A new approach towards Teleoperated Fire Fighting

Many attempts concerning teleoperated fire fighting were made without much success so far. In this paper a new approach towards teleoperated fire fighting is presented that bases on experiences of the past. The approach is made by using a tracked vehicle to pull the fire figthting equipment to the scene of fire. The information being necessary for the operator to guide and to control the vehicle safely is acquired by a low cost multi-sensor system. Dependent on the environmental conditions, the speed of the vehicle and the amount of necessary information, different sensors are used to obtain the data. This sensor data is fused, verified and 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. The fire fighting robot and the sensor system itself are to be the basis for several other applications in the future.