7 ms·
Firefighting Robot Snake Flies on Jets of Water
- starpilot 8y agoScience has gone too far.
- Johnny555 8y agoI'd call this "engineering" more than science.
- djrogers 8y agoOk, 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.
- Johnny555 8y agoThis could theoretically go around corners so you could send it down a hallway and then into a room.
- djrogers 8y agoNot 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 8y agoWell 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 8y agoIf 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.
- trhway 8y ago>making it longer means more jets which means more water which means making the hose bigger which means it’s heavier.... if one combines it with one of a Boston Dynamics creatures, may be only the last 10ft is all what would be necessary to cover.
- Mister_X 8y agoDrones baby... they need to Add Drones to the Hose, that will solve the weight problem. See, Drones can help solve nearly any engineering problem. Remember, Drones are Your Friend.
- pvaldes 8y agoThe problem with drones is how to move them. Lithium batteries would last only for some minutes if you need to support a lot of weight. And then, your expensive robot would just burn somewhere An electric cable would put electricity and water together, create sparks that could reignite some areas, and add new dangers in form of chopping rotating blades and maybe swinging cables. A drone in form of a flying fire extinguiser could be a better idea than a hose-drone, but still would need to fly and keep stability against powerful convection currents caused by the fire. And of course you can forget anything with combustion engines or hydrogen fuel on it if you plan to put it in a fire.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aaron695 8y agoI would think it would be to heavy. I wonder what the calculations would be on length compared to water loss to keep it flying. I'd think mains power combined with normal drone tech might be better. You would be circulating oxygen more efficiently though. Could you negate this with a small loss of water near the blades? Or use mains power to use the jets more efficiently, increasing the pressure as it leaves the hose using the wasted water more efficiently. In a garden is see it as possibly brilliant though. Less obstacles and pre-programmable, get the thrust as a spray for the lawn and the end for specific plants / trees.
- mikaelgyth 8y agoThat thing is going to f* up your lawn...
- MindTwister 8y agoI thought the same thing. "I really hope they got permission to ruin the lawn"
- RugnirViking 8y agoActual 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 8y agoSerious question, are those damages covered by fire insurance?
- moate 8y agoYes, 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.
- sabujp 8y agoit wasted so much water
- moate 8y agoIn 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.
- Animats 8y agoHere'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
- giarc 8y agoAs 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.
- brtknr 8y agoLooks like it had to waste a lot of water to get that far!
- moate 8y agoOne thing to consider is that that water would be getting sprayed on a burning building, which is probably a feature not a bug.
- mdrzn 8y agoThat 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?
- mseebach 8y agoThe 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?
- 317070 8y agoI was thinking the same thing, but was actually very optimistic of how high this thing could go given the rocket equation. Does someone know how much pressure you need to get to a height of X with a system like this? I'd say that given we have 10m fountains, it would be pretty all right. Another way to look at this, instead of the water escaping the hose of the firefighter on the street-level, you could steer the whole water column with this thing.
- rtkwe 8y agoUsing 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.
- Mister_X 8y agoNice! 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 8y agoNotice 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.
- oxygen0211 8y agoThe 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 :-)
- RobertRoberts 8y agoThis 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.
- oldcynic 8y agoThen a bunch of drones fly out to repair the holes in the highway from the hose's high pressure jets?
- RobertRoberts 8y agoDo a search for firefighting drones, waterjet propulsion isn't the only method. But they could augment eachother and not cause any damages.
- mannykannot 8y agoI 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.
- pvaldes 8y agoI 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 8y agoIt'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.
- quickthrower2 8y agoIt 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)
- giarc 8y agoLike a large camera boom? I could see that working (although I'm not a fire fighter).
- mhb 8y agoThis 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- SurrealSoul 8y agoThese are the headlines I want to see