The Fire-Fighting Robot
SP293: Lego Robotics Seminar - Optional Final Project
Background
Home FireGuard (TM) is a U.S.-based company specializing in the supply
of fire detection and fire fighting systems to homeowners. They
already sell common fire detection and prevention systems such as
smoke detectors, sprinkler systems, and alarm systems that contact the
fire department when a fire is detected. However, they are only one of
thirty-three major suppliers of such systems, and competition is
fierce. They hope to take a stride ahead of their competitors by
introducing the fire-fighting robot. They hope the fire-fighting robot
will fill the deficiencies of smoke detectors, sprinkler systems, and
fire department notification systems. These are:
- Smoke detectors only warn of a fire, and do nothing to put it
out.
- Sprinkler systems often cause severe damage to the contents of
the rooms they activate in, and are especially dangerous in rooms
containing expensive electronics, art, etc...
- Fire department notification systems take a substantial amount
of time to summon help to the scene.
Home FireGuard (TM) visualizes a robot that is activated by a fire detector
similar to those used to notify fire departments. The robot then
traverses the house until it finds the fire and extinguishes
it. Home FireGuard (TM) already stores the floor plans of all houses that
have service contracts with it on computer. Because of this, they
believe they can transmit the floor plan of the current house to the
robot so it knows the layout ahead of time.
They have contracted you, the designer, to design and build a robot
that, knowing the floorplan of a house ahead of time, can navigate the
house, locate the fire, and extinguish the fire. For your first
presentation to them, they want to see a small robot that can do this
in a model house, to demonstrate your ideas have merit. After you pass
this review, you can go on to building the full-size robot that will
navigate a full-size house.
Abstractions
Unfortunately, you haven't really been hired by a company to build
robots. You don't own your own robotic design company yet. And we
don't have the supplies to build huge robots that explore five-story
Boston brownstones. So we're scaling the above project down into the
lego robotics world and the size of robots we're used to working
with. In addition, because it is more difficult to build a multi-story
model house capable of supporting a robot's weight, and because stairs
pose a huge challenge, we will be restricting the house to one story.
House Details
The house will either be laid out in the biology lab or a similar
place with a smooth, white floor, or the house will have a built-in
smooth white floor. The walls will be made of wood or thick cardboard,
as yet undetermined, and may be painted some color. The ceiling will
be open to allow easy placement of the robot and to let us watch the
robot in action.
For the purposes of your design, assume you are designing the robot to
fight fires in one specific house. See figure 1 for the floorplan of
this house, accurate to 0.5 inches.
Figure 1:
Fire Details
For general safety reasons, and because components are both expensive
and damaged by fire, we will not be using a real fire. The fire will
be represented by some bright light source, possibly a full-size light
bulb in some sort of mounting. In addition, the floor and walls of the
room containing the fire will be painted or taped black. This
represents the smoke that is filling the room.
There are several ways of 'extinguishing' the fire. Currently, the
suggested methods are dumping foam pellets on the fire or throwing
foam blocks at the fire. These represent smothering the fire with some
chemical extinguisher. You are free to propose other analogs for the
fire extinguishing process (firing a squirtgun, releasing air from a
balloon, whatever you can think of). Whatever method of extinguishing
the fire is chosen, if the extinguishing material (foam, water, air)
comes into contact with the light bulb or its base, the fire is
considered successfully extinguished.
Competition
This project is mainly a competition between you and the free time you
have/want to spend working on it. The main purpose of the project is
to build a robot that accomplishes at least partly the firefighting
goals. There may be a competition for those who wish to enter to see
whose robot can extinguish the fire most reliably and quickly. More
details will be forthcoming.
There will probably be some sort of ``prize'' like a Toscanini's gift
certificate for every robot that successfully extinguishes the fire.
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