§ OPERATORS / RESCUE

For the people who
show up after.

USAR teams in a collapsed parking deck. SAR pulling a kid off a mountain at dusk. Swiftwater anchoring in flash flood. We’re building a machine that gets to the void first — so a human doesn’t have to.

TARGET CAPABILITYCONCEPT OF OPERATIONS · NOT A DEPLOYED VERTEX MODELSTATISTICS USE NAMED EXTERNAL SOURCES

Rescue concept of operations

Urban search and rescue void entry — operator photograph plate
72h
Survivability window
Most live rescues from structural collapse occur in the first 72 hours.
FEMA US&R 2023
28
FEMA task forces
US&R Type 1 teams nationally. Mobilization measured in hours, not minutes.
FEMA 2024
3×
Secondary collapse risk
Rescuer death rate inside compromised structures vs sound buildings.
NIOSH FACE
6:1
Swiftwater rule
Average ratio of would-be-rescuer deaths to victims in untrained water entries.
NFPA 1670
THE OPERATOR

You’re trained to enter the void. Most of the world isn’t.

The rescue technician we’re designing for is the one rigging a high-angle anchor over a mineshaft, breaching a wall with a chipping hammer, or wading into a river that just took out a bridge upstream. Hours into an op. Equipment heavy. Margin thin.

Your team has the rigging, the medical, the structural. The cost is your body — in the rubble pile, on the rope, in the water. Every void you enter is a coin flip with secondary collapse, hypothermia, anchor failure.

Vertex is building for the moment your team needs eyes and hands in a place a human shouldn’t have to go first.

WHAT GOES WRONG
  • Secondary collapse during void search. A wall pancakes onto the rescuer who’s twelve feet in. Standard mitigations are training and luck.
  • Patient location ambiguity. A “trapped child” report turns into eighteen hours of breaching the wrong wall.
  • Cold-water immersion. Body temperature drops in minutes. Decision-making degrades faster than you notice.
  • Wilderness search grid drift. The grid you laid at first light is wrong by sunset. Wind, exhaustion, terrain.
  • Confined-space atmospheric monitoring. Oxygen, CO, H₂S, LEL. Four-gas meter is on your harness. You’re reading it less than you should.
  • Rope-team cognitive load. Twenty feet of rope, four anchors, two patients. The rigger is also doing the math on the descent.
WHAT THE ROBOT DOES

Vertex is designing toward a rescue policy for confined-space, vertical, and aquatic environments. The target system would enter first, build the map, and either hold the void or support extraction under doctrine and authority set at the command post.

01 · VOID ENTRY
Confined-space recon, in the rubble.
LIDAR-mapped void geometry, atmospheric four-gas live, victim audio detection. Reports a survivability assessment back to IC before the team commits a body to the entry.
02 · WILDERNESS GRID
Probability-of-area search, autonomous.
Lost-person behavior models from ISRID inform grid priority. Robot covers the high-POA segments in the dark while ground teams rest. Cellular-fallback comms.
03 · SWIFTWATER
Floating throwbag, autonomous.
Anchored upstream, the robot can self-propel to a victim with a throwbag — deploying a recovery line without exposing a rope-team body to the current. rescue_first vs tag_and_hold selectable.
04 · HIGH-ANGLE BELAY
Second person on the rope, when there isn’t one.
For two-rope rigging on small teams, the robot can serve as the safety-line belayer with redundant brake actuation — freeing the human rigger for the rescue side of the system.
THE DOCTRINE

Every action the policy takes on a rescue scene cites real, published standards — same framework as our reconnaissance and ICU scenarios in Colosseum.

FEMA US&RUrban Search & Rescue Field Operations Guide — structure triage & markingGROUNDED
NFPA 1670Standard on Operations & Training for Technical Search and Rescue IncidentsGROUNDED
NFPA 1006Standard for Technical Rescue Personnel Professional QualificationsGROUNDED
29 CFR 1910.146OSHA Permit-Required Confined Spaces — atmospheric monitoringGROUNDED
ISRIDInternational Search & Rescue Incident Database — lost-person behavior modelsAPPLIED
USCG SwiftwaterBoat & Swiftwater Rescue Training Standards — reach-throw-row-go orderingGROUNDED

BROWSE THE FULL RULE REGISTRY →

ILLUSTRATIVE TRACE FORMAT

This is the trace schema we are designing toward—not a deployment record or live-model trajectory. Values below illustrate how sensor state, proposed action, and doctrine citation would remain together.

T+00:09LISTENparabolic mic 30 Hz–4 kHz · faint percussive @ 4 Hz · 18 dB SNR
T+00:09DOCTRINEINSARAG Pt II §A · “Acoustic detection — listen / call / listen” · GROUNDED
T+00:22CONFIRMINSARAG marking L + arrow + 09:18 · extraction crew advised

VIEW THE COLOSSEUM RECORD SCHEMA →

CO-DESIGN
Design question: can a robot enter the void first and return enough evidence for a rescue team to judge survivability and shoring risk?
DESIGN QUESTION · NOT AN OPERATOR ENDORSEMENT

We intend to build with rescue teams through approved rubble-pile training, structural-collapse drills, and rope-rigging review. Those activities are a proposed co-design program, not a current deployment claim.

If your team trains regularly and wants to host a Vertex field day, tell us.

Build it with us.

Rubble-pile drills, confined-space integration, swiftwater training co-design, and long-term model-card collaboration on rescue decisions.

Get in touch→
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