London's Robotic Fire Brigade 82
dustpan writes "The BBC has a story up about a quartet of robotic fire fighters that the London Fire Brigade is testing and with which have been achieving 'tremendous results.' The robots were developed by QinetiQ, which is a defense contractor. The LFB has been testing the units since last year and the machines are primarily used in fires involving acetylene canisters. The group commander for hazardous materials and environmental protection with the LFB says that the robots have cut the time to resolve these potential hazards from 24 hours to 3. From the article: 'Three years ago we were shutting down parts of London for over 24 hours every other week. Now it doesn't even make the news.'"
Re:Same platform different end-effectors (Score:3, Interesting)
Also I suspect it suffers from the 'Dalek problem'...it can't climb stairs. I assume that this is not too much of a problem as most acetylene cylinders are probably kept at ground level. Certainly if it keeps Firefighters safer, it must be a good thing.
How often does this happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
The LFB has been testing the units since last year and the machines are primarily used in fires involving acetylene canisters. The group commander for hazardous materials and environmental protection with the LFB says that the robots have cut the time to resolve these potential hazards from 24 hours to 3. From the article: 'Three years ago we were shutting down parts of London for over 24 hours every other week.
Apparently there are a lot of rogue acetylene canisters catching fire in London on a regular basis. I weld as a hobby and in all the welding shops I've been in, in all the classes, I've never seen an acetylene tank go off. And with all the welders I've ever met in all those places, maybe one has ever seen a tank go off. Is it something with your gauges over there? The tank construction? Seems to happen a lot more there than it does here.
Acetylene is nothing you want to dick with. If it gets away from you, then I'd sure want a robot going in to deal with it. [youtube.com]
I remember reading about a DIY version (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it; thanks to Google Books [google.com] I'm remembering a pretty cool section in Robot Builder's Bonanza [amazon.com] on DIY robot firefighters, building up simple circuits to ever more capable, fire-detection systems, control schemes, and automatically controlled extinguishing apparatus.
Obviously not quite the same thing, but it was pretty cool when I read it, and so I'm taking this opportunity to plug the awesomeness of building DIY firefighting robots. =]
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)