By Marian Accardi
Newhouse News Service
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — If a medic has to leave cover to check on an injured solider on the battlefield, that can mean putting his or her own life at risk.
A small Huntsville company, PERL Research, is developing an automated robotic triage system that can remotely assess a wounded soldier’s condition until a hostile area is secured.
The robot will have a thermographic sensor that extracts certain vital signs heart rate, respiration rate and blood pressure from the wounded without touching the person, PERL President Paul Cox said. Intelligent software processes the data from the sensor. A video camera and a two-way radio mounted on the robot allow the medic to communicate with the soldier.
“The medic can be 50 yards away to several miles away” from the injured person, Cox noted.
PERL was awarded a $950,000 contract for the project the largest in its history by the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, Md. The company competed against 35 other small businesses.
“It was a long shot,” Cox said, “because we had not been involved in robotics work before.”
The triage system will be a two-year effort for PERL. The company will develop a complete demonstration unit on a robot.
PERL recently moved into the Inergi Center, operated by Huntsville-based Inergi Design Services. Inergi will build some lab equipment and mounts for the robot’s sensors for PERL as well as handle some marketing, Cox said.
Cox started PERL in 2004 after working with defense contractors and for the Army in Huntsville, Washington and Dallas. The name is an acronym representing the first names of Cox and his three business partners when the company was founded.
Cox believes that a remote robotic triage system will also have commercial applications “for any type of emergency response like an underground mine collapse or disasters like a building collapse, where it’s too dangerous to send in (human) rescuers.”