Development of Fire Fighting Robot (QRob)

Fire incident is a disaster that can potentially cause the loss of life, property damage and permanent disability to the affected victim. They can also suffer from prolonged psychological and trauma. Fire fighters are primarily tasked to handle fire incidents, but they are often exposed to higher risks when extinguishing fire, especially in hazardous environments such as in nuclear power plant, petroleum refineries and gas tanks. They are also faced with other difficulties, particularly if fire occurs in narrow and restricted places, as it is necessary to explore the ruins of buildings and obstacles to extinguish the fire and save the victim. With high barriers and risks in fire extinguishment operations, technological innovations can be utilized to assist firefighting. Therefore, this paper presents the development of a firefighting robot dubbed QRob that can extinguish fire without the need for fire fighters to be exposed to unnecessary danger. QRob is designed to be compact in size than other conventional fire-fighting robot in order to ease small location entry for deeper reach of extinguishing fire in narrow space. QRob is also equipped with an ultrasonic sensor to avoid it from hitting any obstacle and surrounding objects, while a flame sensor is attached for fire detection. This resulted in QRob demonstrating capabilities of identifying fire locations automatically and ability to extinguish fire remotely at particular distance. QRob is programmed to find the fire location and stop at maximum distance of 40 cm from the fire. A human operator can monitor the robot by using camera which connects to a smartphone or remote devices.