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Paintball Sticky Sensors
Eddy_D writes "The EETimes has a story about a group of undergraduate students at the University of Florida (Gainesville) that have developed a sticky sensor, fired from a paintball gun, to sense explosive compounds in suspect objects at a distance. The project is funded by Lockheed Martin (Missiles and Fire Control group), who is rushing to deploy this new technology to soldiers in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan."
The goal of the project, funded by Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Missiles and Fire Control group (Orlando, Fla.), "was to help our soldiers detect improvised explosives or even chemical weapons from a distance far enough away so that they would not be hurt," even if the material detonated, said Greg Ivey, an aerospace-engineering student who graduated from Gainesville this month. A soldier with a laptop computer can monitor the projectile from up to 240 feet away.
Wouldn't this be a great combo for small biotech creations?
Pictures, chemical analysis, sample collection etc. would be a snap!
(fairly) Remote analysis of questionable objects would be a snap if you shot the device on it, enabled it with your wireless remote, and waited until it reported fully to your laptop.
Get paid to code OSS
"Be careful! it might be explosive!"
"You're right.. we'd better shoot some low-powered weaponry at it"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
So, basically, we can deploy a shitload of these into Iraq to find the WMD's...
All jokes aside, it sounds cool, you could use any kind of sensor with it. How about one with a frequency counter?
This came to mind when I read the article:
Soldier: Thinks to himself "Hmm, suspicious vehicle parked over there." [Pop]..[Splat]..
Terrorist hidden behind car: "Paint Check!" Soldier: "Ref!, Paint Check, I mean Bomb Check that suspect!"
Terrorist: "No fair, he over shot me." "and Crono that gun!!! Is this freedom? It's got to be at least 305fps!"
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Now there will be now more arguing about whether or not it's "splatter" or a direct hit, although it looks like the golfball size bruise the generally is created will now be the size of a baseball.
Although you've obviously intended to be funny, it is a common misconception that elaborate explosives can usually be triggered by a "nudge". This is hardly the case -- think about nuclear weapons, which require an elaborate creation of slow neutrons, or even simple explosives that require the mixing of two compounds.
The force of a missile blast with compounds inside will be sufficient to mix the two compounds (usually, but even then, not always, as plenty of missiles are "duds" for this reason). Shooting a golf-ball sized detector-weapon at this is hardly dangerous. The reason they build explosives so that they're hard to set off is so they DON'T accidentally detonate while being constructed or transported.
That said, this is an extremely cool invention (and maybe I'm biased considering where I'm based...)
A paintball gun typically fires ar 300 FPS , NOW Lets say they crank it up a bit for the increased payload and no need for a saftey threshold to homans. Ok now if youve ever been hit with a paintball at 450 fps, it hurs and hasforce behind it.
Firing that at a potentially explosive package with the limited range (300 ft) I think Ill just have to passon that one
funny to you but how would you like to be shot by one of your co-workers?
Having played a bit of paintball I can say if the velocity is cranked up and can (and has) puntured skin.
Tear gas paintballs already exist (heh) but I always thought it would be cool if traffic cops could tag your car with a paintball transponder...... blow through a speed trap? why chase em?
mark em and wait for them to stop either because they thought they got away or because they've realized the car is marked.
OR maybe you could use them to deliver a russian style sleeping gas..... (just don't drop em) its easy to get a paintball into a window..
You could crank the gas up and fire a wooden dowel (sharpened no doubt).
just rambling but this is pretty cool and paintball guns have gone a long way from the 'marking trees for forestry' beginning.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Anyone a Spiderman fan? He used to have Spidey Tracers (I think Batman had something similiar) that he used to throw at a retreating enemey so he could track them later. Sometimes he used to web them in place.
If this sticks to the target (my impression is that it does) you could shoot them at departing cars and such and track them from a distance.
... as the guys at my local paintball place, we're in big trouble.
Seriously, shoot some UV dyed hot pepper balls into unruly crowds/at people with guns.
