IBM Files Patent For Bullet-Dodging Bionic Armor 379
An anonymous reader writes with news that IBM has filed a patent for "Bionic body armor" that would protect a wearer from long-range gunfire by detecting the incoming bullets and administering small shocks to the appropriate muscles required for moving out of the way. Quoting the patent: "When a marksman (such as a sniper) is attempting to fire a projectile from a firearm, the marksman typically prefers to be as far away from the target as possible, thus giving him or her a head start for the escape after the firing. As an example, the longest reported sniper hit was from a distance of about 2500 meters, resulting in a time of flight of about 4 seconds for the projectile/bullet. Had the target been aware of the inbound projectile, avoiding it by simply walking away would have been possible." After detecting the projectile, the armor would calculate the trajectory and "stimulate the target to move in a predefined manner ... sufficient to avoid any contact with the approaching projectile."
Re:Mechanism of detection? (Score:2, Insightful)
Jeez, I'd like to patent invisible rocket suits (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't mean you can make it work in 10 years or less.
I guess we should be patenting everything we can possibly think of, now. Sigh.
wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably the lamest idea ever. Long range sniper kills of this type represent an insignificant minority of deaths, they really think people are going to wear this crap?
The detection method sounds flaky and lame. What I would pay to see though is the other side create an 'electromagnetic' interference device that causes this armor to 'stimulate' the wearer to dive into a brick wall or something.
Re:Mechanism of detection? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mechanism of detection? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or in other words, radar.
Super Sonic Rounds (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of sniper rounds are super sonic. (the speed of sound is only about 1,100 ft/s)
So the bullet will hit it's target before the sound wave warning has arrived
This sounds way too good to be true.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the armor emits an electromagnetic signal that can detect, instantly, the movement of a bullet, can calculate the trajectory of said bullet, and somehow ensure that the user is warned enough to move out of the way of the bullet. In the example that they give, the bullet is traveling at 625 meters per second, the size of a bullet coming from a typical sniper rifle is very small. So this armor can detect, say the size of a small marble, from 2500 meters away?
Assuming that this armor can perfect and accurately detect incoming small arms projectiles and warn the user in time, how can the armor know the ground terrain that the wearer has to physically negotiate? Say the person is standing in two feet of snow, or in sand in the desert, perhaps the person is in two feet of water, or they are walking down stairs? The armor requires the user to be an acrobat from what I can tell. And no matter what, unless the armor can fully mobilize the wearer and move them automatically, this system still leaves room for grave human error, meaning it's hardly reliable.
And won't people figure out a way to beat the armor, or beat the system. Imagine a sniper rifle that fires a decoy bullet, that knocks the target down (as he evades the first bullet) and puts the armor wearer in a prone position on the ground, making him or her easy to target. Or perhaps a decoy bullet is shot from one barrel and the real bullet follows in a pre-calculated trajectory requiring no manual aiming for the sniper. Perhaps a bullet can be made undetectable to the electromagnetic pulse that the armor gives off. Maybe the armor can be jammed? You fire a bullet with an electromagnetic pulse destabilizer and then pick off your target when the armor fails.
I should mention that I live like three or four miles from IBM's headquarters in the Hudson Valley, so I hope they let my friends who work there bring in their buddies (or just me) for some live fire demonstrations where we can snipe at blowup dolls wearing million dollar armor with some high tech rifles.
Another typical IBM patent (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens when a company pays its employees for each successful patent, and when employees are even told to put patent applications in their yearly personal objectives, which affect their annual bonuses. You end up with employees spending a large chunk of their work week filing for patents on any random idea that enters their head, no matter how impractical, obvious, or unrelated to the company's actual research and development.
Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, there's accuracy. You don't want your VIP actually walking to intercept the bullet.
Second, size. If your radar is so precise as to detect a bullet even 500 yards away, it's gotta be pretty big.
Related to this, there's energy. For an awesome radar (or anything else) like that, you'd need big-ass batteries, and/or to recharge every couple of hours. Especially in battle, this would be a no-go.
Finally, if they claim that this is really for VIP's under high risk of an assassination attempt, and not for military/police, then the device would probably have to be invisible. I don't think Obama or Bill Gates wants to walk around with a huge thingamajig on his head (remember "Child abduction is not funny"?).
Seriously, I don't know if it's a good idea to give somebody a patent for an idea if they haven't addressed so many key issues.
Is this a troll patent? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Super Sonic Rounds (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why they aren't going off of sound (detailed in the patent application). They're using EM waves to reflect off of the bullet (either radar, laser, etc).
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:5, Insightful)
...or right into the path of the SAME bullet.
I mean, how accurate can this thing be? Maybe the bullet detected by the suit was going to pass two feet to the left of you. If the suit makes you jump to the left ... ooops!
Re:wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wtf (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't about saving lives. It's about getting government money.
