Scientists have developed a flying dragon, called the Dragon Firefighter that will be able to fight fire - by shooting water out of its mouth.

The Dragon, invented by Japanese researchers, is expected to join firefighter teams to put out fires that are too large and dangerous for humans to fight. “We here present a prototype (原型) of a four-meter-long, remotely controllable flying firehose (消防水带) robot, designed to safely and quickly put out fires in buildings by directly getting close to the fire sources,” said Dr Yuichi Ambe, from Osaka University. Researchers also worked closely with Japanese firefighters to understand the type of help they may need when fighting bigger fires.

This is not the first time the robot has shown its potential to the world, however. The Dragon Firefighter was introduced at the World Robot Summit in 2021, where it managed to put out a fire around 4 meters away. “Since the show at the World Robot Summit, we have continued to work on improving our Dragon and have learned many new things,” said Dr Yu Yamauchi, from Akia Prefectural University.

“For example, we found that the original passive dampening mechanism (洒水机制) had its problem: it took too long to prepare for flight. We also found that heat from fires can greatly influence the outdoor applications of the corrugated tube (波纹管) that holds the water hose and electric cables (电缆).”

Since its first show, improvements have been made to improve the mouth it uses to shoot out water. Despite this, it could be a long time before you see the Dragon Firefighter out in the real world. “We believe that it will take about 10 more years to offer our robot in real-world firefighting situations,” said Ambe. “The primary challenge will be to increase its reach to beyond 10 meters. Developing useful firefighting methods for this robot’s unique potential will be a key part of further development.”

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT=3. 5 (Click to learn more). It has a remarkable ability to interact in a conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human. Large language models perform the task of predicting the next word in a series of words.

Is ChatGPT Free To Use?

The use of ChatGPT is currently free during the “research preview” time. The chatbot is currently open for users to try out and provide feedback on the responses so that the AI can become better at answering questions and to learn from its mistakes. However, ChatGPT is envisioned as a tool that the public will eventually have to pay to use.

How Can ChatGPT Be Used?

ChatGPT can write code, poems, songs, and even short stories in the style of a specific author. The expertise in following directions elevates ChatGPT from an information source to a tool that can be asked to accomplish a task. This makes it useful for writing an essay on virtually any topic. ChatGPT can function as a tool for generating outlines for articles or even entire novels. It will provide a response for virtually any task that can be answered with written text.

Limitations

●ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.

●ChatGPT is sensitive to tweaks (微调) to the input phrasing or attempting the same prompt multiple times. For example, given one phrasing of a question, the model can claim to not know the answer, but given a slight rephrase (重新措辞), it can answer correctly.

●While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior. We’re using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect it to have some false negatives and positives for now. We’re eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system.