Researchers from Japan’s Akita Prefectural College, Tohoku College, and Osaka College, have give you what can solely be described as a reverse dragon — a 13-foot-long aerial hose robotic which places fires out, fairly than beginning them.
“We right here current a prototype of a four-meter-long, remotely controllable flying firehose robotic, engineered to soundly and effectively extinguish fires in buildings by immediately approaching the fireplace sources,” co-corresponding creator Yuchi Ambe, PhD, says of the system, dubbed the Dragon Firefighter.
The Dragon Firefighter flies on wings of water to place fires out from above. (📷: Yamauchi et al)
Wanting extra snake-like than dragon-esque, the Dragon Firefighter flies above a hearth utilizing water jets — which, handily, additionally serve to quench the flames. A hose connects the robotic, which is steered from a wheeled cart on the rear, to a truck that includes a 3,000-gallon water reservoir drained at a fee of 105 gallons per minute.
The robotic’s head contains each a visible-light digicam and a thermal-imaging digicam, permitting controllers to pinpoint the supply of flames and higher direct the dragon’s water jets. The system was first demonstrated on the World Robotic Summit 2020, however the crew behind it say the dragon has been significantly improved within the years since — to the purpose the place they’re joyful to launch its design for others to analyze and iterate upon.
“We discovered that the unique passive dampening mechanism which counters oscillations of the Dragon Firefighter’s physique was impractical: it took too lengthy to organize for flight,” Yu Yamauci, PhD, explains of the tweaks required to the design. “We additionally discovered that warmth from fires could cause detrimental plastic deformation in outside purposes of the corrugated tube that holds the water hose and electrical cables.”
It could possibly be some time earlier than you see the robotic out combating fires, although. “We estimate that it’ll take roughly 10 extra years to deploy our robotic in real-world firefighting eventualities,” Ambe admits. “The first problem will likely be to increase its attain to past 10 meters [around 33 feet]. Growing efficient firefighting techniques tailor-made to this robotic’s distinctive capabilities will likewise be a important facet of additional improvement.”
The crew’s work is detailed within the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI beneath open-access phrases.