Drizzt
Member
State getting a grip on smart guns
NJIT works on weapon that fires only after recognizing its owner's touch
Sunday, October 26, 2003
BY STEVE TWOMEY
Star-Ledger Staff
The piece is a Beretta 9mm, model 92FS.
It rests -- Italian, gray, unloaded -- in the right palm of Michael Recce, although the professor is such an un-gun guy he can't remember what the weapon is, even if it is the sun of his solar system. It's a gun; enough said.
Affixed to either side of its handle are 16 raised, dime-size sensors. Recce's team has done the test thousands of times now, either in its stained-ceiling and window-free lab on the cusp of downtown Newark or at an Army facility in Morris County: A hand picks up the weapon. An index finger starts to pull the trigger. The sensors start working on the riddle.
Who's holding the gun?
Readings stream through wires to a processor on a table top. The machine, in a sliver of an instant, sifts its memory. Not for fingerprints. This isn't about them. It's asking itself if the holder's grip is familiar. That's Recce's ace premise, that a palm and fingers trying to squeeze off a shot create a "pressure signature" distinctive enough to serve as personal identification.
If the situation were real, the Beretta loaded and the grip lodged in memory, the processor would tell the gun to fire. If the grip were alien, it would instruct nothing. The trigger-pull would unleash nothing.
Imagine ...
A toddler who picked up such a gun couldn't fire it.
A teenager who brought dad's to school couldn't massacre with it.
A thug who stole one couldn't kill with it.
A cop in a struggle couldn't have it turned against him.
"It is revolutionary," Recce says. "It's big."
Maybe the future will not include "dynamic grip recognition," the name of the innovative technology -- it received a U.S. patent in May -- being born in room 4111 of the Guttenberg building at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. There are those who belittle NJIT's excitement as self-promotional or its concept as flawed. This is, after all, a field littered with great ideas now deceased.
But the quest for safer guns, even thinking guns, is accelerating faster than perhaps the world beyond science knows. Using fingerprint scanners, light beams, radio signals and other gee-whiz notions, NJIT and others are trying to perfect guns that would limit who can use them, technologies that have "advanced significantly since 1996," the Sandia National Laboratories concluded two years ago.
"I'm more confident now than I was a few years back," says Kevin Foley, vice president of product engineering for Smith&Wesson, the venerable arms maker in Springfield, Mass., which is deep into research on "user recognition" systems. "I wasn't sure this was achievable at all."
In the most ambitious designs, the gun would compare a biological trait of the person holding it with the stored traits of the rightful user or group of users, such as a squad of police. Only if a match were made would the holder be able to fire.
That would thwart young hands that came across an adult's weapon, one of the most potent arguments for developing safer technology. The federal Centers for Disease Control say 174 minors nationwide were shot to death accidentally in 2000, the most recent year available, although that is considerably fewer than the number who accidentally drowned (1,236), suffocated (842) or died of poisoning (311).
Even bigger changes might come on the street, given that a 1996 study by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig of Duke University estimated that 500,000 weapons are stolen every year. Surely some of those thieves would find ways to defeat smart technology -- any bank can be robbed with enough effort -- but many, if not most, criminals would find themselves unable to use the pilfered prize to murder or rob.
The possibilities, however, do not end with guns.
MORE SILENT SENTRIES
Terrorists could not fly airplanes that recognize only the pilot's grip. Thieves could not steal cars that start only if a scanner sees the correct fingerprint. Doors would open only if a light beam in the knob detected an authorized palm after painlessly sampling more than a dozen benchmarks in the first few layers of skin.
"This is really incredible technology," says Richard C. McCaskill, vice president of business development and marketing for Lumidigm, a New Mexico company working on "deep tissue" recognition. Even though he's been involved for years, the research remains stunning.
"I still say that, almost daily," McCaskill says.
Safer weapons will not arrive in months, though. They will arrive in years, if at all.
To a degree, the obstacle is the politics of guns. Pro-gun groups "do not trust the technology," the Sandia report said, and fear that citizens would wind up only with poor-performing smart weapons because all non-smart ones would be banned.
And, says Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association, "What is the cost factor here? Are these firearms going to be priced out of range for families and individuals of modest means?"
