Home > News

SmokeBot Robot Could Be Used to Fight Fires When Firefighters Can’t

By Laura Tucker
SmokeBot Robot Could Be Used to Fight Fires When Firefighters Can’t Featured Image

If you’ve never been involved in a building fire, either during or after it’s been extinguished, you might struggle to see the depth of the situation. But the heat can be imaginable, and sometimes there is so much smoke that fills the room that it’s hard to see. The SmokeBot robot could help in that situation by entering buildings when it’s not safe for a human to do so.

Previous Robots

There’s no doubt there’s a need for such a robot. No matter how careful we are, there is always going to be accidents that lead to fires, whether they’re in businesses or in homes. Firefighters will always be everyone’s heroes, but with a helpful robot, their jobs could be just a little less treacherous.

There have already been two humanoid robots that were created to help in these instances: a robot built by the U.S. Navy and another that was created by researchers in Italy.

The Navy’s prototype firefighting robot is called SAFFiR, which is short for “Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot.” It was created to help fight shipboard fires. SAFFiR has sensors that enable it to see through thick smoke and has hands that can manipulate things such as doors and hoses. And because it was built by the Navy for use with shipboard fires, it can stay upright while the ship lists back and forth.

news-smokebot-robot-plume

Italian researchers developed the “Walk-Man,” which shouldn’t be confused with the classic personal cassette player. It was designed to locate fires, walk toward the fire, and then activate an extinguisher while collecting images of the fire to send back to a human team to remotely analyze the situation and guide the robot.

SmokeBot Robot

SmokeBot is smaller than the other two fire extinguishing robots, but it could still be just as useful in a fire or even an indoor gas leak. Like the others, it can also see and navigate its way through a smoke-filled room.

Something it may do a little differently than the others is that it plots maps of its location to assist the firefighters or even search-and-rescue teams. It does this by using a combination of gas sensors, radar, a laser scanner, and a thermal camera. A similar version is being used in Vienna, but it only has a robotic arm and a regular camera.

“We target robots operating in low-visibility environments, a scenario where robots could be very helpful, but in which it was not possible to use them prior to SmokeBot,” said the project coordinator and professor of Computer Science at Sweden’s Örebro University, Achim Lillienthal.

news-smokebot-robot-house

“To enable using robots in low-visibility scenarios – with a lot of smoke or dust, for example – we developed novel sensors and perception and cognitive approaches tailored to those sensors.”

Along with an active heat shield, the SmokeBot can also autonomously find areas with a Wi-Fi connection. If it becomes unconnected from the human firefighters who are controlling it via a remote, it can find its way back to the last spot it had an Internet connection.

Future Uses

While the SmokeBot robot was designed to be used to fight fires, there are other missions it could help with, although it would move too slowly to help in critical rescue missions.

The team that built the SmokeBot is considering using the same technology in drones, Lilienthal explained that currently the sensors are too heavy for drones, but if they get lightweight sensors, then perhaps they could apply the technology to a flying robot to aid in low-visibility conditions.

What other uses do you see for this robotic technology, and how successful do you think it will be in fighting fires? Add your thoughts and concerns in the comments section below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.