Systems Competition | Event 2

From Casualty Mapping to Responder-ready Tools

In Challenge Event 2, teams were required to operate with full autonomy as well as accurately geolocate casualties. Degraded sensing, dynamic physiological changes and walking casualties will significantly added difficulty to the challenge. 

To win a prize, teams passed casualty localization and triage accuracy thresholds. Teams also developed a user interface designed for use by first responders.

Technical Challenge Elements

	Degraded Sensing The courses included elements that ranged from constrained passages to large fields, lighted areas to complete darkness, and wet to dusty conditions. Sensors had the dynamic range to operate reliably in these environments. Dust, fog, mist, smoke, talking, flashing light, hot spots, and gunshot and explosion sounds were within scope of this challenge element. Extreme temperatures, fire, tremors, and hazardous materials were not within scope.
	Obscuring Obstacles Casualties were fully visible to partially obscured to completely obscured, such as buried under a shallow layer of rubble. Sensor modalities capable of penetrating rubble had an advantage in such situations. Casualties were grouped with limbs overlapping, or may be interacting with live responders.
	Terrain Obstacles The competition scenarios were 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 was not the focus of this challenge and it was expected that widely available outdoor robotic platforms will be capable of navigating the competition environments. In some cases, more robust platforms benefitted from more direct navigation paths or closer approach paths to casualties.
	Dynamic Obstacles Live responders, ambulatory wounded, or other physical changes to the environment were e 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 were not expected to re-evaluate casualties for changes in status, casualties who were not evaluated within an appropriate timescale may have had a change in status (for example, progression of untreated hemorrhage or airway injury).
	Endurance Limits Individual scenarios ran <30 minutes. Teams were permitted to replace batteries during their run; teams considered the implications of returning to the original launch location and redeploying their systems Real-world systems used stand-off sensors on platforms to locate and triage casualties in the field.