Nor are all gun-control groups keen on smart-gun technology, because it could increase the number of weapons. Previously wary fathers and mothers might become buyers, swelling the pool of people who might misuse a weapon, however smart it is.
"That's perhaps the most compelling argument for me to listen to," says Stephen Teret, a professor of public health policy at Johns Hopkins University who nonetheless believes more lives will be saved by smarter weapons than lost.
But the sheer complexity of making a weapon smart is probably a more daunting obstacle than politics.
At the moment, a handgun is mechanical simplicity in a compact package. To tell who is trying to fire, it would need an onboard data processing system. It would need an onboard source of power. It can't gain too much weight or cost. The processor can't take too long to decide.
Most of all, the gun must fire when an authorized user wants it to fire. Police officers must believe it will never lock them out in a street incident. Civilians must believe it will always offer protection in the home, perhaps the chief reason Americans own 70 million handguns.
"We didn't want to end up with a product that was going to not be usable because it was unreliable," says Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), the sponsor of a 2002 law that says only smart handguns can be sold in New Jersey, starting three years after the state certifies they are workable and widely available.
Given all the requirements, "I know the current technology does not provide an acceptable solution," says Gary Mehalik, communications director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, who argues that "the more complicated you make a firearm ... the more likely it is something will go wrong."
But next month, if all goes well, NJIT will pass a milestone at Picatinny Arsenal, the Army facility working closely with Recce's lab. For the first time, the research team will fire bullets from a gun that has grip technology. The processor won't make a shoot/don't shoot decision, not yet. But researchers will be able to track how the sensors are influenced by the heat, smoke, noise and concussion of discharge.
NJIT began with, of all things, signatures.
Recce is a devotee of pattern recognition, including biometrics, the study of human patterns. By looking at physical and behavioral traits, for example, it is possible to distinguish any one of us from all the rest of us. A voice creates a distinctive pattern. An iris has a pattern, too.
SIGHTING PATTERNS
On a hot summer day in 1999, the year of the killings at Columbine High School, Recce encountered his boss in a parking lot. The state Legislature, which had been debating the technology's feasibility, had just given NJIT $1 million to get smart about smart guns. Donald H. Sebastian, the school's vice president for research and development, recalls that Recce simply said, "I heard you were involved in this project, and I've got an idea."
It involved biometrics.
When someone signs an electronic screen, like those that stores have for credit card customers, the key is not how the scribble looks but how it unfolds, where the stylus moves quickly and slowly, where it is picked up and put down. That's a pattern. Recce told Sebastian something like that might be helpful in authorizing the use of a gun.
"I know Michael," Sebastian says, "and if he says something like that, it's not science-fiction musing."
Recce's interest is not personal. To this day, he has never fired a real gun. He is not a gun victim, a Second Amendment zealot or ban-them-all fanatic. Recce, 44, is an eclectic delver. He once worked on creating a robot to pick oranges. His multiple degrees and interests include math, fine arts, computer science, robotics and neural computation. Formally, he is a professor of information systems. Fundamentally, Sebastian says, "He has the soul of an engineer."
With its $1 million in state money, NJIT first looked at what others had done to create a "smart gun," an oft-misunderstood, bandied-about phrase. "The definition frequently changes either subtly or significantly depending upon the ideology of the speaker," the Sandia report said.
Many advocates of gun control, for example, believe arms makers have long been able to make smart weapons, but lack the will. They fear boycotts by the NRA, advocates say, and worry that developing a smart weapon will expose them to lawsuits alleging they could have developed one sooner.
Yet often these advocates don't mean smart technology that identifies a specific user. They mean PIN codes or keys that unlock a gun. Certainly, those increase safety. But they work only as long as children or thieves don't figure out a PIN code or find a key. And a homeowner who hears a bump in the night has to be able to easily find the key or remember the PIN code for a gun he might not have used for months or years.
By "smart," other advocates mean devices that work like E-ZPass. A gun owner wears or has something -- a ring, a wristband, a necklace -- that emits a frequency that activates the weapon.
