The US Navy is always concerned about the safety of its sailors and tragedies involving fire became a real obsession that needed to be taken into consideration. Now, the agency managed to develop a prototype robot called SAFFiR that’s able to assist the firefighters in their attempt to fight with fire. The robot, developed in partnership with several US universities, is resistant to high temperatures and it can memorize the ship’s plan in order to be more efficient and to move independently through the environment. SAFFiR measures only 1.50 meters and it has an autonomy that allows it to assist the firefighters in their tasks for over 30 minutes.
The firefighter robot has many features: it is equipped with a voice recognition system, it has a biped movement system with reminded me of Atlas and it can do all kind of things. It can open valves, pick up items, it can direct a water lance and it can also detect the presence of human bodies through various environments like smoke or low light. I’m eager to see how this project will evolve and if we’ll ever see it performing various tasks in other fields.
As you can see in the following videos, SAFFiR is a work in progress project and it still needs a lot of work.
