The U.S. Navy firefighting robot SAFFiR passed a major test, battling and beating a real fire on a real ship.
Okay, this wasn’t exactly like a scene from Backdraft. The 5'10", 140-pound bipedal robot accomplished the task very, very slowly and with a good assist from the programmers at Virginia Tech not to mention a couple of handlers who were nearby to catch the lumbering bot if it happened to fall over.
Oh, and the robot actually put out the burning chair aboard the decommissioned USS Shadwell back in November 2014. SAFFiR (or Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot) is a joint project of Virginia Tech and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
The video of SAFFiR’s feat, which you can see above, was held until Wednesday of this week. A Virginia Tech spokesperson told Mashable that the Navy wanted to release the news after the holidays and really wanted to highlight their robot accomplishment at this week’s Naval Future Force Science & Technology EXPO in Washington, D.C.
None of this, however, diminishes what SAFFiR was able to do. The robot, also known as THOR, stood and walked on its own, navigating the tight corridors of USS Shadwell, which was docked in Mobile Bay, Alabama. It then approached a shipmate, turned to detect a heat source behind a closed door and, after someone opened the door, picked up a fire hose and battled and beat the blaze. Critical in SAFFiR’s ability to detect and fight fires is its three vision systems, which include stereo cameras, an infrared camera (for heat) and laser radar.
“Manipulating an empty hose or walking down a hallway is very different than operating in a heat-warped soot-filled corridor dragging a hose filled with water,” John Seminatore, a Virginia Tech master's student in mechanical engineering who worked on SAFFiR, said in a news release about the robot, adding, “It was a tense month leading up to the demo, we had never seen where we were testing, never used a real hose, never actually sprayed water... The team did great and the robot performed like a champ.”
Despite four years of development and this shipboard fire success, SAFFiR is still a prototype (without its protective outfit on, it looks very much like a walking science project) and it will be, according to the Virginia Tech spokesperson, years before it is deployed.
Cost may be a limiting factor, as well: Last year Tom McKenna, a program manager with the Office of Naval Research, told Mashable that a single firefighting robot could cost about $1 million. Even if and when the Navy figures out how to manage the costs of these robots and SAFFiR does start roaming U.S. navy ships and finding and fighting fires, it will be alongside human navy firefighters.
“These robots can work closely with human firefighters without firefighters being directly exposed to steam or heat, fire and smoke,” said McKenna.