Experimental Validation of a Robotic Stretcher for Casualty Evacuation in a Man-Made Disaster Exercise

Abstract

This paper describes a cooperative search and rescue exercise where an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is used by a military rescue team for extraction and evacuation of a casualty from an unsafe man-made disaster area. This experimental validation was performed within a full-scale emergency response exercise organized on June 2019 by the Chair of Safety, Emergencies and Disasters at Universidad de Málaga (Spain). With this purpose, we adapted the skid-steer Rambler robot to carry a stretcher with appropriate roll-in and locking mechanisms. The mission consisted of two phases: first, extraction from the hot zone was performed with remote teleoperation using a dummy; second, casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) to an aeromedical evacuation point was done with sightline teleoperation moving an actual volunteer. The realistic one-shot exercise was performed by actual rescue personnel with no previous experience with the robotic system. The paper shares insight and lessons learned from this concept validation experience.This work was partially supported by the project ``TRUST-ROB: Towards Resilient UGV and UAV Manipulator Teams for Robotic Search and Rescue Tasks'', funded by the Spanish Government (RTI2018-093421-B-I00). Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech