Fire–Fighting Bot

A team of engineers from the Coordinated Robotics Lab at the University of California, San Diego have built a robotic scout that can assist fire–fighters to make rescues easier. The scout is a self–righting two–wheeled robotic vehicle that has been built for rapid exploration and description of structural fires.

The robot functions on field by mapping and capturing pictures of the interior of buildings through stereo vision. A sophisticated and advanced software then combines this data, which includes the state of fire, volatile gases, temperature and the reliability of the building’s structure to create a virtual reality picture of the interior of the building, along with a few other off–field robots.

Fire–fighters could then use the virtual map of the interiors to access the building and rescue survivors with much more clarity and without much loss. The engineers state that the robots are agile, autonomous and can climb stairs.