Also for fighting fires inside buildings I think there may be scenarios where robots can bring advantages and safety to firefighters. However, in most of these cases the primary objective is not to extinguish the fire but to search and rescue for people still missing in there. This is often a task an order of magnitude more difficult, especially for machines (we have problems detecting moving people on open roads, try that with unconcious people in a room filled with smoke and fallen over funiture and items - neither normal nor IR cameras will tell you the whole truth. This is even very hard for people), so your mileage will vary from mission to mission. I don't have a problem with the idea of using robots for this, in contraire, I would like to have the opportunity more often, I would however have them in a different form factor - more the mars rover kind or what we have seen from boston dynamics, with flexible hoses that are better to store and maneuver in small spaces. Also, as I said, using water for propelling will do a lot of damage we are actively trying to avoid.

EDIT: Mainly because of that there is also much work done from the inside, with fully independend respirators and heavy heat gear. A few decades ago, you used to say "spray in on top until the water coming out on the bottom is cold", however the damage is then about as big as if you just would have let the house burn down, so with getting more high tech materials, everything started switching towards more precise actions using less water, often even deconstructing the parts of the house affected by the fire (e.g. had a mission last week where we were ripping apart the roof insulation and opening spots in the roof of a house in a fire after lightning strike, only applying water to the really burning parts).

I would like to see a progress towards a way of working as you mentioned it, but I'm not sure if we would end up exactly there. On a site, there is so much going on that I don't think one person could handle a whole mission remotely. More of a smaller team going out, handling the dangerous stuff from a safe distance very effectively through specialized robots. Firefighting is also a lot about giving the affected people the feeling that someone is there for them and rebuilding their feeling of safety, handling everything fully remote might not be helpful with that.

20 years ago the tech we have today was science fiction. The idea that every person on the planet could have a multi-camera internet connected device would have been ludicrous.

But I understand your perspective, you seem to actually at the sites where you can see how hard it would be for a robot to achieve the same results as a human. But isn't the hope (for geeks anyways) of the future of tech that robots will be able to save _more_ lives than humans alone?

Also, there's a fire fighting game that got popular a few years back. If this is a harbinger of things to come, firefighters in the future may be using xbox controllers to fight fires, just like they use them to fly drones in war.