August 2007

Firefighter Safety Spurs Interest In Robots

By Lyn Bixby

Early this year the Virginia Department of Transportation, using state and federal money, bought four wireless remote-controlled firefighting robots for four towns in the state’s Hampton Roads area at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay, primarily for dealing with fires in tunnels that connect the communities.

The purchase was the culmination of a three-year effort by Newport News Fire Chief Kenneth Jones to get the robots – Austrian-made LUF60s – imported into the United States.

This summer, a fire department in rural northeastern Pennsylvania applied for a federal grant to buy an LUF60 to ventilate industrial buildings in cases of accidents and fires.

In Texas, Dallas Fire Rescue officials say they plan to apply for a grant to buy an LUF60 for fires in high-rise buildings and warehouses.

And in southern California this spring, the Santa Ana Fire Department bought a different kind of robot – an American-made Talon – for its hazmat team, which had been testing robots for several years.

“I think this is the dawn of the era of robots in terms of the fire world,” said Cynthia Black, a spokeswoman with Foster-Miller, Inc., of Waltham, Mass., the company that makes the Talon.

Jim McLaughlin, a salesman who has been crisscrossing the country this year in a Ford F350 with a 4,400-pound LUF60 in tow, said he believes he is on the cutting edge of something special, judging by the reactions of firefighters at demonstrations he has conducted and the curiosity of bystanders everywhere he stops.

If Black and McLaughlin are right, the anticipated new era of robots will likely owe its development to the national movement toward greater safety in the fire service, as well as the availability of grant money – because the devices are expensive and fire departments run on tight budgets. The price for the LUF60 is more than $200,000. The Talon, which was purchased with a federal grant, cost the Santa Ana Fire Department $110,000.

Jim Melton, a Santa Ana Fire Department hazmat specialist, said his department did its best to keep the Talon’s price down, including using its own instruments. “Every [robot] company out there says, ‘If you pay us, we’ll put the instruments on,’” Melton said. “We said, ‘Whoah, whoah, whoah, we’re the fire department, we have instruments. If you can’t program it to use the ones we have, we’ll duct tape them to it.’”

Revolutionizing Hazmat

Melton is making somewhat of a name for himself in the realm of robotics. He has done considerable testing of robots supplied by different manufacturers for hazmat applications, has become a consultant to Foster-Miller and gives presentations at conferences, some with rather obscure names, such as the Unmanned Systems Capabilities Conference III, also known as USCCIII, early this year in Nashville, Tenn.

At that gathering he predicted robots will revolutionize hazmat operations by increasing the safety and situational awareness of firefighters, as well as others caught up in hazmat incidents. And while he is a consultant to a manufacturer, he called on the robot companies to make their products more versatile, reliable and durable, as well as encouraging them to cut their prices and to improve their field support.

Phone Calls Weekly

In an interview in July, Melton estimated that less than a dozen hazmat teams in the U.S. are using robots, but he said many more are taking serious looks at purchasing them.

“We get phone calls weekly, ‘What did you guys do, how did you do it?’” he said. “We’re not promoting any particular company. We’re saying the robot works for us. Obviously some are better than others, but they are all good in their own way. They have their own specialties and advantages.”

The Talon robot, a compact, tracked device that looks gangly with its arm and mast extended, is built for military, SWAT and hazmat applications, designed by an engineering company formed about 50 years ago by three graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As of this summer, more than 1,000 Talons were in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to Martin Foley, Foster-Miller’s global anti-terrorism manager. The company boasts that one Talon “has actually been blown up three times, yet is still in the fight with new arms, wrists, wiring and cameras.”

The LUF60 was the idea of a group of Austrian volunteer firefighters who were having a few beers in the Alps one night about seven years ago, according to McLaughlin, who is the LUF60 sales manager for Singer Associates Fire Equipment, Inc., which is based in Virginia and is the exclusive distributor of the device in the United States.

