Robotic Firefighting: A Review and Future Perspective

Firefighters are constantly exposed to the danger of hot, dark, and toxic fire environments during their firefighting operations and suffer injuries now and then. Today, firefighting robots are gradually deployed to support fire services and enter the explosive, toxic, and smoky fire scene for detection, mitigation, and rescue. Robotic firefighting aims to reduce the risk of casualties and improve disposal efficiency significantly. However, firefighting robots are still far from massive applications, because of the problematic remote control in complex fire incidents and their limited autonomy and small working range. There is still an urgent need for intelligent and autonomous firefighting robots, as well as research and development to expand their firefighting tasks and reliability. This chapter reviews the development of firefighting robots and UAVs over the last six decades, from early master-slave remote control to the latest sensor-driven semi-autonomous control. It also summarizes the classification of firefighting robots and their respective development directions. Finally, we point out the key technologies and challenges in the autonomous intelligent firefighting robots and predict the future application of firefighting robots and their interaction with fire services.