| Network turns soldiers helmets into sniper location system | | Print | |
| Written by Akiba | |
| Wednesday, 25 March 2009 | |
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Imagine a platoon of soldiers fighting in a hazardous urban environment who carry personal digital assistants that can display the location of enemy shooters in three dimensions and accurately identify the caliber and type of weapons they are firing. Engineers at Vanderbilt University's Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) have developed a system that can give soldiers just such an edge by turning their combat helmets into "smart nodes" in a wireless sensor network. ISIS developed this novel technology with the support of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the university has patented two of the system's key elements. Like several other shooter location systems developed in recent years, the ISIS system relies on the sound waves produced when a high-powered rifle is fired. These acoustic signals have distinctive characteristics that allow the systems to pick them out from other loud noises and track them back to their source. Current systems, however, rely on centralized or stand-alone sensor arrays. This limits their accuracy and restricts them to identifying shooters at line-of-sight locations. ... The ISIS shooter system uses wireless nodes invented at UC Berkeley and produced by Crossbow Technology Inc. of San Jose, Calif. These smart nodes, or motes, form self-organizing wireless-sensor networks and are the realization of the Pentagon's "smart-dust" concept of radically reducing the size and cost of sensor networks for military applications. Current commercial shooter location systems are extremely expensive, with prices ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per unit. By contrast, an entire node for the ISIS system weighs only slightly more than the four AA batteries that power it and costs about $1,000 to construct using currently available commercial hardware.
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