“They’ve got over 2,000 tunnels in Austria alone, and they wanted to come up with a way to better fight fires inside those tunnels,” he said. “They came up with this machine drawn on a cocktail napkin from the concept of a snow cannon from an Austrian Alps ski resort.”

Rechner’s, a small, family-owned Austrian company, began manufacturing and selling the device in 2001. “The LUF60 has been specially designed and developed to allow firefighters to approach safely and control the seat of a fire despite the presence of heavy smoke, flames and superheated gases,” the company proclaims on its Web site.

Singer Steps Up

The robot looks like a small tank with a large barrel mounted on top. The barrel is a steel and cast aluminum water cannon with a hydraulically-driven ventilation fan and 360 high-pressure nozzles, capable of flowing Class A and Class B foam. The diesel-powered robot has a rubber track system, capable of withstanding temperatures of 400 degrees Fahrenheit and giving it the ability to climb stairways up to a 30-degree angle. The manufacturer says the machine “clears the path for advancement of up to a distance of 1,000 feet by incorporating a high-capacity positive-pressure ventilator and a ‘water beam’ fog.”

In 2004 Jones, the fire chief in Newport News, Va., was flipping through a foreign fire service trade journal when he came across the LUF60.

“Right outside my window at City Hall, I can see the Monitor-Merrimack tunnel,” Jones said in an interview last month, “and we don’t have a very effective way to deal with fires in tunnels, and that goes for the whole United States.”

Jones set out to investigate the LUF60 and decided he wanted to buy one. But because the product was not sold in the U.S., he needed to find an American distributor.

“I’ve known Dick Singer [president and CEO of Singer Associates] for about 35 years because he was a volunteer up in Fairfax when I was with the fire department up there a long time ago,” he said. “Mr. Singer saw the merits of the case and stepped up to the plate when I couldn’t get anybody else to.”

Meanwhile, Jones began trying to line up funding for a robot purchase. Because the roads through the tunnels linking Newport News, Portsmouth, Norfolk and Hampton are state roads, he went after government transportation funds. One of the people he contacted was his congressman, U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott. “He said, ‘It’s a no-brainer,’ and he was able to get it in the 2005 federal highway bill,” Jones recalled. “That was 80 percent of the money and then we kind of put the pressure on Virginia Department of Transportation, ‘What are you going to do, turn down 80 percent?’ They came up with the other 20 percent and purchased the machines and turned them over to the local governments.”

The robots were delivered to the four towns in January and cost about $220,000 each. Jones said his department has trained on the robots, but has not had to use them. Although he wanted them for tunnel fires, he said, “they can be used for parking garages and large commercial structures. Anything that either needs suppression or a large ventilation capability that you need to do remotely, that machine can do it.”

He sees the LUF60 as an innovative device, one that offers new options for fighting fires. “It’s like the fire service has always been like infantry, they pull up and they deploy from their vehicle with hose lines like infantry,” he said. “This will be the first time we’ve had a tank to go into the structure, whatever it is, and then it puts out a cone of suppression agent which is water fog and then the firefighters come in with hand lines like infantry supporting the tank. So this revolutionizes the whole strategy of dealing with fires in large structures.”

It also provides protection for his firefighters, he said. “If something happens, I’ve lost a $200,000 robot, I haven’t lost anybody,” he said.  “There’s a lot of places that in order to get close enough, you have to put people in harm’s way to get the water stream on the fire, and this thing will shoot a water beam at least 180 feet. So that’s more than any hand line, and you’re not endangering people inside possibly compromised structures.”

Before he knew about the LUF60, Jones said he had already seen a robot in action because Newport News is the only fire department in Virginia that has a bomb squad. “I’ve been out on calls and watched the proficiency of those members of the department that deal with suspicious packages with the robot,” he said. “We really need to be looking at robotic machines.”

