Design issues for a fire-fighting robot on tunnel intervention

In this work a robot for fighting fires in road and railways tunnels is presented. The problems of security in tunnels is first discussed with particular attentions to the vulnerability to fire of actual tunnels, the potential disaster connected to non controlled fires and the issues concerned with fire fighting in close environments as tunnels. The important role that robotics may play for fire fighting and disaster preventing is outlined and a particular robotic system, purposely designed for tunnels, is presented. A dynamic model of the robot is developed, which is exploited for dimensioning the mechanical structure as well as for actuators selection and trajectory planning. The design takes into account the constraints deriving from mechanical and electrical charges, energy consumption, intervention time.