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Robot Firefighters Have Another Go At Trinity 47

Posted by timothy from the not-just-toys dept.
mtDNA writes: "The New York Times has an article on the eighth annual robotic firefighting contest at Trinity College." The contest's home page has contestant rankings as well as some great photos and the rules contestants had to live by. Next year promises to be even more challenging. Anyone there to offer some first-hand reports?
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Robot Firefighters Have Another Go At Trinity More

Robot Firefighters Have Another Go At Trinity

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  • Enough of this sissy crap! (Score:4)

    by electricmonk ( 169355 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:55PM (#185397) Homepage
    Putting out fires? Putting out fires? Enough with the limp wristed engineers who are doing this to "save lives"! I want people building robots that will cause a fucking mess! I wanna have a robot that STARTS fires! My God, were all the male engineers born without balls, or was castration a course requirement for schools of engineering?

    --

  • So, Looked at the picts from the site, and there were no fires. So, why are they fire fighting robots. It seems to me that they are simple robots that find thier way though a maze. Gee, my first java app did that!
  • Looking into your link [army.mil], without seeing the title or anything I thought I was looking a magnified scrubbing bubble [scjbrands.com].

    Freaked me out for a second.

    Those stupid bubbles and their accursedly smug faces always make me want to lash out. I usually make a big mess. Ordinary cleaners just won't do. Thus a viscious cycle begins in the MulluskO household. This is why I never leave my computer alone for more than five minutes at a time.

    [follow the bubble link]
  • When organic matirials burn, they produce CO2.
    So it could be said you're getting it in the face with or without a Fire-fighting, Trinity-Loving robot?

    sorry
  • The point of these robots is to prevent the fire from getting to the stage where a life is in danger. If you notice, the contest has a five minute limit on finding the candle. Why? Because, at that point, the fire would beyond the capabilites of a single unit.

    Take for example, sprinklers. If we are called to a fire at a structure with sprinklers installed, normally either the fire is out and they want us to check it, or it is past the point that the sprinklers can handle. At that point we use them as a gauge (sprinklers use about 15psi, if we note the pressure that we are supplying drop by that amount, then we know another sprinkler head let loose).

    And actually, fires are only about 20% of what we run. Most of us are trained to a minimum EMT level, with Paramedic becoming a requirement at major departments. And truthfully, how would a firefighter react to the same situation? You do what you are programmed to do, which is the best that you can do.

    But, let's quickly look at advantages of this:

    • Robots will be able to go into places considered a life-hazard by human firefighters
    • Robots will able to work for longer stretches of time
    • A destroyed robot is no problem, it is simply replaced
    • While initial R/D is high, training costs are dramatically reduced
    etc, etc.

    And honestly, I am not worried about seeing positions cut because of this anytime soon.

  • Re:An Insider's Take... (Score:3)

    by svwolfpack ( 411870 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @09:04PM (#185402) Homepage
    Sorry about the lack of paragraphs... I sort of forgot. Anyways, here are my responses:

    The circuitry used was a 2 resitor/1 capacitor setup, although I'm not sure of the exact values... So it was a filter which essentially cleaned up the static/crosstalk along the wires.

    as for the number of sensors, there are ways to acheive the same results using fewer sensors, however, it's much much easier when the simplest way route is taken... in this case, when working with a 6 MHz microcontroller, trig is a royal pain in the neck, as anything as far as floating point math is concerned will just about bring it to a halt.

    In addition, one of the biggest problems I found while programming is the large difference in the world of robotics between theory and practice. So while a sensor should be taking a reading in the exact direction that you point it, and the wheels should move the exact speed you tell them to, it quickly gets confused because this generally doesn't happen. So, by adding more sensors, you can get many readings of your surroundings at once that just can't be gotten with 2 sensors no matter how hard you try. (For example, think about what happens when a robot following a wall runs into a corner, or hits the corner at an angle...)

