Inspiration
Our inspiration was to develop a human intervention-less assistance to the work of searching and extinguishing fires and minimize damage to human lives and property without exposing fire fighters to additional risks.
What it does
This robot is designed with autonomy and navigation features for locating and detecting fires inside a building and to extinguish it to avoid untoward incidents or the loss of lives.
How we built it
The first part of this project was to build the mechanical structure of the robot. We ensured using a strong and sturdy chassis with two motor wheels on the rear side of the robot that enabled 360 degrees of mobility to the robot, then we installed at the front side of the robot an IR based Flame Sensors for detecting fire and finally a servo motor for triggering the built-on fire extinguisher spray can.
The second major part of this project was dealing with hardware such as integrating the Arduino UNO board, our L293D Motor Driver Module, DC geared motors, 9V battery, 1.4Ah Lead Acid battery, 5V relay modules, and servo motor.
Finally, the third task involved programming for room mapping with the YDLIDAR, controlling the robot for mobility, fire detection and extinguishing, using Arduino IDE and ROS navigation on Linux operating system. The source code is given in the respective GitHub repository.
Challenges we ran into
None of the teammates had worked with ROS navigation before, documentation as well learning from each other experiences helped us get through every obstacle we came across.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to create an autonomous firefighting robot within two months. Despite not having experience with a major part of the technologies and tools we used, we were able to get everything done just by referring to documentations and watching YouTube videos which speaks volumes about how far we have come. Despite the circumstances, we were able to stick to the timeline made by us at the beginning of the project. We managed our time and coordinated really well.
What we learned
We learned to interface many of the mechanical components we installed on top of our robot and especially using ROS navigation and interpreting the collected data was the most rewarding to have learned.
What's next for Autonomous Fire Fighting Robot
Adding more range for the fire detection and adding support for uploads of larger files as well.
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