An unmanned K-MAX helicopter has shown it could evacuate wounded troops from a combat zone, Lockheed Martin [LMT] announced April 29.
During a March 26 demonstration, ground operators used a Neya Systems UxInterceptor unmanned ground vehicle to assess the condition of a “casualty,” which was a 30-pound mannequin simulating an injured person, and to search for a safe landing area for K-MAX, Lockheed Martin said. K-MAX then flew to the designated landing site, where the mannequin was strapped into a seat on the side of the aircraft and flown to safety.
“It essentially simulated an end-to-end robotic mission–how ground vehicles and air vehicles could be used collaboratively to conduct” unmanned casualty evacuation, said Jon McMillen, Lockheed Martin’s business development lead for unmanned K-MAX.
The demonstration was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and took place at Kaman Aerospace [KAMN] in Bloomfield, Conn. Kaman builds K-MAX, and Lockheed Martin supplies the helicopter’s mission suite. Neya, a small business in western Pennsylvania, provided a tablet controller that could control both K-MAX and UxInterceptor using the OSD-sponsored unmanned aerial system (UAS) control segment architecture.
The event was the latest in a series of efforts to show potential new uses for K-MAX, which transported millions of pounds of cargo for U.S. Marines during the nearly three years it was deployed in Afghanistan. In tests last year, K-MAX doused fires with tons of water and delivered an unmanned ground vehicle to soldiers defending a simulated village. McMillen told reporters that Lockheed Martin hopes to do a K-MAX firefighting demonstration for the Department of Interior sometime this year.