It's no secret that a lot of loud noises are heard on the battlefields. That's why soldiers these days often wear in-ear headphones that protect their hearing thanks to smart noise cancellation. However, this system also does not at all help to determine where a potential enemy is firing at you from, and it is not always so easy to do this even without headphones and distracting sounds. The new technology is designed to use military headphones along with a smartphone to solve this problem.
Known as Tactical Communication and Protective Systems (TCAPS), special headphones used by the military typically contain tiny microphones both inside and outside each ear canal. These microphones allow the voices of other soldiers to pass through unhindered, but automatically turn on the electronic filter when they detect loud sounds, such as the user's own weapons being fired. However, they can sometimes make it difficult to determine where enemy fire is coming from. This is vital information because it allows soldiers to know not only the direction in which they should return fire, but also where they should seek cover.
An experimental system developed at the French-German Research Institute Saint-Louis is designed to help soldiers with this task. Her work is based on the fact that modern military weapons produce two sound waves when fired. The first is a supersonic shock wave that propagates in a cone shape in front of the bullet, the second is the muzzle wave that follows it, which radiates spherically in all directions from the firearm itself.
Using microphones inside tactical military headphones, the new system is able to measure the difference in time between when two waves reach each of a soldier's ears. This data is transmitted via Bluetooth to an application on his smartphone, where a special algorithm will determine the direction from which the waves came and, therefore, the direction in which the shooter is located.
βIf itβs a smartphone with a good processor, the computation time to get the full trajectory is about half a second,β says SΓ©bastien Hengy, lead scientist on the project.
To date, the technology has been field-tested with TCAPS microphones spaced apart, with plans to test it on a mock soldier's head later this year, and rollout for military use in 2021.
Source: 3dnews.ru