Systems Competition | Event 2

From Casualty Mapping to Responder-ready Tools

In Challenge Event 2, teams are required to operate with full autonomy as well as accurately geolocate casualties. Degraded sensing, dynamic physiological changes and walking casualties will significantly add difficulty to the challenge. To win a prize, teams must pass casualty localization and triage accuracy thresholds. Teams must also develop a user interface designed for use by first responders.

Technical Challenge Elements

	Degraded Sensing The courses are expected to include elements that range from constrained passages to large fields, lighted areas to complete darkness, and wet to dusty conditions. Sensors will need to have the dynamic range to operate reliably in these environments. Dust, fog, mist, smoke, talking, flashing light, hot spots, and gunshot and explosion sounds are within scope of this challenge element. Extreme temperatures, fire, tremors, and hazardous materials are not expected to be within scope.
	Obscuring Obstacles Casualties may be fully visible to partially obscured to completely obscured, such as buried under a shallow layer of rubble. Sensor modalities capable of penetrating rubble may have an advantage in such situations. Casualties may also be grouped with limbs overlapping, or may be interacting with live responders.
	Terrain Obstacles The competition scenarios will be held in realistic environments that may include natural or human-made materials; structured or unstructured clutter; and intact or collapsed structures and debris. Robotic mobility is not the focus of this challenge and it is expected that widely available outdoor robotic platforms will be capable of navigating the competition environments. In some cases, more robust platforms may benefit from more direct navigation paths or closer approach paths to casualties.
	Dynamic Obstacles Live responders, ambulatory wounded, or other physical changes to the environment may be included to test the agility of the system autonomy to identify and assess casualties.
	Dynamic Casualties Some treatable injuries may rapidly become fatal, and delays in finding and assessing casualties may result in missing the window for effective LSI. While competitors are not expected to re-evaluate casualties for changes in status, casualties who are not evaluated within an appropriate timescale may have a change in status (for example, progression of untreated hemorrhage or airway injury).
	Endurance Limits It is expected that individual scenarios will run <30 minutes. Teams may be permitted to replace batteries during their run, but teams should consider the implications of returning to the original launch location and redeploying their systems Real-world systems will use stand-off sensors on platforms to locate and triage casualties in the field.