Such systems would work well for police officers, who always have their weapons, always want them "enabled" and could make the device part of their uniform and routine. In fact, the $5.8 million the federal government has given to labs for smart-gun research stems from a desire to reduce the number of officers killed after their guns are taken. (That is not an everyday occurrence, though. From 1992 through 2001, 46 officers in the United States were killed on duty with their guns, the FBI says. Its Web site, however, does not say how many were wounded.)
OUTSMARTING OURSELVES
For the general public, however, E-ZPass systems have problems similar to those of PIN codes and keys: Unless the owner keeps the E-ZPass with him -- around the neck, say -- he must know where he left it. That could lead homeowners to keep the smart device with the gun, on a shelf or in a drawer. And that would mean a child or a thief could easily find both the gun and the means to fire it.
When NJIT finished its review of smart gun technology, it concluded that no system based on a PIN code, key or E-ZPass would work as well as a biometric system, at least for civilian guns. A biometric "key" cannot be forged, forgotten or given away, because it's part of someone's body. It is "immune to owner neglect and irresponsibility," Sebastian says.
But which biometric?
A fingerprint scanner built into a gun handle can get smudged, greasy or bloody, distorting readings. And what if the owner is wearing gloves? Several experts believe recent work on fingerprint systems suggests they are getting better, but NJIT did not make them a priority, Sebastian says.
Voice recognition is a possibility. The owner could speak a password to the gun. But what if the owner has a cold or laryngitis? Not only that, voices change dramatically under stress, and a situation in which someone is trying to use a gun would be stressful. NJIT didn't go there, either.
Almost from the start, grip technology was the grail, because it offers one plus above all others.
"Ours is the only one that doesn't require you to do something different," Recce says.
The owner would not have to put a finger on a scanner, speak a password, punch in a code or wear something that sends a signal. He would simply grab the gun, as always.
Moving from plastic models to the Beretta -- which was donated by an NJIT employee -- Recce and his assistants have slowly built their knowledge of how palms and fingers take hold of a gun and squeeze, and how to capture those differences electronically.
"It is more a question of stopping the failures than improving the performance," Recce says. "The performance was improved through better placement of sensors, better electronic designs, more robust sensors, improved signal detection and analysis."
He now has an opinion of whether a grip is distinctive.
Not as distinctive as fingerprints.
Or snowflakes.
CALLING ON TECHNOLOGY
But Recce says somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000 people would share an owner's "pressure signature." And the odds that a child would have the same grip as an adult are "nearly astronomical," given that any child's hand is smaller than any adult's.
"Who knew everybody had a personalized hand grip?" says Weinberg, the assemblywoman.
A gun would have to recognize that grip instantly, however. It takes three-tenths of a second to pull a trigger, Recce says. In that time, the sensors have to take readings, and the processor has to analyze them and decide whether to allow a shot.
No sweat.
"Thank you very much for cell phones," Recce says.
They have revolutionized processing by miniaturizing it.
"The processor in my cell phone" -- he takes it out of a pocket -- "has more than enough processing capacity to make that calculation."
In Recce's lab, though, the processor is still big and still on a table. Nothing has been put in the Beretta. Nor has the lab gotten to what one gun expert called "the design wall." How the electronic part of a smart gun will tell the mechanical part to fire, if that's the decision. Will some sort of safety pin be pulled out? How?
It is a research step NJIT might skip entirely, because of stunning parallel developments in the very nature of weapons.
An Australian company, Metal Storm, now has a working model of an all-electronic gun. Nothing moves but the trigger and bullet. There are no mechanical linkages set in motion by the finger pull. There is no hammer. Ammunition does not move out of storage in the handle or a revolving cylinder.
Instead, seven bullets are lined up in the barrel, separated by propellant. When the trigger is pulled, each round is fired by a signal sent from a electronic processor in the gun handle.
"It's much more reliable," says Charles Vehlow, chief executive officer of Metal Storm Inc., the U.S. branch of the company, "because you've gotten rid of all these mechanical parts."
NJIT, which formed a partnership with Metal Storm last month, might ride piggyback on this breakthrough, using the electronics that fire the shells to also determine if the grip is authorized. That would solve two smart-gun problems: Where to find space for a processor and how to bridge the gap between smart technology and the firing mechanisms. Not only that, criminals who want to use a stolen electronic gun couldn't disable the smart-gun technology without disabling the entire gun, because they are so intertwined.
