Our First Look Inside SAFFiR, the U.S. Navy's Firefighting Robot

We've got pics of the new humanid robot from Virginia Tech

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Our First Look Inside SAFFiR, the U.S. Navy's Firefighting Robot

When we posted about SAFFiR last week (the firefighting robot being developed by Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory), the best we could offer you in terms of imagery was a picture of CHARLI, a diagram, and a gratis screenshot of a flaming Terminator robot. Now Dr. Dennis Hong, the director of RoMeLa, wrote in to share these pics of what SAFFiR actually looks like right now.

I dunno about you, but my first reaction to these pics was something along the lines of "whoa, beefy." By comparison, CHARLI looks positively skeletal. Here's another pic of SAFFiR:

To recap, some of the distinguishing features of SAFFiR include those big, serious parallel linear actuators on the hip and ankle joints, titanium springs in the knees, and a central aluminum structure to allow to robot to carry a bunch of grenades and fire extinguishers and stuff. I'm still waiting to see how SAFFiR will manage to climb up ladders on a ship busy doing barrel rolls in a hurricane while on fire, but I think we can all be fairly confident that if RoMeLa can figure that out, more RoboCup wins should be no problem at all.

Via [ RoMeLa ]

Images: Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa)

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