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Comment by walshemj | Hacker News Reader

But to replace a fire fighter would require order of magnitude discoveries in several fields you would effectively need true AI and a self powered robot with as good strength and endurance as a human.

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Don't assume that the robotic solution will look anything like the human solution. A fitbit does not look like a "robotic personal trainer" and a roomba does not look like a person with a broom.

I would speculate that the obvious next wins for fire-fighting are drones to visualise the scene from multiple angles, remote control or self-aiming hoses and extinguishers. And various hardened eyes and arms to reach into the fire. All with human oversight, but a reduction in the number of humans involved or in harm's way.

This reduction in manpower is the pattern - e.g. supermarket self-checkouts still have some human staff, but to troubleshoot and supervise.

I'm actually most of the way done with a prototype of a quadcopter that can be deployed on a scene that just orbits and streams video to a monitor in the chiefs vehicle. It's mostly off the shelf components, with a little bit of 'wrapper' that makes is easier to deploy.

The biggest issue I haven't sorted out yet is the batteries... LiPo batteries are great in terms of capacity/weight, but if you keep them fully charged all the time, you kill them pretty quickly...

Swarm them.

When one is approaching 20%, send one that's charged to replace it. Once the replacement has arrived, return the depleted one to the charging station and do not charge past 80% or so.

If you make the charger smart enough to not completely charge the battery, and you have a ..eh.. Battery of copters available, you've solved the problem

Could they be stored at a low temperature until there's an actual need to use the copter?

Ok can this go into a burning building find trapped people and carry them out?

No? That's well outside the scope of its design... what's your point?

And for that matter, better fireproofing.

Right a robot that can perform as well as a fit human firefighter will be available any time now just like fusion, Hard AI is only 5 years away and have been for the last 50 years.

Those things are improving every week. Self-powered robots will exceed human strength and endurance in a few years with steadily improving battery power/kg (metal-air batteries are already better than gas-powered engines). AI for autonomous robots is the current Darpa challenge. And for firefighting, the automation doesn't have to extend as far as life-or-death decisions; those can be made remotely.

Though I'm not sure it needs to be completely automated. You don't see robots writing news articles, but a researcher and Google are more productive than several researchers.

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