In a simulated natural disaster, robotic drones from the University of Maryland’s RoboScout Team arrived first, scanning the area for survivors. They beamed patients’ locations to robot dogs and medics on the ground to quickly find, triage and treat the most critically injured people first.

“When we talk about robot triage, we’re talking about using drones and robots to assess the severity of injuries,” said Derek Paley, professor of aerospace engineering at UMD and principal investigator for RoboScout. “This would be used when there’s a scenario where there are more patients than medics.”

The RoboScout team is participating in the second year of a three-year Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant program called the DARPA Triage Challenge. The large-scale simulations took place

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