Lifeboat Foundation

Virginia Tech’s Visual Arts Department and Engineering Department have been joining forces to design ESCHER, a firefighting robot.

ESCHER was originally created at the beginning of 2015 in the Terrestrial Robotics Engineering and Controls Laboratory. ESCHER is short for Electronic Series Compliant Humanoid for Emergency Response.

“The special application for this project is the idea that ESCHER could go on naval ships and fight fires and go places that would normally be hazardous to humans,” said Meaghan Dee, assistant professor and chair of Visual Communications. “If you think of something like the Fukushima Disaster, you could have just sent in a robot, and that’s what these emergency robots are designed to do.”