Robots for battlefield medics

The first 30 minutes after an injury in combat is critical then decides whether a soldier survives or dies. For a wounded care, however, must be first discovered and then often under heavy bombardment to be evacuated. That can cost minutes of the paramedics and even to make targets.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are developing a technology so that military doctors a helping hand - and in the truest sense of the word. Howie Choset, a lecturer in robotics at CMU, has a snake-like robot developed the various sensors includes the health of a soldier can monitor. The system can be wirelessly via joystick control, so a doctor in a distant hospital every point of the body, and may investigate to injuries during the evacuation to investigate. The flexibility of the arm allows that he is also moving in tight spaces, making even an initial medical review directly on the battlefield is possible.

Choset and his colleagues already are building for more than ten years of such "Snakebots, improve their movement potential and flexibility. Also it is a prototype for several miniaturization noted. In the past, the group has already robots for search and rescue missions and helped to create the Ford, a snake robot for precise auto painting to develop. The team also recently founded a start-up, one of the latest technologies from the laboratory Chosets commercialize be: A robot, which potentially serve as a heart surgeon could.

Currently, the CMU team with the Center for Telemedicine and new technology (TATRC) of the U.S. Army to make the robot arm in the high-tech grave of the Force to integrate. This so-called "Life Support for Trauma and Transport System (LSTAT) is a kind of portable intensive care unit with an integrated defibrillator, ventilator and a variety of physiological monitoring devices. The LSTAT is already used in several combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan - medics can make a few patients with the built-up and technique to use his pension.

"There are all these sensors on board, with which we have preliminary diagnostic testing. It also helps us, the system first measures in order to save the patient," Choset said. The only problem was that the sensors on LSTAT appropriate and that they must move by hand. "If someone has been taken and we will help him become a target itself becomes light. That's why we wanted to automate the entire system and the sensors with the help of robotic technology to the patient to move while he was out of the battle area is taken."

Choset and his students have a very jointed arm created from multiple joints is driven, which gives a snake-like flexibility. Each joint has two of freedom, which, taken together, bending, pulling and turning movements in various configurations allow how she knows of reptiles.

Because it is impossible for a person, all of these joints by hand to steer, the team developed a software to precisely control the robot by joystick movements possible. In laboratory tests, the researchers were able to successfully arm the body during a skeleton entlangführen. An attached camera allowed the prosecution in the distance.

Choset has various physiological sensors attached to the robotic arm, including a CO2 and oxygen detector that can determine whether breathing is present. Also the robot could be an oxygen mask put on by him or a connection to the ventilation device, without the paramedics would have to help.

In future, even Choset ultrasonic components are integrated so that a patient quickly to internal bleeding can be checked. His team is collaborating with researchers at Georgetown University in a relevant essay. This is the useful, the robot needs a certain strength Sensibilitiäts ratio, to determine what force Aufdrücken when the probe on the body must be used, in order to get good pictures. This will Choset, along with other questions will soon investigate.

Sylvain Cardin, a senior researcher at the Medical Robotics TATRC, provides yet another military applications for the robot arm. "He could be sitting in a small vehicle that you send into battle area, and one medic, one might take the injured from the same remote support." Since then it does not matter whether the person still located under attack: "You can save people without having to sacrifice themselves to become.