Fires at sea can ruin your whole day. That’s why the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is preparing to test a pair of anthropomorphic firefighting robots this summer. Two designs of the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR) will be tested aboard a decommissioned amphibious landing ship this summer in an effort to improve the Navy’s ability to fight fires and overcome the limitations of human flesh.
The demands of fighting fires within enclosed spaces filled with heat, smoke, and toxic fumes released from fuel oil, paint, and electrical wiring stretch the endurance of human firefighters. In my personal experience, just wearing an Oxygen Breathing Apparatus (OBA) and the other gear used in Navy damage control was bad enough after just 15 minutes of use. And even a relatively minor fire can get out of control quickly. A fire, set deliberately aboard the submarine USS Miami in the shipyards by a contractor who wanted to get off work for the day, ended up doing $700 million in damage, resulting in the deactivation and scrapping of the sub.
The SAFFiR robots, designed by researchers at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Virginia Tech, will use the same firefighting equipment as humans. In some ways, they are designed to deal with the same challenges posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Robotics Challenge, which is aimed at developing robots that can deal with disasters like those that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant—going places humans can’t, using general-purpose tools designed for humans. But the SAFFiR bots will have to cope with issues most land-bound firefighters never experience: working in a dark, metal box that pitches and rolls with the waves. They will also need to be able to work side by side with human firefighters, responding to commands and gestures.
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