Wildland firefighting technology has not progressed much since the 1950s, but robotics have the potential to make this hard and dangerous work easier for the men and women charged with stopping forests from burning, said a Texas A&M professor.
Robin Murphy, professor of computer science and engineering at the university’s center for robot-assisted search and rescue, led a Lockheed Martin-sponsored report on what the potential users of this technology would want if they were offered ground robots.
Interviews with firefighters throughout the United States revealed that their number one need was a vehicle that could autonomously haul heavy equipment up and down mountains.
“What [we] found is that they have to haul all their gear,” she said at the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference. Sometimes they do this while wearing protective gear in 100-degree temperatures. Study participants said they would want a medium-sized cargo vehicle that could be optionally manned or unmanned.
Next on the list was a system that could do forward observing. It would use sensors to interpret conditions, including the speed and direction of a fire.
Remotely piloted aircraft with thermal sensors have been used in California to search for hotspots during some forest fires, but that’s not a perfect solution, according to the participants. Unmanned aerial vehicles “can’t see under the canopy. And they don’t fly at night,” Murphy said.
Firefighters would like a robot with a probe that could drive into an area and take temperature measurements underneath ash and embers to see if there were any potential hotspots that could flare up again.
They also wanted unmanned bulldozers or other equipment that could remove the dead trees that fuel fires. Also on the list was a relay vehicle that could retransmit radio communications when firefighters are in deep valleys, and a moveable weather station that can take measurements such as wind direction, relative humidity and other data. Sometimes the weather reports are 14 hours old before they make it into the hands of the commanders, she said.
At present, these robots are just on a wish list. A lack of resources is preventing these ideas from moving forward. Federal, state and local firefighters normally don’t have a lot of funds to spend on high-tech equipment. “Wildland firefighters have almost no money for preparation,” Murphy said.