ORLANDO — There may come a day when the call of “medic!” on a battlefield will be answered by a robot rather than a corpsman.
Technologists are taking initial steps toward automated medical evacuation.
The vision is to have an unmanned rotor-craft or ground vehicle drive into a hotzone, dispatch a humanoid robot to scoop up the injured, and carry the victim to a vehicle that will transport him back to safety.
“This way you can send a robot in rather than having to send someone else — or a team of people — into harm’s way,” said Mike Kokko, an engineer at VECNA Robotics of Cambridge, Mass.
The company is developing the Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot, or BEAR, which has reached the prototype stage.
The proof-of-concept model is already able to stand on two tracked legs and can lift about 525 pounds. The company has a video of the robot standing while curling that much weight with a barbell. During one demonstration, it carried in an upright position a fully weighted dummy for 50 minutes.
“You have to have a robot that is strong and flexible at the same time” for it to carry out the mission of picking up and moving casualties, Kokko said.
The company is receiving research dollars from Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, a part of the Army Medical Research and Material Command.
While the robot would not be doing first aid, it could go into structurally unsafe buildings after an earthquake, hotzones — where nuclear, or other kinds of toxic material pose a threat — or into a leaking nuclear reactor core, a company statement said.
The robot’s “dynamic balancing behavior,” which allows the two legs to stand, gives the robot the ability to move upright. The tracks bend at the knees so it can lower itself to scoop up a victim in its arms.
The company is currently making incremental improvements to the robot. For example, it is giving it stronger legs that can step over obstacles.
It is also working on software that will allow it to move semi-autonomously. Engineers also need to make it more rugged for outdoor use, Kokko added.
Within the military, there are other potential applications for the technology such as loading and carrying heavy ammunition, he said. The company sees a wider market in the domestic area with the HomeBEAR version that would assist the physically impaired.
“If we can pick up a soldier and carry him back, then there are many other things we can do that are not as complex as that,” Kokko said.
The BEAR could be placed in a larger ground medical evacuation vehicle where it would sit and recharge its batteries until needed.
A possible way to transport a victim long distances is the Combat Medic Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, which is in its early stages of development at Piasecki Aircraft Corp. of Essington, Pa.Much of the basic technology to develop a rotary-wing UAV that can fly into a combat zone is already out there, said Jay Troy, director of systems and software engineering at the company.
Piasecki was a pioneer in the development of ducted, rotary-wing aircraft, which unlike a traditional helicopter, has enclosed blades. Not only are ducted blades more efficient, but they would ensure that there would not be blade strikes if the aircraft were being maneuvered through cluttered urban environments, he said.
The project has received a small business innovation research grant from the Army Material Command to carry out basic experiments.
Most of the company’s current work on the system is a landing zone selection demonstration. This allows the aircraft to use a ladar — a laser detection and ranging sensor — to scan the ground for wide open, uncluttered areas.
After the location of a wounded soldier is determined, the ladar begins looking for the closest and safest area to land. Red areas on the screen are too rough. Safe areas are in green.
For an automated air evacuation to work, “you need to do collision avoidance, you need to be able to figure out where to land, and you need to be able to do that safely,” Troy said.
The system can also work in conjunction with a ground robot, which might be searching for a clear path to a predetermined area.
“You don’t have to have a preloaded map,” Troy said. “As you fly over the area you can generate your own map using the ladar and feed that into the system.”
Like the BEAR, the landing zone technology can have applications outside its intended use.
All military rotorcraft, piloted or not, have a need for autonomous landing zone selection, he said.
“That’s a helpful technology for any rotorcraft operator.”