It's a bird, it's a plane — it's a flying firehose robot prototype called the 'Dragon Firefighter'

The Dragon Firefighter in action at the opening ceremony of the World Robot Summit on 08 Oct 2021 in Fukushima, Japan (CREDIT Tadokoro Laboratory, Tohoku University, Japan)

We all know the legend of fictional fire-breathing dragons, soaring above the masses and spewing flames from their mouths. But what if instead of starting fires, there was a dragon that spat water to put them out?

That’s the idea behind the “Dragon Firefighter,” an experimental aerial firefighting robot prototype that has been in development for years in Japan.

A paper was published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI on Dec. 22 describing a successful demonstration of the prototype and releasing a copy of the prototype blueprints for other researchers to build their own.

“We here present a prototype of a four-metre-long, remotely controllable flying firehose robot, engineered to safely and efficiently extinguish fires in buildings by directly approaching the fire sources,” Yuichi Ambe, an assistant professor at Osaka University and joint corresponding author of the paper, said in a press release.

Right now, it’s still in its early stage, so we won’t be seeing a giant robotic hose flying to tackle the scene of a fire in Canada anytime soon. But according to researchers, this technology could help improve safety for firefighters by entering areas of a building that humans can’t safely get to.

The Dragon Firefighter is a remote-controlled giant "hose" that has multiple nozzles firing jets of water out of it. The robot keeps itself in the air not through wings or spinning fans, but through the sheer power of the water shooting out from it at a rate of 6.6 litres per second, which pushes the hose up into the air at a height of around two metres.

The eight nozzles are controllable, so that an operator can move the hose through a building by toggling different nozzles. The hose itself is flexible, able to curve into different shapes and maneuver with the aid of cameras on the hose’s tip. The back end is connected to a fire truck to keep water pumping through it.

Researchers have been working on flying robots for similar purposes since 2016. While it may sound like a strange idea, creative takes on a fire hose have been experimented with before.

The paper mentioned prototypes of a “snake firefighter robot,” which used water pressure to crawl on the ground in underground tunnels that are not easily reached by firefighters, as well as the Shark Robotics Colossus firefighting robot, which can be remotely controlled to move around a scene.

The Dragon Firefighter has gone through numerous iterations—this new paper discusses not only its performance at the opening ceremony of the World Robot Summit 2020, which was held in September 2021 in Fukushima, Japan, but also the changes that occurred before and after that showcase.

During the showcase, the Dragon Firefighter successfully extinguished three fires that had been lit by another robot. The flames were fully snuffed out after 26 seconds.

“Since the demonstration at WRS2020, we have continued to work on improving our Dragon and have learned many new things,” Yu Yamauchi, an assistant professor at Akita Prefectural University and a corresponding author of the research, said in the release.

“For example, we found that the original … Dragon Firefighter’s body was impractical: it took too long to prepare for flight. We also found that heat from fires can cause detrimental plastic deformation in … the corrugated tube that holds the water hose and electric cables.”

Researchers are also working on making the shapes of the robot's nozzles optimized for the best movement and more precise water direction.

As for when this firefighting robot might see active duty?

Researchers estimate it’ll take around ten more years to get it ready to fight actual fires.

“The primary challenge will be to extend its reach to beyond 10 metres,” Ambe said.