"Electronically discharged firearms may ultimately prove to be the preferred platform for 'smart guns,'" the Sandia study said.
Smith&Wesson is also at work on an electronic gun, and would marry it to Lumidigm's light-beam recognition system that samples 13 skin factors. Lumidigm's McCaskill says, however, that anyone with gloves "will have a problem." There has to be "fairly good skin contact." But he says NJIT's idea has a problem as well: An individual's grip can change.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
That's what Gary Sniezak thinks, too.
NJIT has "dramatically overstated the discriminating capabilities of that technology," says Sniezak, vice president for research and development of FN Manufacturing Inc., a South Carolina arms maker working on a user-recognition gun intended for police. He calls Recce's idea "great theory," but only in the lab.
To work, the processor of a grip-technology gun must become acquainted with the authorized grip. After buying a gun, the owner would pick it up at, say, a police station. In the presence of an officer, he would grip the weapon repeatedly to give the processor enough data to get a profile.
The grips of husbands and wives or police officers and their partners also could be programmed into a processor.
But, Sniezak says, those stored grips might bear no relation to the high-intensity grip produced by a frightened police officer or owner in a dire situation. At the moment of greatest need, the gun might lock out the owner. And what if the owner has a sprained wrist or a cut and has to shift the weapon to the other hand?
Recce has a solution.
Highly stressful situations can be simulated, he says, so that both a normal grip and an "anxious" one can be stored in the gun's memory as two different grips of the same authorized user. And Taurus International Manufacturing, another gun maker, thinks NJIT can overcome the problem. It has agreed, in fact, to help the school develop its smart gun.
"Of the folks that had really studied it and did not have a political ax to grind, and came at it from a technology standpoint instead of a political standpoint, NJIT was clearly the leader," says Timothy Bumann, Taurus' national trial counsel.
Overall, Recce says, "There's nothing that's lit up ... that says 'This is a major roadblock.'"
Not yet.
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1067278215299987.xml
NJIT works on weapon that fires only after recognizing its owner's touch
Sunday, October 26, 2003
BY STEVE TWOMEY
Star-Ledger Staff
The piece is a Beretta 9mm, model 92FS.
It rests -- Italian, gray, unloaded -- in the right palm of Michael Recce, although the professor is such an un-gun guy he can't remember what the weapon is, even if it is the sun of his solar system. It's a gun; enough said.
Affixed to either side of its handle are 16 raised, dime-size sensors. Recce's team has done the test thousands of times now, either in its stained-ceiling and window-free lab on the cusp of downtown Newark or at an Army facility in Morris County: A hand picks up the weapon. An index finger starts to pull the trigger. The sensors start working on the riddle.
Who's holding the gun?
Readings stream through wires to a processor on a table top. The machine, in a sliver of an instant, sifts its memory. Not for fingerprints. This isn't about them. It's asking itself if the holder's grip is familiar. That's Recce's ace premise, that a palm and fingers trying to squeeze off a shot create a "pressure signature" distinctive enough to serve as personal identification.
If the situation were real, the Beretta loaded and the grip lodged in memory, the processor would tell the gun to fire. If the grip were alien, it would instruct nothing. The trigger-pull would unleash nothing.
Imagine ...
A toddler who picked up such a gun couldn't fire it.
A teenager who brought dad's to school couldn't massacre with it.
A thug who stole one couldn't kill with it.
A cop in a struggle couldn't have it turned against him.
"It is revolutionary," Recce says. "It's big."
Maybe the future will not include "dynamic grip recognition," the name of the innovative technology -- it received a U.S. patent in May -- being born in room 4111 of the Guttenberg building at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. There are those who belittle NJIT's excitement as self-promotional or its concept as flawed. This is, after all, a field littered with great ideas now deceased.
But the quest for safer guns, even thinking guns, is accelerating faster than perhaps the world beyond science knows. Using fingerprint scanners, light beams, radio signals and other gee-whiz notions, NJIT and others are trying to perfect guns that would limit who can use them, technologies that have "advanced significantly since 1996," the Sandia National Laboratories concluded two years ago.
