New Directions In Fire Fighting Robotics
David J. Ahlgren · 2020
The Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest (TCFFHRC) encourages inventors of all ages and levels of skill to develop autonomous fire-fighting home robots that can find, and extinguish as quickly as possible, a randomly placed fire in a model house.Open to persons of all ages and levels of skill, the contest engages a wide community of roboticists, whether school children or professional engineers, in a challenging shared design task, promotes robotics as a learning medium, builds international connections, strengthens cooperation, teamwork, and learning outside the classroom, and promotes the development of robots that someday will fight fires in real homes.This paper describes the contest's history and participation, and it presents changes to the rules that apply to the 2005 contest.As a case study the paper describes past and current projects carried out by the Trinity College Robot Study Team (RST) and demonstrates that the new 2005 contest rules have already had educational and technological impacts.