Super Cool
The diversity and accessibility of great minds at Vanderbilt never ceases to amaze me. In a Computer Science class (CS 103: Intro to Programming for Engineers) this Monday, Professor Akos Ledeczi casually mentioned a project he works on at Vanderbilt’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems. With about 10 minutes left in the class, Prof. Ledeczi pulled up screenshots, videos, and an excerpt from a paper about a counter-sniper system that he and his team have designed and tested with great success. Using a network of cheap and portable sensors (“soldier wearable”), the system, known as PinPtr, triangulates the position of a shooter based on acoustic data collected from the bullet – With a single shot, the system of scattered and deployable sensors can return the location of the shooter to 1m accuracy in three dimensions, the trajectory (speed and direction) of the bullet, and even the type of weapon fired.
PinPtr in action - Green dots represent the mobile sensors, the red line is the ballistic vector for the bullet.
Seriously? Seriously. I wish I had known about this project the first day of class so I could have spent each successive class with my mouth open in “THAT IS SO COOL” shock. Vanderbilt is so ridiculous in that sense – The people here are working on real, innovative technologies that will be relevant in the near future. As an Army cadet, “soldier-wearable” counter-sniper systems are of even more personal relevance, and there’s a very real possibility that I’ll be seeing this system again in a much more practical setting in the near future.