    Think of it like this: Assuming the sensors are fixed i.e. they dont rotate, and the robot is pointing at a wall at an angle, how does it know INSTANTLY without moving where the wall is, and what angle it's pointing at, considering the wall can be ANYWHERE relative to the robot. With only 2 sensors, I don't see how it can be done unless the robot or the sensors move, which adds a whole other degree of complexity. Hope that helped.
  • Because of scheduling confilcts I wasn't able to go this year. But, I did place third in my local contest. You can check out my robot at http://www.gorobotics.net/ffbot.shtml. It should be up some time :)
  • http://www.wsmr.army.mil/paopage/Pages/blst016.htm

    Freaked me out for a second.

    Nice concept, though. Probably be nice to be able to have bots competent enough to put out a nuke. :)

  • Just being a messerschmidt or whatever you call it
  • I had this image of these robot firefighters trying to put out the fire from this trinity,

    Trinity Test Site [enviroweb.org]

    That would be, er, cool though.

  • I attended a couple of these contests, early in
    their history. They are well worth the trip,
    especially if you have kids who are (or may
    become) technically inclined.

    It's interesting to watch which strategies succeed
    and which fail, and to try to figure out why they
    fail. One strategy that did NOT work, was to
    compute everything to the "nth degree". The
    robot ends up being WAY too slow.

    There are always a couple of innovative approaches
    each year. Some even win the contest for the competitor.

  • Re:I'm more than a little concerned... (Score:3)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:07PM (#185408)
    well jobs being taken over by computers/robots/etc has been a problem for all of history. When computers first came out people were so worried that their jobs would be taken (and they were) but computers created other jobs for people in other areas...

    I say that if a robot can do it better, let it happen. Firefighters are a necessary part of our society (unfortunatly) but it is a dangerous and tax payer expensive job. If a robot was put to the task it is likely that much less money would have to be spent, and many more lives would be saved.

    as far as which one to save... who knows. the current state of AI is low compared to what would need to be available for this type of descision making, but who knows what will happen.

    I say use whatever is best for the job.
  • FYI they look like little AIBO dogs lifting their legs.

  • Re:This is great stuff -- more useful than battleB (Score:3)

    by PingXao ( 153057 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:43PM (#185410)
    Read that John Rowland article again. He vetoed the bill. He was the only one who was *not* ignorant. He may be a politician (strike one) but he's a very smart guy who was lucky enough to get a good education and learned the difference between sound public policy and hysterical nonsense.

    Before attending Villanova, he went to one of the best high schools in the state of Connecticut. Nothing beats a good Catholic school. Nothing. You can bet your last dollar there will *never* be any violence at that school. There are good, smart teachers there that genuinely care about their students. They expect the kids to attain a certain level of academic achievement, and strive to help them do it. A sound education is good preventative medicine for ignorance.

    I'm a Democrat and I vote for Rowland. And this has nothing to do with the fact that I went to the same high school.
  • I don't think that they would use the robot to decide between saving lives or not. It should be used to locate the fire and extinguish it. It could also be used to locate people. But I would think that they would add a camera so a human can take care of making the life or death decisions.
  • i am more woried about the robot putting out my cigarette, candles on my table, or my pilot light.

  • An Insider's Take... (Score:5)