Stuff like this sounds sexy. The generation of people in government office who hand out cash for this grew up watching sci-fi movies, and this sounds cool. They even get to try on the armour at sales pitches I reckon. Probably get to take a few souvenir photos.
Compare that with very dry presentations saying more steel is needed to reinforce the armour on military vehicles. It sounds dull, and it doesn't get funding.
This is nothing new. Governments make emotional decisions in knee jerk response, or decisions that have good photo-ops. The press makes things worse by reporting sound bites, or stories with good photos, and ignoring the important stuff.
Re:wtf (Score:3, Insightful)
Redundant. As much as I love Jackie's movies, Tuxedo can only be watched while really really drunk.
Re:And how's it deal with multiple shooters? (Score:3, Insightful)
in that case even a bulletproof vest would be irrelevant because it cannot stand repeated hits anyway.
that's why a .22lr smg can be far more dangerous than a 9x19mm pistol.
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, the plates generally in use by NATO nations are designed to stop up to 3 hits from 7.62 rounds. Now, granted "designed to" doesn't mean they will, but if you're suggesting that the plate is useless after only one hit from a 5.56 round, then you're just plain wrong.
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:4, Insightful)
The trig. is easy, sure, the problem is getting accurate data points on a tiny piece of metal moving at twice the speed of sound on a vector almost directly towards you.
Luckily the patent office accepts patents for impossible things.
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Super Sonic Rounds (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh brilliant. So all you need is a rocket built to home in on EM waves from the armor?
Re:This sounds way too good to be true.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd love to hear your arguments against bulletproof vests.
"Won't people figure out a way to beat the armor, or beat the system. Imagine a gun that fires a much heavier caliber bullet that the vest cannot stop?"
"What if people are standing on the edge of a building. Now instead of having a bullet rip through them only to make them collapse, the impact will push them off the ledge and crash into a crowd of toddlers and other kids. Boom, splat. Instantly kills multiple people with one single bullet, just because the target was stupid enough to wear a bulletproof vest."
Here's a hint - it's not supposed to be a forcefield. It's supposed to improve survivability not make you impervious to any and all attacks. After all - what's to prevent the shooter from just switching nuclear armaments?
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if you can link the sensors together this could also be used to have people jump in front of the bullet to defend the target. Think President + Secret Service.
Re:Mechanism of detection? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you throw gravel at several hundred meters per second so as to get the doppler signature required for the system to act, it had better dodge your gravel.
Of course, that won't be very efficient; the gravel would probably disintegrate.
Hmm, maybe if you make metal gravel? And make it aerodynamic? Hmm...
Re:wtf (Score:3, Insightful)
On the steel issue.. a large part of that problem is using vehicles for purposes they were never designed for.
A humvee is supposed to be a relatively light support vehicle that follows behind the front. It was not generally designed to get shot at - adding extra armor plates is a lot of weight that significantly changes how the vehicle handles.
By taking our army that was designed to kick ass and take names against another army, throwing them into anti-insurgency duty where they have to deal with civilians who may or may not be setting bomb, we've gone completely outside of the expected parameters our military was designed for. Once you come to this realization, it takes a lot of time to actually design, build, and install hundreds of armor plates, assuming that your distributors even have free space on the machines to do it (since they're probably full up making armor plates for your armored vehicles). The Iraq war has been like trying to use an attack dog as a seeing eye dog - he probably capable of learning how, but he just isn't set up for it.
The interesting thing to me is that, according to the articles I've read, the US military actively dismantled their anti-insurgency units and doctrines after Vietnam over concerns that if we had units trained to do this sort of thing, leadership would be dumb enough to try to do it again. Never underestimate the stupidity of government leaders, I guess.
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:3, Insightful)
A reasonable practical concern. However, it's just a patent for "futuretech," not a practical invention (yet?). Also, I don't know how accurate small phased-array radar systems are, or by how much you could improve the accuracy of your estimate of the bullet's state by incorporating a dynamic model (using, e.g., a Kalman filter). But I think that both questions need answering before this idea, even with "existing" technology, can be dismissed.
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I find it hilarious that you are actually suggesting we use a highly sophisticated machine to control a suit which turns the person inside into a meat shield to protect someone else. Surely by the time we've actually invented this amazing device we can figure out something else to put between the speeding bullet and the president rather than another fucking human being! :).
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:2, Insightful)
I was trying to point out that going faster than sound is only a fundamental issue for sound based tracking. Fast & small objects are *hard* to track with other methods, not impossible.
You claimed it was _completely_ useless (emphasis yours) for situations like the one they quoted. The idea that they hadn't considered that the bullets may be moving faster than sound was the one I was responding to.
Re:Stimulate to move... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, yes, that works well to track a small, high velocity object in a similarly cluttered field.
It is exactly the high velocity that makes it so easy to track. It would stand out like a sore thumb on doppler radar. And since you only care about bullets aimed at you, it will also be almost stationary in the radar's field of view.