It won't kill 'em, but they'd probably wish they were dead (for a while). Then you can use some UV lights to track the ones you hit (where they've been, where they've gone, what they've touched)
Ok, not strictly on topic, but from the article tagline of PORTLAND, Ore, the team doing the discovery in Gainesville, Fla, and the writer having a Spirit One e-mail address that is the same ISP I use, I find it very interesting that this article could be written 3000 miles away from the actual research.
Plus, I noticed it because I had hopes of getting my hands on one of the prototypes when I saw the Portland, OR tagline- hoping that the team working in Florida was a mistake and that the balls were being produced at some paintball place close to me. I'd LOVE to have a civilian/spytech version of this tech- say a small audio sensor that could be fired from a paintball gun to stick to somebody's window.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Terrorists, have reinvented the 'sticky bomb' in a new spring shade of mauve.
Eat at Joe's.
It won't kill 'em, but they'd probably wish they were dead (for a while).
or make them wish they werent suddenly permanently blind in one eye with a hot burning chemical burn sensation in their eyesocket...
you know there's a reason why people wear protective goggles at paintball games.
No thats because the force of a direct hit nakes your eyeballs fallout.
STUDENT-BUILT PROJECTILE COULD HELP SOLDIERS DETECT BOMBS, CHEMICALS
April 28, 2004
Contact Information
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Infantry soldiers suspicious that a truck or box may contain explosives or chemical weapons may soon be able to find out for sure by shooting the target with a sticky little projectile that can detect the danger and report it from afar.
The crayon-sized sensor, which users fire from a standard paintball gun, was invented by a team of University of Florida undergraduate engineering students as part of a government- and corporate-supported engineering research and education program at UF. Lockheed Martin's Orlando-based Missiles and Fire Control, which sponsored the project, plans to refine the projectile and put it into production, and there is a chance it could be used in Iraq, Lockheed officials say.
"That (use in Iraq) was the original genesis," said Leslie Kramer, director and engineering fellow for Missiles and Fire Control, explaining the sensor would be an ideal tool for identifying improvised explosive devices, or IEDs - disguised homemade bombs that have injured and killed scores in Iraq.
"These IEDs - a lot of these things are being buried in piles of trash," he said. "If you had a good chemical sensor on this projectile, you could fire it into the trash and stand back and determine whether it could detect TNT leaking out of an artillery shell."
Guided by mechanical and aerospace engineering Professor Loc Vu-Quoc, a team of six engineering seniors designed and built the projectile over the course of the yearlong Integrated Product and Process Design, or IPPD, program. It was a challenge: Lockheed officials outlined what they wanted in broad terms and told the students to be creative. The team, which included students from several different engineering fields, considered numerous approaches, including a gun made of plastic tubing, before deciding to try an off-the-shelf paintball gun shooting a modified projectile.
The team built a tiny circuit board containing a transmitter, sensor and wire antenna, all powered by a watch battery. They inserted the circuit board in a cylindrical case tipped with the sticky industrial polymer. The weight of the polymer, together with the arrangement of the components, causes the projectile to be heaviest at the front, which helps it fly straight and strike the target with its sticky end.
"What we did was we made its tip heavy so it's like a dart - it doesn't tumble over," said electrical engineering student Felipe Sutantri.
Chemical and explosive detectors are expensive and difficult to work with, so the team tested their prototype using a tiny accelerometer, a sensor that registers movement. Accelerometers are commonly used in airbags to sense collisions. In a variety of tests, the team showed the accelerometers and other electronics could survive being shot out of the gun and striking a target. They were able to measure the accelerometer's data remotely at impact using oscilloscopes and laptop computers, much the way laptop-equipped soldiers might glean information from a deployed version of the projectile on the battlefield.
"I think the most important thing for the proof of concept was to see if the electronics could survive the impact," Sutantri said.
The students' tests proved the transmitter could report data from up to 240 feet from the laptop, while the paintball gun could shoot the projectile at least 65 feet. Both distances could be extended in the production version, and engineers also likely will shrink the projectile's size and weight.
"The next step is the integration of other detectors into this projectile and also modifying what the students did to make it more tactical," Kramer said.
Tara Plew, a research engineer at Missiles and Fire Control and the employee who worked most closely with the students, said the projectile "has created all kinds of excitement in the company," with two U.S. military bases asking for written descriptions of t