4 ms·

If your network is good enough to gather a microphone's data from each soldier/drone on the battlefield, you could centrally assemble a very accurate location a

If your network is good enough to gather a microphone's data from each soldier/drone on the battlefield, you could centrally assemble a very accurate location and type on any weapon fired and other ambient sound. That data could be used to evaluate risks and return fire accurately within milliseconds. It could give a general a lack of fog-of-war only available before in simulations.

bragr 4y ago
I'm not sure this is true given the inaccuracy of shotspotter
- h2odragon 4y ago
  I think shotspotter's problems are more political than technical. Not to say they don't have technical challenges too: better sensors than the human ear turn out to be fairly easy, but interpreting that data is still hard. Brains are complicated, "hearing" is a process contributed to by nearly every layer of meat that reacts to sound. The human ability to notice a new noise in the cacophony of everyday life is really an amazing trick if you think about it.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    I know a non-shotspotter effort to identify gunshot sound in a very different context which also is having a very hard time; there is a real unsolved technical problem here. And it makes me think that ID'ing gun model from audio - which will be harder than simply identifying the existence of gunfire - is going to be very difficult.
- closewith 4y ago
  Possibly with small calibre weapons in urban areas. Sound ranging is a solved and reliable way of identifying artillery locations and was the gold standard until counter-battery radar was developed during WW2. It's still in service with all major militaries (in the West, largely using BAE HALO) as it's a completely passive sensor system and therefore not subject to attack from HARM.
livueta 4y ago
Yes, but with caveats. Disclaimer: just a hobbyist, not my professional area, corrections appreciated - oldschool radio direction-finding with a couple of directional antennas that are manually positioned and rotated (i.e. based on signal attenuation) doesn't really work for point-in-time things like a single brief signal unless you have massive arrays of well-positioned receivers, which is fine if you're building an HFDF installation but not fine if you're a squad on the move - multilateration on the basis of signal attenuation, analogous to that sort of oldschool RDF, is possible but IME doesn't perform very well; same problem where you often need a lot of well-positioned points to shrink the possibility envelope down to something useful - multilateration on the basis of time of arrival, analogous to more modern pseudo-doppler / correlative interferometry RDF techniques, can perform a lot better but requires a very high quality shared time source - if the model is analyzing info from an array of observers, this can be a problem on typical battlefield network designs that prioritize availability over performance - but this approach also enables single site setups where a local time source and a handful of receivers can read a bearing without actually needing to network at all, though this involves a lot of math
- wbl 4y ago
  GPS solves the sync issue to the order of nanoseconds. You can also have local TOA determine angles that get passed up to triangulate. The US Army deployed some of these techniques in antisniper work in Iraq.
  - livueta 4y ago
    That's a good point, and required time precision seems like it should be proportional to the velocity of the signal being investigated. I had some bad experiences trying to use gps time for RDF, but that might not apply here. From https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/mobisys07/full_papers/p113.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/mobisys07/full_papers/p... > Our time synchronization approach yields errors signif- icantly less than 100 microseconds. As the sound travels about 3 cm in that time, time synchronization errors have a negligible effect on the system. Sounds like it? The anti-sniper systems I knew about already (Boomerang) are that single-site setup where time sync isn't a problem. The "Individual Gunshot Detector" sounds more like what you're describing. > The Individual Gunshot Detector (IGD) by Qinetiq consists of a shoulder-mounted unit with four acoustic sensors and a chest display that attaches to body armor. Still looking for more detail, but that sounds like a local ToA > pass up angles for triangulation type deal.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
> within milliseconds. I think you're overestimating the speed of sound a bit. You'd need nearly 5 seconds to hear artillery fire a mile away.
carabiner 4y ago
Given that sounds occlude each other as overlapping pressure waves in air, this seems impossible. It's like unblurring a photo - information is lost and can't be recovered.

bragr 4y ago

I'm not sure this is true given the inaccuracy of shotspotter

h2odragon 4y ago
I think shotspotter's problems are more political than technical. Not to say they don't have technical challenges too: better sensors than the human ear turn out to be fairly easy, but interpreting that data is still hard. Brains are complicated, "hearing" is a process contributed to by nearly every layer of meat that reacts to sound. The human ability to notice a new noise in the cacophony of everyday life is really an amazing trick if you think about it.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  I know a non-shotspotter effort to identify gunshot sound in a very different context which also is having a very hard time; there is a real unsolved technical problem here. And it makes me think that ID'ing gun model from audio - which will be harder than simply identifying the existence of gunfire - is going to be very difficult.
closewith 4y ago
Possibly with small calibre weapons in urban areas. Sound ranging is a solved and reliable way of identifying artillery locations and was the gold standard until counter-battery radar was developed during WW2. It's still in service with all major militaries (in the West, largely using BAE HALO) as it's a completely passive sensor system and therefore not subject to attack from HARM.

livueta 4y ago

Yes, but with caveats. Disclaimer: just a hobbyist, not my professional area, corrections appreciated - oldschool radio direction-finding with a couple of directional antennas that are manually positioned and rotated (i.e. based on signal attenuation) doesn't really work for point-in-time things like a single brief signal unless you have massive arrays of well-positioned receivers, which is fine if you're building an HFDF installation but not fine if you're a squad on the move - multilateration on the basis of signal attenuation, analogous to that sort of oldschool RDF, is possible but IME doesn't perform very well; same problem where you often need a lot of well-positioned points to shrink the possibility envelope down to something useful - multilateration on the basis of time of arrival, analogous to more modern pseudo-doppler / correlative interferometry RDF techniques, can perform a lot better but requires a very high quality shared time source - if the model is analyzing info from an array of observers, this can be a problem on typical battlefield network designs that prioritize availability over performance - but this approach also enables single site setups where a local time source and a handful of receivers can read a bearing without actually needing to network at all, though this involves a lot of math

wbl 4y ago
GPS solves the sync issue to the order of nanoseconds. You can also have local TOA determine angles that get passed up to triangulate. The US Army deployed some of these techniques in antisniper work in Iraq.
- livueta 4y ago
  That's a good point, and required time precision seems like it should be proportional to the velocity of the signal being investigated. I had some bad experiences trying to use gps time for RDF, but that might not apply here. From https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/mobisys07/full_papers/p113.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/mobisys07/full_papers/p... > Our time synchronization approach yields errors signif- icantly less than 100 microseconds. As the sound travels about 3 cm in that time, time synchronization errors have a negligible effect on the system. Sounds like it? The anti-sniper systems I knew about already (Boomerang) are that single-site setup where time sync isn't a problem. The "Individual Gunshot Detector" sounds more like what you're describing. > The Individual Gunshot Detector (IGD) by Qinetiq consists of a shoulder-mounted unit with four acoustic sensors and a chest display that attaches to body armor. Still looking for more detail, but that sounds like a local ToA > pass up angles for triangulation type deal.

MichaelCollins 4y ago

> within milliseconds. I think you're overestimating the speed of sound a bit. You'd need nearly 5 seconds to hear artillery fire a mile away.

carabiner 4y ago

Given that sounds occlude each other as overlapping pressure waves in air, this seems impossible. It's like unblurring a photo - information is lost and can't be recovered.