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."
That video game AI snipers are cheaters!
Aimbot =(
is called Biomimetic Systems. It was the result of the thesis work by a former BU grad student Socrates Deligeorges. I have seen the robot in action and it is pretty awesome!
Its not uncommon really. Sometimes a sniper has a very good protective spot and you can't get to the spot itself without fighting through other enemies.
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.
Who the hell snipes at night?
Not always. While your support for zee troops is appreciated, you must remember that the troops aren't always the target.
Important Iraqi politicians can and do get whacked from time to time. It would be nice to know who's doin' the killing.
The system can recognize weapons by their report, and thus ignore friendly fire.
So if any of our weapons fall into enemy hands, this robot will actually hinder handicap the user since they would be ignoring shots from the other side thinking that it's just FF?
This kneejerk reaction: "Bah! New stuff is worse than old reliable stuff" isn't appropriate for concept prototypes.
I absolutely agree that only proven technology should be rolled out en-mass, but developments like this robot are extremely valuable. Even if it utterly doesn't work, that's fine - they'll still learn a bunch about automatic auditory sensors, single sensor location calculation, and building robots.
As for the tactical utility of this sort of thing - it absolutely can't be replicated by armored vests. Kevlar does *nothing* against a high powered rifle. Even if every soldier always wore the armor necessary to stop a 7.62 mm rifle round cold, it would be heavy and hot, and they'd just get sniped in the face and upper leg more often. The thing that's really annoying about a sniper isn't that they can injure someone; it's that if you run into a sniper moving through an urban setting you're stopped dead until you can figure out where they are - this can really slow down any kind of urban troop movement. With this robot (conceptually), it reduces the sniper to only one shot - then since you know where they are you can take them out and keep going.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Except you lose a lot of muzzle velocity by adding a silencer..
Everything sounded pretty normal until the XBox controller...that was pretty funny.
This used to be called 'Nintendo Warfare'. I'd almost say we'll change the term to 'XBox Warfare' but it won't be long before somebody mods a Wii controller to do all of this AND make the kill shot to.
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
Too bad it's not controlled by a Wii controller. Then you could just kill the sniper with the controller and avoid the air strike altogether.
...he'll be able to call in precision chair strikes!
If the soldiers are continuously broadcasting sound and relative position data to a base station, then they may as well paint themselves fluorescent orange and do jumping jacks.
That's why the military developed spread-spectrum radio communications. A radio set converted sound waves into a rapid series of short pulses that jumped from frequency to frequency using a random pattern. The idea was that it would be impossible to triangulate the location of a transmitted because any single pulse would only appear as background noise. This evolved into
mobile phone systems.
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Why would you call in a precision air strike for a lonely sniper?
It doesn't need to be an air strike. Lots of rocket propelled grenades can lock onto a laser designated target.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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
Short Answer: Actually, you are incorrect. Our armor is designed to take multiple hits from 7.62-mm ammunition.
Long answer: What the hell are you talking about? This isn't Desert Storm, this is 2007, baby. Check out the Interceptor Body Armor, which has been standard issue for all troops being deployed for a while now.
There are parts of the Interceptor Body Armor that are made of only Kevlar for its flexible properties, such as the groin protector that is hanging off the body armor in the picture. However, as the op says correctly, the thin Kevlar is not designed to take anything more than 9-mm rounds, ideally. The actual parts designed to accept 7.62-mm rounds, "stop plates" as some call them, cover the entire from torso from collarbone to belt buckle, front and back. They are made from some rather advanced ceramics. Nowadays, they even issue armor for your sides and your shoulders, two common places some people get shot and end up dying.
We also wear helmets. In the Army, they're commonly referred to simply as "Kevlars" (Typical example: "Uniform for the EST will be IBA with your kevlar, no LCE." Translation: That means you're going to the computer-simulated firing range with your Interceptor Body Armor and your helmet, but you're not bringing your 'pistol belt' or the canteens and ammo pouches that are typically attached to the pistol belt. The army loves acronyms). Anyway, there are true stories of kevlars taking 7.62 rounds and surviving, but even the helmet made out of kevlar molded to a hard, shaped shell is only designed to accept 9-mm rounds.
