Finding Biomechanically Safe Trajectories for Robot Manipulation of the Human Body in a Search and Rescue Scenario

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for generating biomechanically safe trajectories for robot-assisted repositioning of unconscious human casualties in search and rescue, ensuring safety constraints are mathematically incorporated into planning.

Contribution

It presents the first solution to biomechanically safe trajectory planning for repositioning human limbs, integrating biomechanical constraints into robot-human system dynamics and optimization.

Findings

Validated approach on real robot and human subject

Demonstrated safe limb repositioning in rescue scenarios

Enhanced planning considering biomechanical safety constraints

Abstract

There has been increasing awareness of the difficulties in reaching and extracting people from mass casualty scenarios, such as those arising from natural disasters. While platforms have been designed to consider reaching casualties and even carrying them out of harm's way, the challenge of repositioning a casualty from its found configuration to one suitable for extraction has not been explicitly explored. Furthermore, this planning problem needs to incorporate biomechanical safety considerations for the casualty. Thus, we present a first solution to biomechanically safe trajectory generation for repositioning limbs of unconscious human casualties. We describe biomechanical safety as mathematical constraints, mechanical descriptions of the dynamics for the robot-human coupled system, and the planning and trajectory optimization process that considers this coupled and constrained system. We finally evaluate our approach over several variations of the problem and demonstrate it on a real robot and human subject. This work provides a crucial part of search and rescue that can be used in conjunction with past and present works involving robots and vision systems designed for search and rescue.