Inspiration
Fires can spread fast and put people in danger. We wanted to build a small robot that can find a fire and put it out on its own, without anyone having to get close.
What it does
Blaze Guard is a self-driving fire-fighting robot. It uses three flame sensors (left, center, right) to find where a fire is. It turns toward the strongest flame and drives closer. When it is close enough, it stops and sprays water with a pump on a moving servo arm. It keeps spraying until the flame is gone, then shuts the pump off.
How we built it
- Arduino board running our own code
- 3 flame sensors to detect fire and its direction
- Motor driver and 2 DC motors to move the car
- Servo to sweep the water nozzle left and right
- Relay to switch a water pump on and off
The robot compares the three sensor readings. A lower reading means a stronger flame, so it moves toward the lowest one.
Challenges we ran into
- The pump kept turning on and off instead of staying on, because of how our pump code was written. We fixed it so the pump stays on until the fire is out.
- Tuning the sensor values so the robot could tell "no fire," "fire far," and "fire close."
- Making sure the relay worked with the right ON/OFF signal.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- The robot finds and drives toward a fire by itself.
- It keeps spraying and stops once the flame is out.
- We built and tested the whole thing and got it working.
What we learned
- How flame sensors, relays, servos, and motor drivers work together
- How to test and fix hardware and code problems step by step
- How to tune sensor thresholds to get reliable results
What's next for Blaze Guard
- Add a smoke or temperature sensor
- Add obstacle avoidance so it can move around objects
- Make it faster and give it a bigger water tank
- Add alerts to send a message when it detects a fire
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