RCCEE

The goal of this project was to develop a system that can extract and transport a wounded soldier from the point of injury to a field hospital. The combat medic is one of the most dangerous responsibilities in warfare. Often in the course of doing his job, the medic is wounded or killed. Additional personnel are also required to transport a wounded casualty out of the line of fire to a safer location, putting more lives at risk. By developing robotic technologies that can seek, detect, and extract a wounded soldier from a hostile situation, the safety of the medic and the potential to save lives is dramatically increased.

Applied Perception was the prime contractor on this SBIR project, the largest funded project in SBIR history. The novel dual-vehicle design that was developed consisted of a small, mobile manipulator (REX) that was used for short-range patient extraction, and a larger, faster tracked vehicle (REV) that was used for long-range patient transport. The smaller vehicle rides on the back of the larger vehicle in a marsupial fashion. The larger vehicle carries two Life Support for Trauma and Transport (LSTAT) stretchers, self-contained life support systems, for patient transport.

The prototype robotic vehicles served as test-beds for numerous other sensor and robotics technologies. These included: GPS-based autonomous navigation, search and rescue sensing, obstacle detection, multi-robot collaboration, telemedicine systems, automatic vehicle docking, and vehicle safeguarding systems.