"I'm more confident now than I was a few years back," says Kevin Foley, vice president of product engineering for Smith&Wesson, the venerable arms maker in Springfield, Mass., which is deep into research on "user recognition" systems. "I wasn't sure this was achievable at all."
In the most ambitious designs, the gun would compare a biological trait of the person holding it with the stored traits of the rightful user or group of users, such as a squad of police. Only if a match were made would the holder be able to fire.
That would thwart young hands that came across an adult's weapon, one of the most potent arguments for developing safer technology. The federal Centers for Disease Control say 174 minors nationwide were shot to death accidentally in 2000, the most recent year available, although that is considerably fewer than the number who accidentally drowned (1,236), suffocated (842) or died of poisoning (311).
Even bigger changes might come on the street, given that a 1996 study by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig of Duke University estimated that 500,000 weapons are stolen every year. Surely some of those thieves would find ways to defeat smart technology -- any bank can be robbed with enough effort -- but many, if not most, criminals would find themselves unable to use the pilfered prize to murder or rob.
The possibilities, however, do not end with guns.
MORE SILENT SENTRIES
Terrorists could not fly airplanes that recognize only the pilot's grip. Thieves could not steal cars that start only if a scanner sees the correct fingerprint. Doors would open only if a light beam in the knob detected an authorized palm after painlessly sampling more than a dozen benchmarks in the first few layers of skin.
"This is really incredible technology," says Richard C. McCaskill, vice president of business development and marketing for Lumidigm, a New Mexico company working on "deep tissue" recognition. Even though he's been involved for years, the research remains stunning.
"I still say that, almost daily," McCaskill says.
Safer weapons will not arrive in months, though. They will arrive in years, if at all.
To a degree, the obstacle is the politics of guns. Pro-gun groups "do not trust the technology," the Sandia report said, and fear that citizens would wind up only with poor-performing smart weapons because all non-smart ones would be banned.
And, says Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association, "What is the cost factor here? Are these firearms going to be priced out of range for families and individuals of modest means?"
Nor are all gun-control groups keen on smart-gun technology, because it could increase the number of weapons. Previously wary fathers and mothers might become buyers, swelling the pool of people who might misuse a weapon, however smart it is.
"That's perhaps the most compelling argument for me to listen to," says Stephen Teret, a professor of public health policy at Johns Hopkins University who nonetheless believes more lives will be saved by smarter weapons than lost.
But the sheer complexity of making a weapon smart is probably a more daunting obstacle than politics.
At the moment, a handgun is mechanical simplicity in a compact package. To tell who is trying to fire, it would need an onboard data processing system. It would need an onboard source of power. It can't gain too much weight or cost. The processor can't take too long to decide.
Most of all, the gun must fire when an authorized user wants it to fire. Police officers must believe it will never lock them out in a street incident. Civilians must believe it will always offer protection in the home, perhaps the chief reason Americans own 70 million handguns.
"We didn't want to end up with a product that was going to not be usable because it was unreliable," says Assemblywoman Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), the sponsor of a 2002 law that says only smart handguns can be sold in New Jersey, starting three years after the state certifies they are workable and widely available.
Given all the requirements, "I know the current technology does not provide an acceptable solution," says Gary Mehalik, communications director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, who argues that "the more complicated you make a firearm ... the more likely it is something will go wrong."
But next month, if all goes well, NJIT will pass a milestone at Picatinny Arsenal, the Army facility working closely with Recce's lab. For the first time, the research team will fire bullets from a gun that has grip technology. The processor won't make a shoot/don't shoot decision, not yet. But researchers will be able to track how the sensors are influenced by the heat, smoke, noise and concussion of discharge.
NJIT began with, of all things, signatures.
Recce is a devotee of pattern recognition, including biometrics, the study of human patterns. By looking at physical and behavioral traits, for example, it is possible to distinguish any one of us from all the rest of us. A voice creates a distinctive pattern. An iris has a pattern, too.
