11/11/2025 Mallory Lindahl

The quadruped robots explore grass terrain at night.

Team Chiron, a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, will compete in the third and final phase of the DARPA Triage Challenge (DTC) next November.

The DTC seeks to develop portable, autonomous systems that can assess and monitor injured individuals in locations where providing medical care is difficult, such as crash sites or natural disasters.

Team Chiron is developing novel robotic technologies that combine unmanned aerial and ground vehicles with advanced artificial intelligence to detect casualties, assess vital signs and provide critical information that helps medical responders know where best to focus their efforts during mass casualty incidents. The team competed in the first phase of the DTC in September 2024, when they developed and tested new technologies for medical triage, including advanced sensors to autonomously locate and assess injuries under realistic field conditions.

In September 2025, Team Chiron completed the second phase of the challenge, which had teams operate in environments that more closely reflected real-world disaster and battlefield conditions with challenges such as smoke, low light and rugged terrains. The researchers tested their system’s ability to operate in nighttime outdoor conditions at the newly constructed Robotics Innovation Center at Hazelwood Green. Members of the team lay out in grass fields to simulate mass casualty victims while quadruped robots were tasked with locating them, assessing their vital signs and injuries from a safe distance, and relaying that information to a remote operator.

Members of Team Chiron pose with their robots at the Robotics Innovation Center.

During the official phase two field challenge, Team Chiron demonstrated its system’s ability to perform autonomous medical triage in demanding real-world conditions. The team’s robots inspected multiple simulated casualties, assessing indicators such as heart rate, respiratory rate and alertness. All tasks had to be completed successfully despite uneven ground, low lighting and spotty communication, pushing the robots to show they could still navigate, detect people and share information reliably in varying environments.

After successfully completing the first two phases, Team Chiron will now prepare for the final stage of the challenge in November 2026, when they will face the most complex conditions to date. Though details have yet to be announced, the challenge is broadly organized around advancing the autonomy and reliability of the triage systems.

To learn more about Team Chiron, its sponsors and partners, visit the team’s website.

For More Information: Aaron Aupperlee | 412-268-9068 | aaupperlee@cmu.edu

Mallory Lindahl2025-11-10T14:17:37-05:00