Bobby Driscoll - Building a robot firefighter lyrics

Building a robot firefighter Navy, colleges take up the challenge of creating robots for dangerous duty Before the year is out, the Navy will start a fire on one of its ships and send in a robot to put it out. Designed at Virginia Tech and the University of Pennsylvania, the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot, or SAFFiR, is a two-legged machine built to climb stairs and open watertight hatches just like a human. But Dennis Hong, one of SAFFiR's developers, said the robot is built to withstand flames and smoke that humans might not survive. “This is almost science fiction, but it's real,” Hong said. Even as Boston mourns the loss of two firefighters trapped in a blaze in March, engineers in Ma**achusetts and around the world are working to develop robots that may one day take the place of humans in dangerous environments — from burning buildings to damaged nuclear power plants. Search-and-rescue robots that roll on wheels or caterpillar treads were deployed during disasters such as the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Last year, a hose-wielding robot from South Korea tackled a major fire in Illinois. And in May, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used an unmanned drone to find an injured man who was lost in a remote area of Saskatchewan, in what may be the first case of a drone aircraft saving a life. Now the US government and world-cla** universities such as the Ma**achusetts Institute of Technology and Worcester Polytechnic Institute are developing humanoid rescue robots, two-legged machines designed to climb stairs, open doors, operate fire hoses, even drive emergency vehicles. But do not expect to see such robots in action anytime soon. Michael A. Gennert, the director of WPI's robotics engineering program, said that teaching machines to perform even basic rescue tasks is a daunting challenge.