Engineers from the University of Missouri College of Engineering, with Army funding have improved popular smartphones so they can find and track targets.
In addition, the engineers have developed ad hoc networks so soldiers can relay smartphone information without using the internet, the university said yesterday in a statement.
The research was sponsored by the Leonard Wood Institute in cooperation with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under a Cooperative Agreement.
“The goal of the project is to provide the exact location of a remote target, through either sound or sight,” said Yi Shang, professor of computer science. “The Android phones and iPhones have powerful processors, which allow us to write complicated programs. Each smartphone has a camera, a microphone, GPS, a compass, an accelerometer, and several other sensors that we can utilize. Plus, these phones typically support three kinds of wireless communication: Bluetooth, WiFi and cellular.”
Collaborators Wenjun Zeng and Dominic Ho, MU professors of computer science, brought expertise in mobile networking, multimedia and signal processing, and have turned the phones into powerful tools for soldiers in combat situations, the university statement said.
“Imagine a team of soldiers in the field,” said Shang. “They see a distant enemy target, but lasers used to provide guidance to the target may be visible to the enemy. With our smartphone-based system, team members could take pictures of the target and obtain a GPS location, which can be relayed via wireless networks to interested parties.”
Also, researchers developed a sound-based localization method for dark or urban environments. Soldiers could record a sound and share it, and software would allow the soldiers to determine the location of the sound source.
There are civilian applications for this technology as well, engineers said. For example, emergency responders could use the software to identify a location or direct traffic, or tourists could use the application to identify an unfamiliar object or building with the exact location.
The technology is still in the early stages of development.