Design and Installation of Waterproof Wireless Communication Device to Support Firefighting Activities

To enhance search and rescue activities robots are being introduced at disaster sites. Robotic support also has the potential to contribute to improving work efficiency at fire scenes. Transmission of the on-site situation to a base station is also an important task for disaster response robots. To fill this role robots need a network for data transfers. In this paper we present the design and installation of a wireless communication device for use at fire scenes. The device consists of the communicator and the characteristic capsule which protects a stored module. The protector is waterproof so that it can shelter the module and guarantee data exchange even during water spraying activities. The devices are automatically deployed from a dropping platform mounted on a crawler robot. Multiple devices establish a wireless multi-hop ad hoc network along the path of the robot. The network aims to monitor the position of a searching firefighter inside the site. Some verification studies were performed to examine the waterproof performance of the device. Furthermore an experiment demonstrated a successful application using the proposed device.