While tunnels for roads and trains and subways are features of many U.S. cities, he said it may take some time for the LUF60 to catch on in this country. “The reason we’re behind the curve on this one is we haven’t had any major fatalities like the Europeans have had in their tunnels,” he said, “and unfortunately, as everybody knows, in the fire service you have to have casualties to get change.”

Funding Is Biggest Issue

Richard Singer said the biggest issue for his company as the U.S. distributor of the LUF60 is the time it takes for fire departments to arrange funding to buy the robot. “Every place we’ve shown it, they want to buy it right then and there,” he said. “The problem is coming up with the $200,000 or thereabouts that it takes to purchase the unit.”

Before he negotiated the agreement with Rechner’s to sell the robot in the U.S., he said he talked with potential customers and made a number of trips to Europe. “Obviously, it’s a business decision,” he said. “It could be the neatest thing in the world, but if you can’t sell it for a profit then you can’t consider it. You have to look at it very carefully. In this particular case, there is a tremendous need for it.”

While Chief Jones first wanted the LUF60 for tunnel fires, other fire departments are trying to get the robot for different applications.

Dallas Fire-Rescue Deputy Operations Chief Michael Price said his department would like to buy the robot for high-rise and warehouse fires. The machine was put through some tests last fall in the department’s simulated high-rise building, though not under fire conditions.

“We’ve had some pretty good high-rise fires in our city, and we’ve always been able to do it by quick aggressive attack,” Price said. “But we think on fires that we cannot control with hand lines, it’s another option to where you’ll be able to try to get a piece of equipment out on the floor and not risk your firefighters… Someone was thinking when they built it.”

He said the LUF 60 did “pretty well” on stairs, but he wouldn’t want to try to send the robot from the bottom floor up stairs all the way to a high-rise fire. He said it fits on most elevators.

 “We like the piece of equipment,” he said, “we’re just trying to find a way to pay for it.”

He said his department will apply for a grant to buy the robot, but not a federal Fire Act grant, which has provided more than $3 billion for fire departments to purchase equipment over the past six years.

Cutting Edge Equipment

“The basis of the Fire Act grant a lot of times is to bring everyone up to a certain level,” Price said, “and this is a little more cutting edge type equipment.”

But the Harwood Fire Company in Hazel Township, Pa., has applied for a Fire Act grant to buy a LUF60 and the anticipated use would be for ventilation.

The department is small, but its coverage area has some huge warehouse facilities and is developing rapidly with plans for a new cargo airport, according to Deputy Chief Rich Naprava, who said he considers the robot a regional purchase.

“We’ve had a couple of incidents where the [industrial] complexes have been just about completely filled with smoke,” he said.  “They were only minor fires, but the smoke output was pretty great, and it just took us forever to ventilate it. Not only can we help our guys get in and out a little quicker, but it will also get the facilities back up and running.”

He first heard about the LUF60 when he saw McLaughlin demonstrate it at the Fire Department Instructors Conference this spring in Indianapolis.

McLaughlin said the robot’s manufacturer has redesigned the device and added options in response to suggestions from American firefighters who have seen the demonstrations.

“The ideas came from Baltimore, New York City, Boston and Chicago,” he said. “Every time we showed it in one of these major cities, they said it would be great if it could do this or that.”

He said the new unit, which has a base price of about $265,000, is the same size as the original, but has a more powerful John Deere engine, increasing the horsepower from 95 to 140; three water inlets instead of two; a stronger water pump; a 800 gpm three-inch turret in the center of the fan tube that can be replaced with a high-expansion foam nozzle; an optional three-point hydraulic hitch on the front that can be equipped with a box or a blade; an optional integrated winch under the machine; optional infrared and visual cameras; and a optional hydraulic rail kit. 

The American-made Talon robot has also been modified – in its case for hazmat operations – by incorporating suggestions from firefighters.

Manpower Multipliers

Melton, the Santa Ana firefighter and who specializes in hazmat and urban search and rescue and has been testing robots for several years, said one reason his department bought a Talon is that it is relatively lightweight – about 110 pounds – and is compact enough to ride in a compartment on a truck.