SIGHTING PATTERNS
On a hot summer day in 1999, the year of the killings at Columbine High School, Recce encountered his boss in a parking lot. The state Legislature, which had been debating the technology's feasibility, had just given NJIT $1 million to get smart about smart guns. Donald H. Sebastian, the school's vice president for research and development, recalls that Recce simply said, "I heard you were involved in this project, and I've got an idea."
It involved biometrics.
When someone signs an electronic screen, like those that stores have for credit card customers, the key is not how the scribble looks but how it unfolds, where the stylus moves quickly and slowly, where it is picked up and put down. That's a pattern. Recce told Sebastian something like that might be helpful in authorizing the use of a gun.
"I know Michael," Sebastian says, "and if he says something like that, it's not science-fiction musing."
Recce's interest is not personal. To this day, he has never fired a real gun. He is not a gun victim, a Second Amendment zealot or ban-them-all fanatic. Recce, 44, is an eclectic delver. He once worked on creating a robot to pick oranges. His multiple degrees and interests include math, fine arts, computer science, robotics and neural computation. Formally, he is a professor of information systems. Fundamentally, Sebastian says, "He has the soul of an engineer."
With its $1 million in state money, NJIT first looked at what others had done to create a "smart gun," an oft-misunderstood, bandied-about phrase. "The definition frequently changes either subtly or significantly depending upon the ideology of the speaker," the Sandia report said.
Many advocates of gun control, for example, believe arms makers have long been able to make smart weapons, but lack the will. They fear boycotts by the NRA, advocates say, and worry that developing a smart weapon will expose them to lawsuits alleging they could have developed one sooner.
Yet often these advocates don't mean smart technology that identifies a specific user. They mean PIN codes or keys that unlock a gun. Certainly, those increase safety. But they work only as long as children or thieves don't figure out a PIN code or find a key. And a homeowner who hears a bump in the night has to be able to easily find the key or remember the PIN code for a gun he might not have used for months or years.
By "smart," other advocates mean devices that work like E-ZPass. A gun owner wears or has something -- a ring, a wristband, a necklace -- that emits a frequency that activates the weapon.
Such systems would work well for police officers, who always have their weapons, always want them "enabled" and could make the device part of their uniform and routine. In fact, the $5.8 million the federal government has given to labs for smart-gun research stems from a desire to reduce the number of officers killed after their guns are taken. (That is not an everyday occurrence, though. From 1992 through 2001, 46 officers in the United States were killed on duty with their guns, the FBI says. Its Web site, however, does not say how many were wounded.)
OUTSMARTING OURSELVES
For the general public, however, E-ZPass systems have problems similar to those of PIN codes and keys: Unless the owner keeps the E-ZPass with him -- around the neck, say -- he must know where he left it. That could lead homeowners to keep the smart device with the gun, on a shelf or in a drawer. And that would mean a child or a thief could easily find both the gun and the means to fire it.
When NJIT finished its review of smart gun technology, it concluded that no system based on a PIN code, key or E-ZPass would work as well as a biometric system, at least for civilian guns. A biometric "key" cannot be forged, forgotten or given away, because it's part of someone's body. It is "immune to owner neglect and irresponsibility," Sebastian says.
But which biometric?
A fingerprint scanner built into a gun handle can get smudged, greasy or bloody, distorting readings. And what if the owner is wearing gloves? Several experts believe recent work on fingerprint systems suggests they are getting better, but NJIT did not make them a priority, Sebastian says.
Voice recognition is a possibility. The owner could speak a password to the gun. But what if the owner has a cold or laryngitis? Not only that, voices change dramatically under stress, and a situation in which someone is trying to use a gun would be stressful. NJIT didn't go there, either.
Almost from the start, grip technology was the grail, because it offers one plus above all others.
"Ours is the only one that doesn't require you to do something different," Recce says.
The owner would not have to put a finger on a scanner, speak a password, punch in a code or wear something that sends a signal. He would simply grab the gun, as always.
Moving from plastic models to the Beretta -- which was donated by an NJIT employee -- Recce and his assistants have slowly built their knowledge of how palms and fingers take hold of a gun and squeeze, and how to capture those differences electronically.
"It is more a question of stopping the failures than improving the performance," Recce says. "The performance was improved through better placement of sensors, better electronic designs, more robust sensors, improved signal detection and analysis."
