DARPA working on inertial-nav 'Smart Boot' tech Elite Pentagon deathnerds have just awarded a contract for development of a highly accurate inertial navigation module which will fit in the heel of a shoe. Massachusetts sensors'n'tracking company Intersense were chuffed to announce the deal this week, in which the firm will work with Case Western university to deliver tiny …
Firstly, Military GPS is significantly better than Halfords brand. Down to less than 10cm in some cases. So that is more than accurate enough to remove an insurgent's face with a stand off weapon.
Secondly, Inertial Nav would only be able to tell you what co-ordinates you are at. Which is useless against a moving target.
TV guidance and such is useful as it hits what you are aiming at, not the location that you assume it is at.
This device will be handy for spec-ops and as a back up to regular systems for sure, but targeting is less of a problem than intelligence gathering, so i think they could do with some better spotters to avoid sending the spec-ops team on a zippo raid in a baby milk factory.
At this point I'd like to give a big shout out to Charlie Wartnaby, a former work colleague, who 10 years ago was playing around with a shoe-mounted 3-axis accelerometer to measure his running speed. Even at the time, this wasn't a new idea - Charlie found that someone already had a patent on it.
Oh, and re the article, the final few paragraphs seem a bit odd. Boot location sensors would certainly help the Americans not to kill any of their own soldiers or any of their allies' soldiers (a useful feature given their track record), but it's not much use for stopping the aforesaid Hellfire missile wiping out a houseful of sandal-wearing women and their barefoot kiddies.
One has to wonder why, if you intend to kill the target, you would bother tracking the target via his shoes when you could simply put explosive/a very sharp nail/one of those stones that always gravitiates to the most annoying part of your foot, into the boot in the first place?
Inertial guidance suffers from increased error with distance travelled as the position is always relative to the start position, as any errors are cumulative. Absolute positioning, such as GPS, has the same errors regardless of distance.
The two together might work: GPS for calibrating when within receiving sight of a satellite or 3, then inertial for the delta from that known position.
relying solely on GPS for mission critical weapons (especially nuclear deterrent) would be beyond stupid. Although it's unlikely, in the event of a major war, an adversary could knock out a dozen GPS satellites with rockets or perhaps totally jam the frequency of the GPS signal within its borders....
Thats the last thing you want when China decides it wants to run the world!
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