Robot firefighter puts out shipboard flames

The U.S. Navy firefighting robot, SAFFiR passed a major test, battling and beating a real fire on a real ship.

Okay, this wasn’t exactly like a scene from Backdraft. The 5 ft. 10 in., 140 bipedal robot accomplished the task very, very slowly and with a good assist from the programmers at Virginia Tech and a couple of handlers nearby to catch the lumbering bot if it happened to fall over. Oh, and the robot actually put out the burning chair aboard the decommissioned USS Shadwell way back in November of 2014.SAFFiR (or Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot) is a joint project of Virginia Tech and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.