Not the one they showed here - it was ~10ft long, and making it longer means more jets which means more water which means making the hose bigger which means it’s heavier....
This is purely a first step in a long process of potentially making a robot snake that can fight fires in specific scenarios. A worthy goal, but it’s a long way from being useful.
Well yeah, I thought it was obvious that it was a proof of concept, otherwise they could have just aimed a traditional hose through the opening to put out the fire. As the article says "It worked reasonably well, as prototypes go, but it’s really more of a proof of concept in hardware than anything else, and obviously there’s a lot to do before a system like this could be real-world useful"
As for future directions it could take (no pun intended): "Since the nozzles are steerable, each module can direct itself independently, letting the hose weave itself through small gaps deep into a structure in order to find the source of a fire... The 2-meter long prototype in the video above is intended to be a single segment in a robot that can be extended to an arbitrary length by just adding on more segments"
The article concedes "What’s happening here might be complex to implement in practice"
If you think in a full flying hose, yes, but there is not need to this. Most of the hose weight could rest in the floor under wheels with a flying head part only for the 90% of the time. Most fire at homes mean some flat area (at least for a while) with maybe some stairs and the weight of the hose would rest in the soil. The weight would be also much lower than a heavy firefigther, so the risk of soil collapsing is also reduced and that would simplify the problem. The robot could be send as scout to clear the area and find risks before humans arrive.
The problem of the full firetruck can be solved if you use a special companion truck exclusively for having a fully mounted robotic hose for special cases (no need to put clothes, axes, hoses, etc in the same truck). All you need is to paid a driver and maybe a second worker to remotely manage the robot so would be cheaper (after you pay the, probably, expensive robot) than adding a second team of fireworkers.
Drones baby... they need to Add Drones to the Hose, that will solve the weight problem.
See, Drones can help solve nearly any engineering problem.
Remember, Drones are Your Friend.
The problem with drones is how to move them. Lithium batteries would last only for some minutes if you need to support a lot of weight. And then, your expensive robot would just burn somewhere
An electric cable would put electricity and water together, create sparks that could reignite some areas, and add new dangers in form of chopping rotating blades and maybe swinging cables.
A drone in form of a flying fire extinguiser could be a better idea than a hose-drone, but still would need to fly and keep stability against powerful convection currents caused by the fire.
And of course you can forget anything with combustion engines or hydrogen fuel on it if you plan to put it in a fire.
This is purely a first step in a long process of potentially making a robot snake that can fight fires in specific scenarios. A worthy goal, but it’s a long way from being useful.