Extending a Helping Arm to Injured Soldiers

R&D DIGEST

Responding to emergency medical situations is always stressful, but the pressure increases when the patient is lying in the middle of a battlefield. To speed up treatment for wounded soldiers, researchers are developing a robotic arm with the ability to diagnose patients.

The project is the result of a collaboration between researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU; Pittsburgh) and the U.S. Army's Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC). The research team is motivated by the belief that it is essential to start treatment for soldiers before they are removed from the war zone. “As most war-time fatalities occur due to loss of blood, the ability to begin treatment sooner could often make a critical difference,” says Howie Choset, head of the research project and an associate professor of robotics at CMU.
Choset's team is working to incorporate the snake robot, also known as a serpentine robot, into the life support for trauma and transport system (LSTAT). The U.S. Army currently uses the LSTAT in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the researchers, the system functions like an intensive-care unit but is entirely contained within a stretcher. It consists of a defibrillator, an oxygen supply, a ventilator, and various forms of physiological monitoring.
When it comes to the development of snake robots, the primary struggle is minimizing the length and cross-sectional areas of the links between the actuated joints, which are placed in a confined space. The concept for the CMU-TATRC design “is to stack two degree-of-freedom joints on top of each other, forming a snake robot,” the project's Web site says.
After the challenge of building a snake robot was met, the researchers had to grapple with yet another—controlling the degrees of freedom to enable purposeful motion. “The true power of these devices is that they are versatile, achieving behaviors not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming,” Choset says.
The team created such locomotive capabilities by using a topological map of the space. “Essentially, we are exploiting the natural topology encoded in the free space to divide it into regions each having simple structure and optimizing within each simple space a cost function,” Choset says.
One of the ways that this snake robot can be controlled is wirelessly through a joystick. This enables doctors at a remote location to examine soldiers' injuries while they are being transferred to a safe area. It also helps to reduce the delay that often occurs when treating soldiers.
The device also could potentially limit injuries that occur to those who try to help the wounded. The researchers are exploring ways to auto-mate the entire system, Choset says. Currently, the sensors are designed to attach to the LSTAT, which means that another person must move them onto the soldier. An automated system would eliminate the need for a person to be endangered while trying to use the device in a battleground.
In addition to automation, an ultrasound component is another item on the researchers' wish list. The component would be used to check patients for signs of internal bleeding.
The research members are currently looking for funding for the project. They say the robotic arm could also have applications in search and rescue operations as well as surgery.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review recently profiled the CMU-TATRC robot. Choset's partner at TATRC is senior robotics medical scientist Sylvain Cardin. Other contributors to the device include H. Benjamin Brown, project scientist at CMU's Robotics Institute, and Michael Schwerin, staff programmer at the Robotics Institute.
The collaboration with TATRC is just one of Choset's many robotic endeavors. He founded the company Cardiorobotics Inc. (Pittsburgh) in an attempt to bring another one of his projects to market—a surgical snake robot that would aid in minimally invasive cardiac surgery.
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