    by svwolfpack ( 411870 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:49PM (#185413) Homepage
    Just thought I'd put in my 2 cents... My friend and I built the 8th place High school robot (milton), which in fact would have come in second except for a stupid error in the code (I'll get to that) which I wrote. Here's my insider's perspective: (I worked closely with all the Trinity teams in their lab, although my friend and I did all the work) This was our second robot we built, last year we did significantly worse (23rd) but we were on the local news, so that was a kick. We're funded by the United Technologies/Trinity College Engineering Initiative, who paid for 99% of our robot. Although many of the groups choose to either custom build the entire robot or build it from various kits, we took possibly the best route, and used legos for all of the structure and the motors. However, Lego Mindstorms just don't cut it, as they dont permit enough sensors. We used a Super T-Comp made by Ray's Robotic Racers (I forget the URL, but it's probably something obvious) as our microcontroller, and I programmed it using Interactive C. The wall sensors are standard sensors made by Sharp, which are more well known for their use in auto-flush urinals. (There's a bit of extra circutry we add in in order to clean up the singnal... i.e. give more consistan readings). There is also a stripe sensor, which is a light sensor mounted next to an LED, which tells fairly accurately where the stripes are that mark entrances to rooms. And there's the candle sensor, which is a straight up IR sensor, usually mounted in some sort of reflective device, such as the mirror from a flashlight, so that the window in which the sensor "sees" the candle is narrower. At a minimum, a robot needs 2 wall sensors (one for each side), a candle sensor, and a stripe sensor. However, it's hard to measure the distance from a wall accurately with only 1 sensor on the side, since the robot could (and usually is) turned at an angle, so think of an arc: The actual distance to the wall varies, but the line perpendicular to the side of the robot extending to the wall can be of constant length, depending on how the robot is oriented. Therefore, our robot had 2 sensors on each side so it could "balance" itself, and make sure it was parralell at any time. It also had a front sensor, so it could see if it was nearing a wall in front, which is critical due to the way the robot "decides" to do things. The robot decides when to turn, stop, rotate, turn its fan on to put the candle out, etc. using readings from the sensors. So for example, if it is following a wall at a constant distance (an important feature, mind you) and it sees that all of a sudden that wall doesnt exist, then it knows that it should turn. Same thing with a wall in the front: if it gets to close, it might need to turn. Of course, which way to turn and whatnot is governed by the program, which essentially knows the entire layout of the maze, and what should happen when, and looks for those specific events to happen. Back to why we would have gotten 2nd... The robot was looking for a stripe near the candle (it had already located it), but intead got off course, because it saw that it was getting too close to a wall (on the side) and needed to turn away... It turned too much, and planted on a front wall before seeing the stripe, because although it was looking for a side wall, it wasnt looking for a front wall. The devil is in the details. Anyway, this year they added a few things, the most prominent was the random start room, which was actually quite easy (we did it) because little did they realize, all the exits/hallways to the rooms are unique, so it's not nearly as hard as the contest designers thought it to be. Here's a little more background on what the actual contest is like: Saturday is qualifying, and many people are completely disorganized. Many don't even qualify. They fill the trinity gym, and the sheer amounts of extenstion cords, people scrambling to find parts, bossy parents instructing their 6th grader how to do things is rediculous. Unfortunately, the number of really innovative robots is sort of dissapointingly low, but the ones that are new are impressive. It's really quite a spectacle. The actual running of the contest takes about 3 hours, but neither my friend nor I nor the Trinity team really got any sleep the saturday night before. Significant portions of code for our and i suspect all of the robots are written within hours or sometimes between runs. It's a completely draining event, but very much so worth it. I hope to compete next year, if at all possible, and I encourage everyone to come at watch, as it really is fun! http://campinappropriate.8m.com

  • Better Idea (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:11PM (#185414)
    I shall create an army of flame-throwing robots, so that the delicate balance of robot power is not upset.
  • Wow, sounds like you're doing pretty well with robotics, being able to asess things as well as you have here. (Might be easier to read if you add paragraphs next time, though...)

    Here's a question and a "smartass comment" too , and rest assured I'm asking because your project really is quite interesting:

    (There's a bit of extra circutry we add in in order to clean up the singnal... i.e. give more consistan readings)

    What sort of circuit design did you use in that extra circuitry, out of interest ... some sort of filter, or opamp?

    Therefore, our robot had 2 sensors on each side so it could "balance" itself, and make sure it was parralell at any time. It also had a front sensor, so it could see if it was nearing a wall in front, which is critical due to the way the robot "decides" to do things.

    You could've achieved the same results, with only *2* sensors total required, if you'd done a bit more math (trig) and "intrinsicly purposed design" with where you put those two sensors. Would've resulted in a smarter bot, too ... Can you figure out how, now that you've had a chance to review things in practice?

    (Sorry if this is a question you're already answering in school ...)

  • Great Competition (Score:3)

    by Corby911 ( 250281 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:11PM (#185416) Homepage
    I competed in this competition 2 years ago (a search in google for Trinity and 1999 can still find my picture), and thought it was a great competeion. My high school, Council Rock (also represented this year) has an excelent Technology Club, which encourages students to develop robots for both this and the Penn State Trailblazers competition. We used HandyBoards (MIT's mobile robot controler) and legos to build our robots, along with a variety of sensors and servos.

