Autonomous Search-and-Triage Robots for the DARPA Triage Challenge
I’m leading Penn’s team (PRONTO – Penn RObotics Non-contact Triage and Observation) for the DARPA Triage Challenge, the latest in the DARPA robotics challenge series. We’re developing a heterogeneous fleet of robots, including both ground and aerial systems, to assist first responders in locating and triaging casualties during mass casualty incidents. Our team consists of faculty from GRASP (Eaton, Taylor, Daniilidis) and Penn Trauma (Cannon, Qasim, Yelon) with over 20 student researchers.
We successfully completed the first two years of competition, and, based on our performance, were selected by DARPA to continue to the finals in November 2026. Our approach combines fundamental robotics (multi-robot navigation, coordination, and autonomy) with machine learning (multimodal visual-language models, deep neural networks) for victim perception, vital sign monitoring, and injury assessment (Hughes et al., 2025).
Director, GRASP Lab; Associate Dean, Cora Ingrum Center (CIC) - SEAS; Raymond S Markowitz President’s Distinguished Professor, CIS