This is my first project, modify Rovio into an automatic fire extinguisher. I originally posted it on robocommunity, the official forum of the Wowwee company: http://www.robocommunity.com/forum/thread/15894/Rovio-fire-extinguisher

The thread on robocommunity gained wide media interest, you can find the following websites also introducing this project:

http://botropolis.com/2009/04/rovio-fire-extinguisher-mod/

http://www.slashgear.com/rovio-fire-extinguisher-mod-2842083/

http://www.makeclub.org/ideas/items/view/7579

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/30/rovio-finds-new-purpose-in-life-with-fire-extinguisher-mod/

http://gizmodo.com/5231474/rovio-modded-to-fight-blazing-candles

Report by New York Times, Nov.4 2010, on page B10:

View full story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/technology/personaltech/04basics.html

Report on my university’s home page:

http://xjtunews.xjtu.edu.cn/xssh/2009-06/1245376865d23550.shtml

http://xjtunews.xjtu.edu.cn/xssh/resource/h000/h49/img200906191000192.jpg

I’ve done a lot of works regarding machine vision algorithms and microelectronics. The Wowwee Rovio is a wonderful platform to do some experiments, and I changed its shell as well as its inner circuit to make it a fully automatic vision guided fire extinguisher robot . I made a electromagnetic valve and added it to rovio, the bottle on the right is filled with CF2ClBr(4ATM):

Then I use adaboost+SVM to train rovio, I’ve worked in visual flame tracking before and at that time I was asked to develop a surveillance software to track smoke and flames. I tested many different algorithms, and finally I applyed the method used in face detection to give a robust result. I used Haar-like rectangular features and integral image to describe flame features and used SVM instead of the cascade classifier. The exprimental result is quite good, even though Rovio’s camera is not that stable and reliable:

And then…rovio became an auto fire extinguisher! Rovio is just wonderful! The following are snapshots of the experiment:

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