have them in a different form factor -
more the mars rover kind or what we have seen from boston dynamics, with
flexible hoses that are better to store and maneuver in small spaces. Also, as
I said, using water for propelling will do a lot of damage we are actively
trying to avoid.

EDIT: Mainly because of that there is also much work done from the inside,
with fully independend respirators and heavy heat gear. A few decades ago, you
used to say "spray in on top until the water coming out on the bottom is
cold", however the damage is then about as big as if you just would have let
the house burn down, so with getting more high tech materials, everything
started switching towards more precise actions using less water, often even
deconstructing the parts of the house affected by the fire (e.g. had a mission
last week where we were ripping apart the roof insulation and opening spots in
the roof of a house in a fire after lightning strike, only applying water to
the really burning parts).

I would like to see a progress towards a way of working as you mentioned it,
but I'm not sure if we would end up exactly there. On a site, there is so much
going on that I don't think one person could handle a whole mission remotely.
More of a smaller team going out, handling the dangerous stuff from a safe
distance very effectively through specialized robots. Firefighting is also a
lot about giving the affected people the feeling that someone is there for
them and rebuilding their feeling of safety, handling everything fully remote
might not be helpful with that.

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RobertRoberts
> _...the primary objective is not to extinguish the fire but to search and
> rescue for people still missing in there._

20 years ago the tech we have today was science fiction. The idea that every
person on the planet could have a multi-camera internet connected device would
have been ludicrous.

But I understand your perspective, you seem to actually at the sites where you
can see how hard it would be for a robot to achieve the same results as a
human. But isn't the hope (for geeks anyways) of the future of tech that
robots will be able to save _more_ lives than humans alone?

Also, there's a fire fighting game that got popular a few years back. If this
is a harbinger of things to come, firefighters in the future may be using xbox
controllers to fight fires, just like they use them to fly drones in war.

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Animats
Here's a champion Flyboard rider, zipping around on water jets.[1] That's the
agility and stability they need. Firefighters could use that, flying the end
of their hoses like a drone to where the water is really needed.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JhUSu8v2N4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JhUSu8v2N4)

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giarc
As an aside, I've tried this before and it's really fun. It only takes 10 mins
or so to get started and "flying". There are lots of training/rental places
around nowadays and I highly recommend people give it a shot.

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mhb
This is ridiculous. The thing is struggling to move 10 feet of maybe 2" hose.

One hundred feet of five inch large-diameter fire hose (LDH) with water in it
weighs over 900 pounds.

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djrogers
Ok, I’m all I’m on robot snakes. Sign me up!

That said, I don’t see anything here that wouldn’t be done faster and easier
with a hose on a boom.

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Johnny555
This could theoretically go around corners so you could send it down a hallway
and then into a room.

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djrogers
Not the one they showed here - it was ~10ft long, and making it longer means
more jets which means more water which means making the hose bigger which
means it’s heavier....

This is purely a first step in a long process of potentially making a robot
snake that can fight fires in specific scenarios. A worthy goal, but it’s a
long way from being useful.

~~~
Johnny555
Well yeah, I thought it was obvious that it was a proof of concept, otherwise
they could have just aimed a traditional hose through the opening to put out
the fire. As the article says "It worked reasonably well, as prototypes go,
but it’s really more of a proof of concept in hardware than anything else, and
obviously there’s a lot to do before a system like this could be real-world
useful"

As for future directions it could take (no pun intended): "Since the nozzles
are steerable, each module can direct itself independently, letting the hose
weave itself through small gaps deep into a structure in order to find the
source of a fire... The 2-meter long prototype in the video above is intended
to be a single segment in a robot that can be extended to an arbitrary length
by just adding on more segments"

The article concedes "What’s happening here might be complex to implement in
practice"

~~~
pvaldes
If you think in a full flying hose, yes, but there is not need to this. Most
of the hose weight could rest in the floor under wheels with a flying head
part only for the 90% of the time. Most fire at homes mean some flat area (at
least for a while) with maybe some stairs and the weight of the hose would
rest in the soil. The weight would be also much lower than a heavy
firefigther, so the risk of soil collapsing is also reduced and that would
simplify the problem. The robot could be send as scout to clear the area and
find risks before humans arrive.

