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 :-)
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.
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.
>...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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Drones 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.
The 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.
"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?
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?
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.
I 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.
You don't need to lift all segments at the same time. Just have some slack at one end and undulate down the line.
Picture a long chain of VVVVVV you can move one side of that V at a time. Based on the video you could probably move 20 feet at a time without many issues, if you get those 20 feet moving at say 20 mph that's 100 feet moving at 5 MPH.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)