Design of a small wheel-foot hybrid firefighting robot for infrared visual fire recognition

The complex and changeable environment and the different degrees of toxic hot smoke and unknown danger at fire scenes can seriously affect the fire personnel’s reconnaissance, fighting, and life safety. To address these challenges, in this study, we developed a small wheel-foot hybrid firefighting robot based on an infrared vision fire recognition system. The robot mainly involves a mechanical system, walking system, fire extinguishing system, and control system. First, the whole system and each individual system were designed and analyzed, and the visual recognition system was developed to test the recognition rate. Second, the kinematics method was used to calculate the position coordinates of the robot’s gait, and dynamic analysis of the robot’s gait process was performed. Finally, the climbing ability of the prototype model of the gait walking device was tested. The experiments showed that the average recognition rate of the flame recognition algorithm was 97.8%, and the overall detection effect was good. The robot had good terrain adaptability, and its gait uplift and forward displacement met the requirements of complex terrain conditions, such as climbing stairs. The climbing efficiency was proportional to the angular speed of the motor within a certain range.