The Design and Development of a Smart Fire-fighter Robotic System

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com dangerous missions. Injured firefighters and civilians inside hazard buildings are risky to rescue and evacuate. Sometimes, firefighters face serious challenges to get in the hazard building to extinguish fire, and locate the civilians, because in most cases, firefighters do not have a prior knowledge about the hazard building infrastructure. Firefighters face serious risks on the job, where they face flames, heat, high level of CO or CO2, and physical and mental stress, A large number of firefighters have been injured during practicing their duties, including extinguishing fire, and rescuing civilians. According to [1], 22 firefighters were died in during fire grounds operations in 2012, and an estimated 81,070 fire-fighter injuries occur irregularly in the US. Therefore, there is an ideal target for robot technology to keep away firefighters from danger. Robotics is the branch of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science that deals with the design, construction, operation, and application of robots, as well as computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information processing. These technologies deal with automated machines that can take the place of humans in dangerous environments or manufacturing processes, or resemble humans in appearance, behaviour, and or cognition. Many of today’s robots are inspired by nature contributing to the field of bio-inspired robotics [2]. Rescue robotics has been suggested by DARPA study as an application domain for the research in human robot integration [3]. This paper presents a prototype robotic system designed to navigate firefighters in unknown terrain, and determine the location of civilians inside the hazard building. Moreover, the designed robotic system is able to find the shortest and the safest route to civilians indoors where GPS signals are inaccessible indoors. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the most significant relevant works. In Section 3, the system design is presented and discussed. The system implementation and results obtained from real experiments are presented in Section 4. And finally, Section 5 shows a conclusion and future works.