Coming Soon to Your Home: Blaze-Battling Robots
Anne Eisenberg New York Times Service
Friday, June 1, 2001

NEW YORK To Jacob Mendelssohn, an engineering professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the smoke detector is a fine piece of technology. But it is a limited one - while it can tell if a fire has started, it cannot do anything to stop it.

For that, most people have to rely on a fire department. And that, Mr. Mendelssohn recalled thinking years ago, can be a problem. "I realized that my smoke alarm could go off, but by the time the firefighters arrived, my house could burn down," he said.

To address that problem, and because he has always loved robots, Mr. Mendelssohn came up with an idea: firefighting robots for the home. Since no such thing existed, he came up with another idea: a robot firefighting competition, open to designers of all ages. Robots would search for a fire, and the one that was the first to find and extinguish the flames would win.

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