Intelligent Mobile Robots being developed for disaster mitigation, fire fighting

ISLAMABAD: Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications is in process of developing an Intelligent Mobile Robots (IMR) to them for disaster mitigation and fire fighting.

Efforts have been made to equip the mobile robots with all modern sensing and communication devices with on-board computational capabilities.

A Senior Manager at Ignite, a department of the Ministry of IT on Friday said the intelligent mobile robots have features including detection and extinguishing fire, intelligent behavior such as object detection, target tracking, collision avoidance, formation movement of a group of robots and autonomous and manual control.

"Now we are working on remote-controlled, heavy-duty robot (Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Observation Robot) which would provide enhanced bomb disposal capabilities to EOD teams," the official said.

MoIT is funding the project through National ICT Research and Development Fund (Ignite) and Principal Investigator's Organization (PIO) is PAF Karachi Institute of Economics and and Technology. The cost of this on-going project was Rs.14.68 million.

The official while seeking more funds for the advanced level Robot said, the cost of locally manufactured robot would be around Rs. 4 million while the cost of imported robot is around 0.4 million Dollar. The IMRs with all of the state-of-the-art technologies built into it are very costly. Small scale IMRs are available in market but all of them have manual control which is difficult to manage and even the experienced personnel cannot guarantee a successful mission.

Giving further details, the official said IMRs has been built in-house and after completing all tests would be available for local industries/hospitals/offices after one year.

The intelligent mobile robots will be able to execute a mission (e.g. object detection in a complex terrain, surveying, trajectory following etc) by incorporating intelligent techniques and robust control algorithms.

The past records indicate a high frequency of disasters of multiple nature and magnitudes as experienced by Pakistani nation. These disasters include industrial fires, terrorism, floods and earthquakes.

The industrial sector of Pakistan is huge and consist of myriad industrial units ranging from cement manufacturing, dying units, steel, glass, paints and many others in which heavy machinery is utilized.

Due to the ad-hoc nature of industrial setup and absence of stringent rules and regulations governing the installation and commissioning of boilers, heaters and many other electro-mechanical equipment, accidents are frequent. In most of the cases the accidents no matter what the cause leads to fire.

The fire fighting department, in most cities is unable to provide immediate support for extinguishing the fire.

Quick and effective rescue operation cannot be guaranteed due to many unavoidable reasons. Fire fighting is a dangerous job which in certain situations may lead to severe casualties of the work force involved.

Therefore, the scope of the project is to develop a group of intelligent cooperative fire fighting and disaster mitigation mobile robots which can perform critical operations in adverse circumstances and hazardous environments.

The developed mobile robots can be included as a work force in fire fighting department.

The official said Intelligent Mobile Robots are extensively used nowadays in many applications and they are extremely helpful.

They can be effectively utilized in life threatening missions as well as in harsh weathers for surveillance investigation, tracking, rescue operation and map generation.

Sensor network based technologies have been used can to enhance the level of preparedness and ability to handle consequences of the disaster in robots.