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arXiv · 2607.13497

Layered Risk Mapping for Autonomous Patient Transport in Expeditionary Medical Facilities

Lorena Maria Genua·Sarvesh Prajapati·Damla Leblebicioglu·Taşkın Padır
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Abstract

In expeditionary medical facilities, routine patient transport imposes a compounding burden of personal protective equipment consumption, staff diversion, and elevated infection risk that becomes unsustainable under surge conditions. While autonomous wheelchairs could absorb this operational load, the safety-critical nature of patient transit within these highly unstructured and dynamic environments poses complex navigational challenges. To address this, we present a layered risk mapping framework that fuses four heterogeneous environmental hazards (terrain slope, static and dynamic obstacles, and semantic traversability) into a unified probabilistic cost surface via a Noisy-OR fusion model. In a paired Monte-Carlo evaluation, risk-informed fusion reduces collision rates from over 73% to under 32% and more than doubles obstacle clearance relative to a risk-unaware baseline. Additionaly, Noisy-OR achieves the highest clearance to obstacles and the lowest conditional peak risk across all tested hazard densities. We further validate the framework on a commercial powered wheelchair across three representative mission profiles in indoor and outdoor deployments, demonstrating that this architecture successfully meets the planning requirements of this previously unaddressed operational regime.

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Lorena Maria Genua, Sarvesh Prajapati, Damla Leblebicioglu, Taşkın Padır. 2026-07-15. Layered Risk Mapping for Autonomous Patient Transport in Expeditionary Medical Facilities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13497

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