The problem of the full firetruck can be solved if you use a special companion
truck exclusively for having a fully mounted robotic hose for special cases
(no need to put clothes, axes, hoses, etc in the same truck). All you need is
to paid a driver and maybe a second worker to remotely manage the robot so
would be cheaper (after you pay the, probably, expensive robot) than adding a
second team of fireworkers.

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brtknr
Looks like it had to waste a lot of water to get that far!

~~~
moate
One thing to consider is that that water would be getting sprayed on a burning
building, which is probably a feature not a bug.

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mdrzn
That title was a roller coaster to understand.

"What’s happening here might be complex to implement in practice, but in
principle, it’s not too complicated" did they check how much water was used to
extinguish the fire vs how much water was used to fly?

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mseebach
The writing is abysmal. "[...] or they can try and get into the building,
which seems like it’s probably super dangerous". O RLY?

"[...] a single segment in a robot that can be extended to an arbitrary length
by just adding on more segments". It seems like it would be subject to
something analogous to the rocket equation -- the more segments, the more
water required for levitation, which again makes the whole thing heavier. Not
trying to middle-brow this, and I am certainly neither a rocket- or robot-
engineer, nor a firefighter, but wouldn't a series of obstacle-crossing robots
carrying a hose be more feasible?

~~~
rtkwe
Using higher pressure water will also increase the total available thrust
without requiring more water. That's a lot easier to play with and increase
than the analogous change in a rocket.

> wouldn't a series of obstacle-crossing robots carrying a hose be more
> feasible

It's possible but there's a lot of problems there too. There's all the
problems of room + obstacle navigation that's vexed robotics for a while at
the same time pulling a long flexible object weighing a few hundred pounds (in
the case of a regular fire hose, less if you use a high pressure misting
system like the post but that is still going to be fairly heavy to avoid
damage) in a way that won't bind on some obstacle. All of that in a very
challenging environment where any light based system is going to have trouble
because of smoke and heat.

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Mister_X
Nice!

It's a High Tech WHAM-O Water Wiggle to put out Fires, I like.

But it needs the Silly cartOOn Smiley Face on the front so it won't scare
children, always think of the children.

Oh no, the house is on Fire!

Don't panic, the Water Wiggle Fire Dept is here to put it out, YAY!

~~~
pvaldes
Notice that the back streams of water moving the robot point towards the hose
segments. They can build the hose with an ignifuge material also, and the
water inside would dissipate the heat.

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mannykannot
I love to see the creative re-purposing of existing technology - isn't that
what hacking is, for the most part? - and the only negative thing I have to
say is to chide myself for not having thought of it.

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pvaldes
I wonder how such hose could manage stairs. To move in a flat surface seems
easy to solve but the water against the vertical stairs could create opposite
forces neutralizing the forward movement.

~~~
onesun
It's not the ground surface that's causing the reactive lifting force, it's
simply the thrust caused by the water jets. Unless the ground ends up blocking
a jet, the shape and orientation of the ground shouldn't have an effect.

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starpilot
Science has gone too far.

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Johnny555
I'd call this "engineering" more than science.

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quickthrower2
It doesn't seem to have a very long reach. What is wrong with a long pipe
(perhaps with a counterweight to make it easy to maneuver)

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giarc
Like a large camera boom? I could see that working (although I'm not a fire
fighter).

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mikaelgyth
That thing is going to f __* up your lawn...

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RugnirViking
Actual firefighters do this all the time. A house on my street was on fire,
and the firefighters broke first floor windows on the houses either side and
brought hoses through those houses to attack the fire from the raised vantage
point.

I would have thought it was generally understood that it's worth the small
price, even for neighbors.

~~~
whatshisface
Serious question, are those damages covered by fire insurance?

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moate
Yes, if not as part of your general home owner's insurance.

It's understood that the cost of repairing this damage is preferable to having
to deal with a claim from a neighbor who's house ALSO burned down.

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SurrealSoul
These are the headlines I want to see

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sabujp
it wasted so much water

~~~
moate
In this example: yes. If it was inside a building that's literally on fire,
not really "wasted" since it's likely either putting out other fires or
preventing fire from spreading to that area.