And thusly return us to the original short answer, that is: Troops in Iraq wear body armor that takes multiple 7.62-mm rounds. Stay classy, San Di-Slashdot.
A common sniper tactic is to position yourself in a location where hills and other terrain will reflect sound back to the target, confusing the target as to the actual location of your fires. Couldn't sound reflection be brought into play and give the device the wrong location, or a set of wrong locations?
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
It's amazing how easily one can get around complex machinery with the use of a pocket knife, some lint and chewing gum if one has the knowhow...
wow...you really are fed on a steady diet of CNN pictures and their associated blurbs aren't you? perhaps you should get out in the real world a little bit. also, it's a sniper detecting robot. it's quite unlikely that it would be deployed in the midst of "arabs who shoot guns in the air to celebrate". and i'm assuming that the soldiers who use the bot have enough sense to differentiate a crowd of happy people with guns from a sniper on a roof somewhere. what's that you say? it was a joke? hmm.....
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
The four microphones would be in a known fixed position. Knowing that sound travels at 344 meters/sec, not all the microphones will pick up the sound at the same instant. There will be millisecond differences between the microsphones as the sound passes over the array. You can then use software to phase correlate the sound impulses and get a very accurate triangulation of the direction it came from. Putting microphones on individual troops who move around will destroy the ability to measure the delays - you don't know exactly how far apart the microphones are and therefore don't know what the standard delay time is.
Most of the stuff on
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!
Not really.. The real problem is that it's much more effective to use subsonic ammunition with a suppressor, otherwise there's that whole "sonic boom" thing to contend with. Subsonic ammunition doesn't have a very flat trajectory, and is more susceptible to wind (simply because it spends more time in the air over a given distance) which makes it almost useless for sniping.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The troops have body armor. The troops have more body armor than most of them really want to wear--plates designed to stop armor piercing 7.62 rounds inside kevlar vests with supplemental side plates and extra shrapnel protection. Interesting red herring, but not a factor.
I find it hard to believe that the thing would really work as well as they claim in a peaceful urban noise environment, let alone a hostile one. Echoes, explosions, and just sheer volume of noise... Still, for an isolated shot in an otherwise peaceful scene, maybe it would be useful.
Even with a fairly tight grid coordinate, however, ground troops are still going to be restricted by rules of engagement and the all-important positive ID of the enemy. This is bar none the greatest difficulty in finding the bad guys and making them dead guys--you have to be absolutely certain of your target, and the bad guys know how to make it difficult. The dumb ones were already made into dead ones a while ago.
...the machine utilizes robotic hearing technology...to sense a shot fired and pinpoint its source.
The problem is that it's simple to pinpoint a source out in the open, but it's much more difficult to determine the source in an urban environment with all of the occlusions and echoes caused by buildings, vehicles, etc. I'm sure this thing works great in the lab, but I doubt it would fare as well in real urban combat.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
iRobot? These guys are likely to get sued by both Will Smith _and_ Apple.
President ISES
(International Society for Elimination of Sigs)
I'd snipe some guy from 2 miles away and then they all turn and lay down fire on my exact location. Fuck that.
They 1 - hide, very very good, so even if you lasertag the area, you'll have difficulty finding him and 2 - a smart sniper doesn't stay in the same location popping 10-ths of bullets in people's brains. Snipers are supposed to be single-shot accurate and have a mission to kill a certain person, whether that be a commander, a guard or whatever it may be, if you want more people dead, you deploy a force with a little bigger firepower. The problem (these days in the military too) is that people have been watching too much high-suspense movies and they're using resources like snipers the same way as well as making 'solutions' to counter Hollywood-style military personnel. I've got family that is in Iraq (he's actually got sniper training) and he can tell you all about the use of 100's of military personnel to guard a small area while other areas are under-stabilized and the misuse of their skills to reflect more 'American' style high-suspense combat fighting against guerilla and other 'insurgents' that can transform from civilians walking around on the marketplace to fighter-with-automatic-rifle in a few seconds.
