An Integrated Optimization System for Lightening the Load of Warfighters

Warfighters rely on technological equipment to ensure safety, mission effectiveness, and situational awareness. This equipment increases the capabilities of warfighters but also adds to their weight burden. This excess load could cause significant stress on the musculoskeletal system and lead to physiological deficits. The overall objective of the proposed project is to develop a system-level optimization environment to design a squad for critical missions while automatically lightening the load on individual warfighters. In this project we will continue to develop both compact and high fidelity human models for evaluating warfighters’ performance and thus enable the optimization-based tradeoff analysis between the weight and squad combat effectiveness. The human-based simulations and predictions will be validated at Stanford University’s Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab and Human Performance Lab through carefully designed experiments. Fully functional code of this integrated system will be developed at the end of phase II, which is capable of simulating the dynamics of the equipment as well as the individual warfighter, predicting motion of warfighters under load, and distributing equipment among a squad for various missions based on individual strength and training.