Life-Saving Baseballs

DeAshcroft writes "Researchers at the Penn State Acoustics Lab have developed life-saving baseballs. As described in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, the team put microphones and wireless transmitters into baseballs, which they toss into piles of rubble to find the (noise-making) survivors. The advantage with baseballs is that they apparently don't have to stop work on the pile to listen for survivors. So, remember, if you're ever trapped in a collapsed building, the basball is your friend. The college paper has a story."

Comments

Triangulation, tetrahedrons, golf balls

[Randym]

If they're networked together within a field of debris, would that mean you'd have a Beowulf cluster of them? Would that find people faster?

Good point. It should be easy enough to triangulate (well, since it's a three dimensional pile, I suppose you'd need *4* baseballs, so 'quadrangulate') the location of victims by simultaneously analyzing the relative volume of sounds picked up by the baseballs.

May I also suggest enclosing some of these baseballs in a tetrahedron framework (probably made of some non-conductive wire, i.e. not copper). This will mean that baseballs enclosed in this sort of framework that are tossed in at the top of a heap of rubble do not go all the way down, but stop on any relatively level surface that they encounter. Then you would have round baseballs near the bottom of the pile, and tetrahedral baseballs further up, thus enabling a better "3-D" acoustic view.

Also, why not use golf balls too? They are even smaller (so that they could go through smaller cracks) and are also resistant to damage from smashing into things.

Why baseballs?

[Black Rabbit]

I wonder why they picked baseballs, as opposed to something smaller. If there's something een more indestructible than a baseball, it's a golfball. One of these would also be able to be put into a smaller space, and with a suitable plastic shell, could be made to glow in the dark so that somebody in a deep hole could actually find one!

Hell, why not both, depending on the situation?

Re:Not Baseballs

[Black Copter Control]

they put one of the mics in a baseball and hit it with a bat to test shock resiliency.

Being in a baseball (well, spherical) case does have some possible uses -- depending on where you wanted it to go. A round, bouncy, shape could allow it to bounce closer to the bottom of a hole. An uneven non-bouncy shape would likely stay near the top. You could use whichever shape was most likely to get themake it microphone where you wanted it.