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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.
Except that the sonic boom caused by bullet is not pinpointable. When the bullet flies supersonic, it's creating those sonic booms the whole way (or until it drops below speed of sound). For example one of my sniper trainers was crazy enough to go downrange when another trainer shot a supersonic round with silencer (both were sufficiently good at their trade to have enough trust) and he said that sound of the shot came from completely different direction from where the shooter was. In my opinion and this is also the opinion of my sniper trainers is that every sniper should use silencer. In addition of removing the bang of the rifle, it also reduces recoil and the puff of dirt caused by the supersonic gasses exiting the muzzle.
.22LR rifles with silencers in close range. Usually in constructed areas and aiming at the gaps of the protective gear.
:). I probably wouldn't shoot anything else, but this robot before exiting the area, because $150,000 is probably the most damage I could make with a single bullet :).
Also almost anyone with some skills can construct a silencer. Simplest designs is that you have several metal disks with hole in the middle which matches the caliber of the bullet and those disks are arranged in line, attached to each other with regular interval and covered with a metal sheet.
The wikipedia article is good one on this, although the silencer design presented is more complex what I presented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressor
And the subsonic rounds are not useless for sniper operations. If I remember correctly, when USSR was in Afganistan, the insurgents used
The ability of the robot to find the range and distance of a shot by the bang of the rifle, is nothing new. I believe that US army has that kind of hardware already in some of their hummers. It is also possible to know the direction of a shot by only the flight sound of the bullet, but that requires several 'listening posts' and a central computer to calculate, but this only gets the direction of the shot, not the distance. And in constructed areas usually calculating correct direction is impossible as the sound bounces from the walls. I don't know if this robot can still pinpoint the direction and distance from the bang of the rifle, if there is walls offering echos etc, but atleast human ear is fooled about the direction. There is also equipment that tries to find the bullet inflight with radar etc, but my understanding those are not yet in use because they are not very reliable.
I think that this robot is the number one target for snipers. Shoot it first and then you're home free unless there is a second one
Thermal imaging for finding snipers is not new also, and usually the military uniforms are made so that they present as low thermal image as possible. Snipers can be invisible in thermal image also as to naked eye. I don't think that the Iraq insurgents have enough training for that, but probably they will adapt if this robot is introduced in Iraq. Although I cannot imagine why US troops in Iraq haven't used thermal imaging or bullet radars (as I've learned to call them) before..
PS. My background in this is that I have completed basic sniper training from Finnish defence forces and I have read several respected books on the subject.
but what if i shoot the robot?
Do not trust this signature.
You're missing out on the key point that is alluded to in the summary.
They've finally developed a flightless robot.
Flightless! It does not fly, AT ALL. Mankind has been dreaming of this since the dawn of science fiction... robots that don't go flying all over the place. awesome.
Actually, echo shouldn't be too much of a problem because it always arrives *after* the initial sound -- as long as you've got line of sight, which I'm guessing would be the main limitation. I suspect another source of error would be the refraction caused by temperature gradients, but I'm not sure how much effect that has. Otherwise, I also share your impression that this is probably a great lab gadget...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
All the major vendors of US suppressors have contracts with the US military (Advanced Armament, OPS Inc, Knights, Gemtech, etc.)
Advanced Armament have several suppressors designed for military contracts that are for sniper-type rifles (TITAN
Using a suppressor on a sniper rifle is of great use.
1. It eliminates the muzzle noise making it more difficult for the enemy to pin point the shooter (the sonic crack from a bullet goes in all directions at once and follows the bullet until it goes subsonic.)
2. It eliminates the muzzle flash, so no visual indicator that a round has been fired
3. It eliminates the gas kicking up dirt from the shooters position, so no visual indicator that a round has been fired
4. It reduces felt recoil, making shooting faster and easier (Thereby more accurate follow up shots if needed)
5. It drops the noise to the shooter down to hearing safe levels.
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