Melton refers to robots as manpower multipliers that enable firefighters to see when they are going into potentially dangerous situations with a lot of unknowns.

“We just had a USAR drill about two weeks ago,” he said, “and by the time the guys were dressed our robot had checked three tunnels and found the victim in five and a half minutes. Our guys were still suiting up and gathering their extrication ropes and their breathing apparatus and meters.”

He said safety is what sold his chief on buying a robot.

“We commit no men initially to recon and we get a reading and we can see,” he said of the department’s hazmat team. “The fire department has never been able to see. We get in there and see what it is and radio back. That is the whole thing that drove this.”

Sampling The Cloud

He said the Talon is used every time the Hazmat Team responds to a call, particularly because he and others want to see what it can – and can’t – do. “The Talon we have is not made for entering the fire,” he said. “But we’ll push it up into the cloud of something coming out of a fire, we’ll push it up and extend the arm. We have sampling tubes that go up about six feet, and so we’ll sample the cloud.”

He said he has pushed all the robots he has tested up to and beyond their limits to try to develop new applications. “Twenty-five years ago when I was a new firemen, I had no idea how to use a Halligan tool,” he recalled. “I just thought it was a very heavy pry-bar, and then some old trucker took me aside and said, ‘Come here kid, let me show you how to open a door.’ I didn’t know any better.”

He said he has used robots in tests to deploy sensors, to drill holes to relieve pressure in potentially-explosive drums of chemicals, to drag firefighters to safety and to administer Mark 1 kits for exposure to nerve agents.

“It shows how can we offer some kind of aid when it takes us a long time to get dressed,” he said. “We can run that robot down carrying a Mark 1 kit, stab your body with it into a thigh muscle or any large muscle and it auto-injects the medication. We’ve done test after test after test, and that thing works great. You’ve never seen a bunch of firemen smile so much.”

Menton maintains the time it takes for a hazmat team member to get fully dressed is one of the biggest reasons to have a robot.

“Undergarmets, Tyvek suits, inside booties, four pairs of gloves, the oversuit, which is the level A suit, all these things end up being time hungry, and we’re still not in there,” he said. “If we are very fast we can get in there in maybe under 30 minutes once we get all the personnel. With a robot, like the one we just purchased, it takes us just under four minutes to get it out and move it. It travels approximately six miles per hour, it can go down range, it can give us live video feeds, we have two-way audio, we can hear and see what’s going on, and we have a general spectrum of meter support on the robot itself. We have radiation meters, we have industrial gas, chemical warfare detectors, ph meters and paper, and we have a sampling device so we can sample liquids on the ground or powder. This is something that we can do in a matter of minutes, and that’s something that we could have never done.”

When the robot is working, the live video feeds can be sent to monitors where they can be watched and analyzed by people other than the Talon operator. The video could even be beamed to the chief’s office, Melton pointed out, and after an incident, it can be used as a training tape.

“It’s an excellent tool for the guys who may not have made it to that event,” he said. “It’s not the answer. It’s just a good tool. The answer is our guys, who are highly trained.”

For information about the Talon call 781-684-4000 or go to www.foster-miller.com. For information about the LUF call 800-442-9700 or go to www.luf60.com.

An Austrian-made LUF60 remote-controlled firefighting robot gets a workout dealing with a simulated refinery fire in a Rotterdam test facility in the Netherlands. (Photo By Dietmar Mathis)

The HD-1 robot weighs about 200 pounds and is made by Remotec, a subdisiary of Northrop Grumman. It was developed for military and bomb squad applications and is also being marketed as a hazmat robot. A Remotec robot was among those tested by the Santa Ana Hazmat Team.

Foster-Miller’s Talon robot weighs about 110 pounds and is equipped with JAUS (Joint Architecture Unmanned Systems) software to make it possible to “plug and play” up to seven sensors mounted on a quick-release tray.