    My year, we had to chose between doing the Trnity Competion and US First competition. We chose Trinity for a few reasons:
    - we didnt have a corporate sponsor
    - First is not autonomous robots - they are remote controlled. Also, there is usually a "human factor" - a person may be able to throw things, etc
    - many teams end up just letting the large corporate sponsor do all the work

    I'm quite glad we skipped First in favor of trinity. It was a very enjoyable (and challenging - read some of the rules from the website for getting bonuses) experience.

  • Re:I'm more than a little concerned... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So we should stop mankind's struggle to automate the chores of life just to prevent unemployment?

    Or could we instead go right on and mechanize dangerous and tedious jobs, and then deal with the social problems that result?

    Only the latter road leads to Starfleet.

  • ya true, but I could not get over the idea of a little bot giving me huffs of laughing gas all day long. Kinda like Jerry Garcia does robotics....

  • Can we give up yet? (Score:4)

    by Denor ( 89982 ) <denor@yahoo.com> on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:28PM (#185419) Homepage
    I'm all for research into robots, but....
    The New York Times has an article on the eighth annual robotic firefighting contest at Trinity College.
    They've been trying for seven years and they haven't put the college out yet? Call some human firefighters, for god's sake!

    I mean come on! Do you have any idea how late for class I'm running?
  • Our high school robotics team (Weston, MA), entered the tournament with our robot named Zurn. During the trials it acted incredibly, however it managed to mess up on all three of our actual runs. In my opinion the most challenging part was getting everything to work together. Also, tweaking it was very difficult. We used an infra-red sensor ot find the candle, and when we turned it to be really sensetive, it would ignore the candle, and when it was set to be very liberal, it would go after the reflection of hte candle on the walls. In my opinion it is a great contest because its a very difficult task to do completely autonomously so it gives robotics teams a lot to do!

    (although I was pushing our other co-president to do battlebots!)
  • Most robots do find the stripe around the candle and use it to know once they're close, because most candle sensors measure intensity of the light fromt the candle, and compare it to "dark"... so it's relative, thus the robot knows when it's pointing at the canndle (maximum brightness compared to everything else) but not how far from the candle it is. The stripe tells it that. Also, the robot can't just operate on a search for the stripe method, as there are stripes at the entrances to all the doors.
  • And you know, that really isn't a bad idea. :-)

  • Brynn showed me the sensor he was working on, it's amazing! A spinning laser rangefinder that works by controlling the speed of an oscillator based on the time-of-flight of the laser light. I can't wait to see it work. FWIW, My robot 'Thermatron I' came in 17th in the senior division.
  • The fire-setting robots will be violating the First Law!
  • I have been building robots for years and finally wanted to compete at Trinity, as I had read about Trinity every year.
    I designed my robot, Tryclops, to win the expert division. Unfortunatly I did not finish my sensor (a laser range finder that returns 64K ranges (1 cm resolution) per second). I went anyway (flew in from Minnesota) and showed off what I had and wandered around and talked to everyone. Some of the seminars were very interesting, All the robots were interesting.
    I plan on going back next year with a finished Tryclops
  • Jake Mendelssohn RULES! He's the one who organizes the competition. Ipsa scientia potestas est.
  • Quite a few people do just look for the candle circle. You'll notice that in the 'expert' class, there are no candle circles
  • Actually, IR is not the best method to sense the candle. There is a Hamamatsu sensor called a 'UV-Tron' that senses the UV light given off by the candle. Many of the higher end robots use the UV-tron to detect whiether the candle is in the room, just by looking in from the doorway with the UV-tron. It is not all that directional so for the final approach people do something else, IR, or look for the candle circle. My approach would be unique (when I get it working) that I only can find the candle stick itself.
  • Asimov himself proved that there are loopholes in his three (and later 4) laws of robotics.

    In one of his stories a character used a robot to commit murder. He told the robot to put the powder from the bag on the top shelf of a certain cupboard into his wife's coffee, and then serve it to her. Robots would have to be way smarter than people to realize that a human would come to harm from that action.

    The problem is that if a robot cannot tell right from wrong then the robot can not follow the three laws no matter how hard it tries.

