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'Smart gun' shows promise |
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Written by Knight Ridder
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Wednesday, 31 May 2006 |
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As police in Philadelphia struggle to stop a scourge of shootings, some New Jersey engineers say they are closing in on a “smart” solution: a gun that can be fired only by its owner.
The prototype, developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, has pressure sensors embedded in the gun handle that recognize a person’s unique grip.
Michael Recce, who dreamed up the grip-recognition concept in 1999, said the only obstacles are time and money.
“It’s an engineering problem, not a scientific problem,” he said.
However long it takes, it’s safe to say the university has embarked on a product-development quest like no other — wading into a contentious issue on the fault line between red and blue America.
In the last few months, Recce’s team has crammed the necessary electronics into the handle of a prototype, so the firearm no longer must be tethered to a computer.
Inside the grip, 16 ceramic discs generate a charge when pressed. They are called piezoelectric sensors, from the Greek piezo, for “pressure.” Barbecue lighters use a similar feature.
Once the shooter squeezes the trigger, the grip sensors spring into action, recording the pressure for one-tenth of a second. In that moment, the pressure applied by each finger varies enough that engineers can distinguish between shooters with a high degree of reliability. A grip’s signature does not vary significantly from firing to firing, even in stressful situations, researchers have found.
A year and a half ago, a prototype recognized authorized users nine out of 10 times. Now, the rate lies between 95 and 99 percent, said Michael Cody, a computer science engineer on the team.
The latest prototype still holds just one 9mm round, and while it recognizes its user most of the time, it cannot prevent others from firing it.
Solving the first problem means creating more room in the handle by designing small, custom batteries and circuits to replace the clunky, off-the-shelf parts, team member Timothy Chang said.
The second problem— preventing a gun from being fired — has already been studied by other manufacturers.
The most sensible approach may be to marry Recce’s recognition technology with a gun that fires electronically — without mechanical, moving parts such as a hammer. If an authorized user were recognized, it would be a simple matter to turn on the firing circuitry.
Recce estimated that his revolving team of graduate students and postdocs could develop a market-ready product in five years, and that a private company could do so in three. | Only registered users can write comments.
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