Ironically, the humanoid shape is only rarely the best configuration for robots. If you think of the animal and insect kingdom from a purely mechanical point of view, for any given thing that a human can do, some animal can do it better.
So when you design a robot, why design for human “good” when you can design based on an animal “better”?
Another advantage of a robot is that it can do safe fire diagnostics, that is, how you fight a fire is based on what kind of fire it is, and what kind of threat it contains.
Personally, I think that in most cases below decks, a robot would spray high expansion firefighting foam and just bury the fire under it. For smaller fires, it could spray CO2 or Halon.
The critical thing is to get it to the fire ASAP.
I suspect that it is built in a human-like shape because the environment it’s designed to work in was constructed for humans.
Wow! You make some great point with respect to robotic design. To that I’ll only add that I think a humanoid shape has a certain “creepy factor” that another design wouldn’t have.