  • Re:An Insider's Take... (Score:3)

    by Octorian ( 14086 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @07:15PM (#185430) Homepage
    I've used the Super T-Comp before myself. It's a nice board. I've even build my own I/O expansion circuitry for it. Ray also provides full schematics, which were great at learning how such things are designed, and came in handy when I went to expand upon it.

    See the Super T-COMP's site:
    http://www.teleport.com/~raybutts/index.htm [teleport.com]

    I read all about this Trinity competition back when I was building my own robot project. I would have entered, had I not lived in Florida.

    See my project, Chip II:
    http://www.logicprobe.org/~octo/robot/ [logicprobe.org]
  • Nothing beats a good Catholic school. Nothing. You can bet your last dollar there will *never* be any violence at that school.

    Ummmm... except when the boys go to church on Sunday and, well... priests will be priests.

    ;-)
  • Oh sure!
    It sounds like a good idea on the surface.

    I would wory that every time I go to light a smoke, I'd have this thing would blow out the match!

    -Goran
  • Ok, mr smart stuff. Do it. You build a robot that has to navigate a 8x8ft maze, find a candle, and put it out. All without touching anything but the floor. Then we'll see who's so smart.
  • Need to combine this with battle bots!

    Have one setting fires and others putting them out!

  • I'd like to log a complaint about the choice of the article title. I thought it was talking about an R-rated sequel to "The Matrix."

    [Note to humor-impaired moderators, this was a joke]
  • This is ausome. Although battleBots seems more appealing on a basic level, perhaps it's the saw blades and knives... Who knows... Neat though.

    I'm just waiting for the real thing. Has anyone thought about the proportions of these robots. The scale of the robots with respect to the fire? I wouldn't want these things appearing at my house even if it were on fire. They'd probably cause more damage than they'd prevent.


  • There will be a white, 30 cm radius circle (or circle segment if a wall is in the way) on the floor around the candle and the Robot must have some part of its body over the circle before it puts out the candle. The Robot can still shoot a jet of CO2, but some part of the Robot must be within 30 cm of the candle before it does so.
    It would be funny / ironic if somebody designed a robot that sensed the circle around the candle, rather than the candle itself...
  • There's a category for kids in 8th grade and below. I wonder how many off them actually build the robots themselves or if it's there parents. I remember back in High school I was in a similar contest. And some of the kids had coaching them on what to say, since they had done most of the job.

    I see that they took this in consideration already:

    "As far as the students are concerned the goal of the contest should be education and not necessarily winning. We know
    that the students desperately want to win, but the adults should let them compete (win or lose) on their own. This
    contest is pretty much on the honor system, but we expect that the student contestants are primarily responsible for
    the creation of their Robots. If we find any case to the contrary, they will be assigned to a more appropriate
    division. We will try to be very fair, and as in everything else, the decision of the Contest Judging Committee is
    final."

  • another one bytes the dust!
    and another one's gone!
    and another one's gone!
    another one bytes the dust!

    Slashdot effect one point, www.trincoll.edu zero.

  • However on the other hand, have they been programmed to obey Asimov's laws of robotics ? As long as they are not self-conscious it is not a problem. The problems arise when they will be able to predict the consequences and weight pros and cons - then they should have Asimov's thre laws of robotics.

  • The True market... (Score:4)

    by Papa Legba ( 192550 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:20PM (#185441)
    Is for smokers trying to quit. I can imagine how much better my trying to quit smoking would go if everytime I tried to light a cigarette it got put out and I got a facefull of C02 to go with it.

    That is until I got smart and replaced the C02 with N02 and enjoyed it a lot more....
  • contrary to the other poster, that's not what "all" of them do, and the best ones don't. You need IR sensors whether your sensing either the line or the candle, and sweeping the room for candle IR is much quicker than trying to walk every inch of each room to see if there's a white circle in it. Its timed event, so I guarantee our school's robot of a few years ago would toast any circle finding bot.
  • NO2 sounds a little dangerous - it would probably trigger your cigarette to burn much faster (or break into a flame) due to the way that NO2 supercools the air. I don't think I'd want a faceful of flame, personally :)

    ...although it might cause me to quit even faster than C02 :)

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