Humanity has come a long way over the last few hundred years, but we are still terrifyingly vulnerable and susceptible to fires. Firefighters have employed tank-like robots that carry hoses into burning structures to minimize the amount of time that humans must endure the unpredictable dangers of a rampant fire, but researchers have a new idea that may change how humans fight fires forever.
Now enter the Dragon Firefighter, the blueprint for a revolutionary firefighting robot that employs powerful water jets to allow a pilot to remotely control the robot hose to fly and maneuver into burning structures and extinguish the flames without the need for risky human-fire interaction.
The design of the Dragon Firefighter was developed in Japan, and was published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Since it was published as Open Science, roboticists around the world may freely use the plans to build their own Dragon Firefighters for the benefit of all. Authors of the blueprints estimate that a Dragon Firefighter robot could be ready for real-world implementation within a decade.
The robot is called a Dragon Firefighter because it flies and shoots water in the way a dragon flies and shoots flames. I think it should be called a Squirtle robot and bigger ones could be called Blastoise robots, but I ain’t no scientist.
This video shows the Dragon Firefighter’s public introduction at the opening of the World Robot Summit in 2021. Since this video there have been developments, including better waterproofing, a nozzle unit capable of handling a wider range of net forces, and an improved mechanism for channeling water flow with more improvements in the pipeline.
As it stands, the Dragon Firefighter’s hose is four meters long, it flies two meters off the ground and is attached to a rolling control module that can be fed by a firetruck to supply the robot with up-to 14,000-liters of water.
There are obvious challenges with the current design of the Dragon Firefighter like the rolling cart and restrictive hose length, but researchers are confident that within the next ten years it will be able to reach beyond 10 meters.
If researchers are able to achieve that 10-meter hose length goal, the Dragon Firefighter could be a widely applicable and life saving device. Thanks to the spirit of innovation shared among its developers, the Open Science blueprints for the robot are accessible to anyone and hopefully the innovations can continue and the Dragon Firefighter’s implementation will spread like wildfire. Click here to view the Open Science documents.