Slashdot Mirror
Listening Robot Senses Snipers
Dr. Eggman writes "Popular Science has a brief piece on the RedOwl, a brainy-looking flightless robot that can 'read a nametag from across a football field and identify the make and model of a rifle fired a mile away simply by analyzing the sound of the distant blast.' For a paltry $150,000, the machine utilizes robotic hearing technology originally developed by Boston University's Photonics Center to improve hearing aids to sense a shot fired and pinpoint its source, identify it as a hostile or friendly weapon, and illuminate the target with a laser visible only with night vision. The RedOwl, built on an iRobot packbot platform and controlled via a modified Xbox videogame controller, can figure out the location of a target 3,000 feet away, allowing troops to call in a precision air strike."
I saw something like this on TV a few years ago. There were some security contractors in Iraq who had a similar device that determined range and vector to gunshots. I don't remember it having the laser designator, but other than that, it was pretty much the exact same thing.
If you're talking about normal so called "flak jackets," you're dead on. They only stop fragments from small grenades and the occasional small side arm/pistol round.
How true this is, I can't say. But: The US Army has adopted Interceptor Body Armor, however, which uses Enhanced Small Arms Protective Inserts (E-S.A.P.I) in the chest and back of the armour. Each plate is rated to stop a range of ammunition including 3 hits from a 7.62 AP round at a range of 10 m, though accounts in Iraq and Afghanistan tell of soldiers shot as much as seven times in the chest without penetration.
Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_armor
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
A good sniper is patient; he's not just going to start firing randomly into the crowd hoping to hit someone. He waits until his target is still, or sitting, or when the target's back is facing him. He waits for the opportune moment, and then strikes. Worse, Modern sniper rifles tear thru most body armor. Body armor is a deterrent, not a forcefield. It is designed to stop small arms fire.
The capability to pinpoint, with exactitude, the location of enemies snipers is an amazingly useful feat, especially if it can be coupled with payload delivery. Sniper is pinpointed, man on the ground ID's and gives the go-ahead on the location, and a short range missile is in the air in a matter of seconds.
Even if you just pinpoint the location though, friendly snipers now know exactly where to look for this guy. I'm impressed.
- DaftShadow
First, anything to help our troops identify and kill those directly responsible for carrying out attacks on them is a huge benefit. I think counter-snipers are the best solution, but they're few and far between. A ground assault on the building would be a lower-key response, but much more risky to American lives. Precision air strikes are a safer alternative to an assault, but as you point out they cause casualties and are visible reminders of the occupation. But letting a sniper live is never the right answer.
The civilians don't care much if Americans kill insurgents, as long as they only kill insurgents. You have to understand that most of the Iraqis are completely sick of the war. They don't care who's fighting whom, who's blowing up whom, they just want it done, they want us out, they want the insurgents to stop.
Unfortunately, "making nice" isn't going to help. There is only a tiny group of people who are responsible for what's happening. They have adopted religion to carry out their agenda, and the power structure of Islam (imams have the local authority to decree whatever they want) makes it pathetically easy for them to subvert it to their own ends by convincing a few crazy fundamentalist imams to follow them. They use attacks for recruitment (as you point out, if the attacks stopped recruitment would drop.) But the attacks don't stop, because the leaders of the insurgency don't want them stopped. For example, the latest rounds of bombing in Baghdad have been in markets serving all faiths; Sunnis, Shiites and Christians all died from the same bomb blast. It's pretty obvious to an outside observer that the goal isn't "kill the Shiites or kill the Sunnis"; instead it's "kill civilians to pressure America and foster more hatred." And it's also become more apparent to everyone that the insurgency has always been coming from Iran. The Iraqis have no particular desire to see their country bombed into the sixth century, but the Iranian "revolutionary guards" don't have to live there, now, do they?
John
Spread spectrum is more about anti-jamming, anti-listning and noise reduction than it is about hiding the transmitter. To triangulate, all you have to do is have a wide bandwidth receiver to listen to the entire military band. With today's DSP technology, you can probably triangulate on a spread spectrum transmitter quite easily.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Once you've identified the location from which the shot was fired, you shine a laser at it at an intensity such that if you're looking at it with the naked eye, you're extremely uncomfortable, but if you're looking through a scope, you lose an eye.
Besides the aformentioned Geneva issues (laser weapons used for blinding being needlessly cruel), what's the point? Targeting the scope at the proper angle seems to be a MUCH more difficult issue than you take into consideration. And if you can target the scope well enough to do this, surely you can target the sniper himself. If you can locate and target the sniper, why not just kill him? And not with an incredibly expensive laser system, but with conventional weapons.
What is needed is better target detection and tracking systems to direct the already available firepower. The system in the article is of dubious value because if you read carefully it's not that the robot does a better job of detecting snipers than a soldier, just that it is CAPABLE of doing so and could theoretically be approach a sniper (and get shot up) more safely. But is a heavy, complicated, expensive piece of equipment. I think it's very unlikely soldiers are going to haul this thing out every time they suspect they are entering an area containg a sniper. And they have to hope that the snipers are stupid enough to shoot at it. I suspect they will learn pretty quickly there is no point in attacking the robot.