A Teleoperated Fire Fighting Robot with a Multi-Sensor System for Navigation Purposes

The development of a multi-sensor system with navigation purposes for a teleoperated fire fighting robot is described in this paper. The robot system consists of a tracked vehicle which pulls the fire fighting equipment to the scene of fire. To perform the task and to navigate the robot safely to the target position, the operator needs sufficient information of the robot's environment. This information is acquired by a low cost multi-sensor system. Depending on the environmental conditions, the speed of the vehicle and the amount of necessary information, different sensors are used to acquire the data. This sensor data is fused, verified, corrected and presented on a man-machine-interface taking into consideration the operator's stress situation and that he has to make decisions quickly according to the information he gets.