A tech firm based in India is aiming to develop a drone that enables remote surgery on wounded soldiers in the battlefield.
SS Innovations (SSI) is working to offer medical facilities to heavily wounded soldiers in remote areas of the battlefield, where lives are potentially threatened and immediate medical evacuation is not possible.
Source: SSI
To accomplish this, the company is developing the SSI Vimana to bring robotic surgery to the battlefield, thus bridging the divide between the point of injury and medical evacuation.
According to the company, the SSI Vimana will be designed to perform hemorrhage control, wound repair, chest decompression, shrapnel extraction and field suturing, thereby stabilizing the patient until evacuation can be conducted and potentially saving lives on the battlefield.
Outfitted with two miniature robotic arms, manipulators and 5 mm surgical tools including forceps, cautery, scissors, needle drivers and suction, the GPS-guided drone is expected to have a flight time of 30 minutes as well as a similar operating time.
Further, the drone will not drop a medical kit from above, but will let surgeons operate on soldiers from a distance using SSI’s MANTRA platform’s surgical robotic system capability compressed into a battlefield-portable form factor.
Beyond the battlefield, SSI also expects the drone to be appropriate for use in civilian rescue operations, such as road accidents and natural disasters.
Although currently in the proof-of-concept stage, SSI suggests that the drone could begin performing life-saving missions as early as 2027.
