Inside science + technology.

• Author: Parsons, Dan

Industry Melds Smartphones to Rifles

(*) The U.S. military has long sought technologies that improve soldier effectiveness in combat, particularly ones that enhance situational awareness, communication and marksmanship.

The Army continues to struggle with development of its next- generation battlefield communications network, and the Defense Department's shadowy research arm is seeking a foolproof robotic sniper scope. Meanwhile the commercial firearms industry seems to have already outdone both.

It was evident in January' at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas that die commercial firearms industry has found solutions to those problems by using relatively inexpensive commercial, off-the-shelf technology.

The recently unveiled Inteliscope, for instance, turns an ordinary smartphone into a riflescopethat can provide wind speed and direction in real time and can record video from a gun-barrel perspective. Companies like Leupold Optics already market apps to hunters and recreational marksmen that track skills progression and calculate elevation, wind speed and bullet drop.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been seeking smart-rifle technologies for years. The agency has tested several prototypes that include smart scopes and bullets that can seek atarget during flight like a tiny missile.

Formally known as Project One Shot, die program aims to develop a scope that will take much of the burden of calculation off a sniper's shoulders. For each shot, a sniper and his spotter must account for wind speed and direction, elevation and range. Even the temperature of the air, the shooter's heart rate and the curvature of the Earth can affect a bullet's path.

"The system developed will measure all relevant physical phenomena that influence the ballistic trajectory and rapidly calculate and display the offset aim point and confidence metric in the shooter's riflescope," according to DARPA documents.

DARPA recently awarded Cubic Corp. a $6 million contract to develop an "observation, measurement and ballistic calculation system" to automatically crunch those numbers without falling prey to the problems of inaccuracy, short battery life and overheating that occurred in earlier iterations.

TrackingPoint Inc, a company bom out of its owner's difficulty in placing long-range shots during an African safari, may have beaten Cubic to the punch by developing precision-guided firearms designed to fulfill exactly the desires DARPA has advertised. Its custom...