Using robots for firefighters and first responders: Scenario specification and exemplary system description

Robotic technology has the potential to be a great relief for emergency response personnel - in their daily work as well as when facing extreme disasters. Robots can be employed to extinguish fires, search for hazardous materials, provide injured with first aid, or get them out of dangerous areas. They can map disrupted areas and assess structural damages of buildings, or they can simply help transporting heavy equipment. However, disaster response scenarios present challenges which need to be carefully investigated and rigorously solved in order to obtain systems which really can assist humans during emergencies and disasters. This paper identifies a number of possible deployment scenarios for robotic systems in emergency response operations. Several fields are identified in which already available robotic solutions can provide an important improvement for first responders compared to today's actual situation. The authors, then, describe a newly developed firefighting robot which offers some of these identified improvements for the emergency response personnel. Perhaps the most important feature - compared to many existing robotic fire extinguishing systems - is the possibility to introduce autonomous assistance functions into the field of firefighting operations.