According to a posting on the U.S. Department of Defense’s Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer page, the Pentagon is looking for a new robot capable of extracting wounded soldiers from the battlefield with “minimal intervention” from traditional medics. The posting emphasizes the need for an autonomous system in order to “reduce or eliminate operator intervention or avoid distraction of soldier first responders from their primary duties.”
There are a total of seven challenges on which they are calling for solutions:
- Plan and execute approach and regress routes within both urban and wilderness terrain, and without preloaded maps or terrain models
- Communicate with and facilitate communications between patients and human medics
- Execute command, control, and coordination of individual robots, robot teams, and medical payloads
- Perform remote/stand-off initial casualty assessment to iidentify injuries sufficient to prevent further injury during robotic casualty extraction
- Lift, move, drag, tow, or otherwise effect recovery of patients in any of numerous body positions from hazardous environments in any terrain to safe locations
- Provide closed loop or semi-autonomous casualty monitoring and enroute care sufficient to mitigate risk associated with “abandonment” concerns during unattended CASEVAC (casualty extraction and evacuation – ed.)
- Plan and conduct recovery from errors or the unexpected
The posting also notes that the Army has been working on research in this area, but is having particular trouble solving the issue of safely picking up wounded soldiers for transport (number five). From the information in the posting, as well as the added questions and answers, any proposals that could come up with a solution to this particular issue would have the best chance at a positive evaluation.
BBTV3NNBR7KQ