Whoever thought the already awesome capabilities of Android smartphones could be extended to include the power to track the direction from which gunfire is heard? If the new system presented by Vanderbilt University researchers proves viable, it will undoubtedly be of great use to cops and other law enforcement officers in the future.
The minds behind this creation comprise of computer engineers from the university’s Institute of Software Integrated Systems. Of course, the technology we’re talking about is not an entirely new affair and the US Department of Defense is reported to have set aside a fair sized budget to build sniper location detectors for military vehicles. The folks over at ISIS seem to envision finding uses for this technology in the relatively mainstream area too.
But don’t mistake the aforesaid smartphone system to merely consist of an app which employs the already embedded sensors and audio receptors to pick up the direction from which a shot is fired. The actual military design requires a set of modules to work together and send the necessary information to each other in order to pinpoint the origin of a gunshot.
The system constructed by the Vanderbilt engineers also needs an Android device, tailor-made software and a sensor module the size of a pack of cards, in order to function. The said node mainly consists of a set of microphones, a micro-processor and a clock. The muzzle blast emitted by a firearm when it goes off and the signature shockwaves made by a bullet when it travels through air are touted to deliver the essential data needed by the module.
The information is then beamed to the connected handset over Bluetooth and several modules working in tandem should be able to sketch out a gunshot’s point of origin via triangulation. The researchers have developed two different ways to get this system running. Six nodes with one mic each can be calibrated to acquire precise location data or just two modules carrying four microphones each may be employed to obtain a rough estimate based on shockwaves.
The Android smartphone or tablet system for tracking gunfire direction is not Vanderbilt researchers’ first stab at this sort of intelligence. The university also boasts of having engineered combat helmets which can locate enemy snipers, in the past.