This floating robot hose can fly into houses to extinguish fire

By admin On Jun 6, 2018

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It may sound terribly scary: a floating robot snake. In Japan, however, they see this differently, because people from the Tohoku University and the National Institute of Technology have made a snake that is not meant to scare people to death, but that must burn these fires. It is meant as an alternative for firefighters who have to enter a burning building in order to be able to extinguish further than straight through an opening. The robot can extinguish in a targeted manner without any danger.

The DragonFireFighter cleverly uses the same principle that Flyboards use to stay in the air. The water is sprayed out at the bottom and the flying snake stays suspended in the air. That is already ideal: the hose is not bound to the floor, where things can stand in the way and automatically a lot of water is sprayed into the room. That in itself is not enough of course, so the robot also has two separate beams on the ‘head’ that can be aimed at specific fireplaces, as you can see in the video.

The robot is clearly still in the test phase because although the driver can already see on a video screen where he has to direct the water jets from the head, the hose can not yet move forward. The construction is also not that you say ‘we take that on notification’ but if the trickiest part already works (keeping the hose in position with all those different water jets that want to push it in another direction) the rest a matter of time.

You could say that it might be easier to just shoot a huge jet of water into a building than this particular hassle, but the precision with which you can fight fire with some extra development certainly has its advantages, although it will still a few years before this is good enough. If that means that fewer people from the fire department have to maneuver themselves into dangerous positions to extinguish a fire, it is more than worth it.