UAV Casualty Transportation Constraints and Monitoring System

The goal of this project is to develop a flight operation constraint system that restricts and/or limits an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’s (UAV’s) movement and maneuvering capabilities during casualty extraction and evacuation missions to within injury specific physiologically tolerable limits. The constraint system employs an inference engine-based design that translates a wounded soldier’s vital signs and symptoms entered by a Role 1 Medic into pre-defined classes of injuries and related flight operation constraints. This proposal also supports a novel pre-clinical proof-of-concept study to assess g-force intolerance limits. The proposed effort addresses three key areas of need to use UAVs for Casualty Evacuation (CASEVAC) missions: 1) safety assurance that UAVs used for CASEVAC transport will result in no further harm to the wounded soldier during their transport, 2) the ability to quickly incorporate wounded soldier intolerance flight intolerance scenarios as part of the UAV mission planning function, and 3) the need to address the dearth of rotary wing injury-specific flight intolerance threshold values that currently exists.