Robot puts out shipboard fires.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie
• Position: Business + Industry News: UNMANNED TECHNOLOGY

* The military employs robots for dull, dirty and dangerous tasks such as disposing of bombs or infiltrating environments that are unsafe for a human to enter. Another possibility currently under development is sending them to find and put out fires aboard Navy ships.

A group of Virginia Tech engineering students recently demonstrated just that with their Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, or SAFFiR. During a demonstration with the Office of Naval Research held last fall aboard the decommissioned USS Shadwell, the robot was able to walk toward a heat source, operate a hose and quench the flames with water.

"Firefighting on a ship is very, very dangerous, but retrofitting ships is also very, very expensive," said John Seminatore, the student leader of the program.

"The idea was: What if we could have some kind of automated fire fighting system that could move around the ship?"

SAFFiR was designed and built by 15 students over a period of four years, he said. The bipedal, humanoid robot weighs 140 pounds and is almost six feet tall, stated a news release. It can walk, move its head and operate a hose.

The rohot is equipped with a stereo imaging camera, a stereo thermal imaging camera that detects heat and a laser rangefinder tor mapping. It also features a balancing system that allows SAFFiR to remain stable while walking around a moving vessel, Seminatore said.

The team has not integrated the software necessary to use the infrared camera, so SAFFiR was not yet able to autonomously find the fire during the demo, he...