He now has an opinion of whether a grip is distinctive.
Not as distinctive as fingerprints.
Or snowflakes.
CALLING ON TECHNOLOGY
But Recce says somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1,000 people would share an owner's "pressure signature." And the odds that a child would have the same grip as an adult are "nearly astronomical," given that any child's hand is smaller than any adult's.
"Who knew everybody had a personalized hand grip?" says Weinberg, the assemblywoman.
A gun would have to recognize that grip instantly, however. It takes three-tenths of a second to pull a trigger, Recce says. In that time, the sensors have to take readings, and the processor has to analyze them and decide whether to allow a shot.
No sweat.
"Thank you very much for cell phones," Recce says.
They have revolutionized processing by miniaturizing it.
"The processor in my cell phone" -- he takes it out of a pocket -- "has more than enough processing capacity to make that calculation."
In Recce's lab, though, the processor is still big and still on a table. Nothing has been put in the Beretta. Nor has the lab gotten to what one gun expert called "the design wall." How the electronic part of a smart gun will tell the mechanical part to fire, if that's the decision. Will some sort of safety pin be pulled out? How?
It is a research step NJIT might skip entirely, because of stunning parallel developments in the very nature of weapons.
An Australian company, Metal Storm, now has a working model of an all-electronic gun. Nothing moves but the trigger and bullet. There are no mechanical linkages set in motion by the finger pull. There is no hammer. Ammunition does not move out of storage in the handle or a revolving cylinder.
Instead, seven bullets are lined up in the barrel, separated by propellant. When the trigger is pulled, each round is fired by a signal sent from a electronic processor in the gun handle.
"It's much more reliable," says Charles Vehlow, chief executive officer of Metal Storm Inc., the U.S. branch of the company, "because you've gotten rid of all these mechanical parts."
NJIT, which formed a partnership with Metal Storm last month, might ride piggyback on this breakthrough, using the electronics that fire the shells to also determine if the grip is authorized. That would solve two smart-gun problems: Where to find space for a processor and how to bridge the gap between smart technology and the firing mechanisms. Not only that, criminals who want to use a stolen electronic gun couldn't disable the smart-gun technology without disabling the entire gun, because they are so intertwined.
"Electronically discharged firearms may ultimately prove to be the preferred platform for 'smart guns,'" the Sandia study said.
Smith&Wesson is also at work on an electronic gun, and would marry it to Lumidigm's light-beam recognition system that samples 13 skin factors. Lumidigm's McCaskill says, however, that anyone with gloves "will have a problem." There has to be "fairly good skin contact." But he says NJIT's idea has a problem as well: An individual's grip can change.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
That's what Gary Sniezak thinks, too.
NJIT has "dramatically overstated the discriminating capabilities of that technology," says Sniezak, vice president for research and development of FN Manufacturing Inc., a South Carolina arms maker working on a user-recognition gun intended for police. He calls Recce's idea "great theory," but only in the lab.
To work, the processor of a grip-technology gun must become acquainted with the authorized grip. After buying a gun, the owner would pick it up at, say, a police station. In the presence of an officer, he would grip the weapon repeatedly to give the processor enough data to get a profile.
The grips of husbands and wives or police officers and their partners also could be programmed into a processor.
But, Sniezak says, those stored grips might bear no relation to the high-intensity grip produced by a frightened police officer or owner in a dire situation. At the moment of greatest need, the gun might lock out the owner. And what if the owner has a sprained wrist or a cut and has to shift the weapon to the other hand?
Recce has a solution.
Highly stressful situations can be simulated, he says, so that both a normal grip and an "anxious" one can be stored in the gun's memory as two different grips of the same authorized user. And Taurus International Manufacturing, another gun maker, thinks NJIT can overcome the problem. It has agreed, in fact, to help the school develop its smart gun.
"Of the folks that had really studied it and did not have a political ax to grind, and came at it from a technology standpoint instead of a political standpoint, NJIT was clearly the leader," says Timothy Bumann, Taurus' national trial counsel.
Overall, Recce says, "There's nothing that's lit up ... that says 'This is a major roadblock.'"
Not yet.
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1067278215299987.xml
