Gene Simmons' Character in the movie "Runaway" had a gun which fired guided bullets (Source: TriStar Pictures)
New design could reduce collateral damage, improve long range hits, and even potentially steer around obstacles
In the future U.S. military snipers might not have to worry about missing.
Engineering researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a new "self guided" bullet capable of steering itself -- like a tiny, silent guided missile -- towards its target.
The task of creating the new "smart" bullet was a daunting one, and has occupied the researchers for three years now. The inspiration for the project came from the stalled state of firearms development for the U.S. armed forces.
I. The M2 -- 90+ Years, Not Much Improvement
The period stretching from 1915-1940 was a golden age for breakthroughs in firearms warfare. One of the key figures of the era was John Moses Browning, heralded as the "father" of modern automatic firearms.
Towards the end of World War 1, Mr. Browning designed what would be one of his final great and terrible works -- the M2 Machine Gun (aka Browning .50 Caliber Machine Gun). The M2 (not to be confused with the semi-automatic M2 carbine light rifle version) was a heavy machine gun. It was typically mounted on a tripod or fixture, and belt-fed rounds. The weapon quickly distinguished itself, proving a superb weapon against infantry, low-armor vehicles/boats, light fortifications, and low-flying aircraft.
Yet, Mr. Browning, for all his innovation, would likely be disappointed in the relative lack of progress in the industry since. Over 90 years later the M2 has not yet been replaced, receiving only minor refinements over the years. Today General Dynamics Corp.'s (GD) M2HB (a slightly improved modern version) is still used as the go-to heavy machine gun by U.S. soldiers deployed in Afghanistan.
The M2 Browning, shown here mounted on a fighting vehicle, has been the U.S. military's go-to machine gun for over 90 years, first seeing action in WWII. [Image Source: Military Wikia]
The lack of improvement, it appears, is not for lack of creativity, but perhaps due to trying to solve the wrong problem.
The M2 is an extremely solid design from the perspective of barrel dynamics and maintenance. However, it is limited by the skills of its operator. That's where the Sandia researchers had their inspired flash of insight. Perhaps rather than trying to improve the already very good gun -- whose shortcomings were largely the result of environmental conditions and operator skill level -- why not try to create a special high-tech bullet that corrects for these errors during its flight towards the target?
II. The "Smart Bullet"
The first step was to understand the problem, by creating advanced physics models, that took into effect possible sources of target misses, such as wind or operator hand shake.
Using this model, the engineers found that at a distance of 1,000 meters -- more than half a mile -- the M2 would often miss the target by as much as roughly 10 meters. That was a big deal as 10 meters could easily be the difference between hitting a hostile combatant and hitting an unarmed civilian.
The next step was to develop a better performing solution.
To do this, researchers needed a way to help their "smart bullet" find its target. To that end the researchers used a laser pointer and an optical sensor housed in the projectile to allow the projectile to determine its performance in-flight, in order to prepare necessary adjustments. Unlike a projectile, a laser offers an instant vector line-of-sight in a gun, even at distance of miles away, and even in some kinds of harsh conditions, such as a strong wind.
The resulting 4-inch long, half-an-inch in diameter 0.50 caliber round takes the input of its microoptical sensor and feeds it into an 8-bit CPU, housed inside the shell. The CPU runs correction algorithms and outputs corrections 30 times a second, in the form of signals to electromagnetic actuators attached to small fins on the bullet.
The new patented Sandia smart bullet can correct its trajectory a 30 Hz rate.
[Image Source: Sandia National Labs]
The new bullet was somewhat different in form factor from a traditional design. Where as a traditional barrel design has grooves (rifling) to help the round spin like a football pass in flight to improve accuracy, the smart bullet throws away the grooves, which would be incompatible with the adjustable fins. Instead, the new design flies like a finned dart. The key to stability in this kind of projectile is a stabilized forward center of gravity, which the researchers carefully achieved in the prototype.
III. The Results
The resulting design, plugged into the original simulation model could hit within 8 inches of the lased spot on the target. It was time to build the smart bullet.
Using off-the-shelf parts, the engineers created and successfully field-tested prototypes. Over three years and a million dollars in research funding later, the team had their smart bullet in hand.
To assess the performance, the team first verified that the barrel exit velocity was combat-ready. A standard M2 has a barrel exit velocity of 2,910 ft/s (890 m/s) for M33 ball. The finned smart shell achieved a speed of 2,400 ft/s (732 m/s), or roughly Mach 2.1. This was a healthy speed for a standard cylindrical belt-fed shell.
Next the researchers wanted to ensure that the microelectronics would survive the flight. So they fired bullet with a small LED attached for identification purposes. The LED round was found during nighttime testing and the battery and internal electronics were shown to have survived the flight.
The smart bullet survived its high-speed flight, with systems intact.
[Image Source: Sandia National Lab]
Finally, the team took high-speed pictures of the bullet in flight as it exited the barrel and flew a short distance. This showed how standard bullets -- and the new smart bullet -- pitched (tilted up and down) more violently as they exited the barrel, before finally settling into a straight path. This pitching was a major source of missing, but with the laser guided correction fins, could be remedied.
Sandia posted a video of the bullet in flight, though the "violent" pitching (in terms of accuracy) is hard to distinguish by the visible eye:
States Red Jones one of Sandia's engineers on the project in an Associated Press interview, "Everybody thought it was too difficult to make things small enough. We knew we could deal with that. The other thing was it was going to be too complicated and expensive. We came up with an innovative way around that to make it stupid and cheap and still pretty good."
He credits the ability to deliver a terrific result on a trim budget to the wonders of modern microelectronics, stating, "In the laboratory, I'm able to make machines so incredibly small it kind of boggles my mind. Where we're headed, we're going to be limited only by our imagination."
The team did not post targeting results of how the bullet performed on real-world targets yet, but they obtained a patent on their work based on computer simulations and the supporting real-world muzzle velocity, pitching visualization, and survival tests.
IV. Moving Toward Combat Readiness
Sandia engineers now hope to take the patented design and create a second-generation prototype, by collaborating with partners in the private sector. The first generation prototype's electronics were only hardened to survive the flight motion, where as a second-gen. design's electronics would need to be hardened for more intense real-world scenarios, such as being dropped out of a moving truck.
By ditching the inertial guidance unit of guided missiles and replacing it with the laser guidance system, the engineers have created a bullet that -- with a bit of work -- can act as a guided missile at a fraction of the cost of a standard guided missile. States Mr. Jones, "What we want to do is make it cheap enough to make it cost effective for the military to use in a machine gun. It's not going to be millions of dollars, but it's not going to be a buck a piece either."
Adam Firestone, an Army veteran, instructor and a weapons system engineer was among those very interested in the design. In an Associated Press interview he commented, "All of a sudden now you've got a way to eliminate the collateral damage issues. From that perspective, this starts to get interesting."
It could get far more interesting yet in the near future.
While the current testing has focused on gun-lased targets, lasing could also be accomplished from one or more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Using multiple small UAVs and pre-flight range-finding information, a bullet's targeting algorithms could correct around a lased obstacle (say a tree), and be strung around to the next lased target, like a real life version of Wanted (the comic book, of course, not the horrible movie version).
With a bit of extra work, the guided bullet technology could be used to curve bullets in a string of waypoints, similar to the supervillain drama Wanted.
[Image Source: Mark Millar/Top Cow Productions]
Curving bullets would certain give the good old fashioned powder firearm a bit of extra life, as would the improved round accuracy. To that end, even as the military sector looks forward to the potentially upcoming age of high-powered laser-weapon warfare [1][2][3], good old-fashioned combustion-based projectile weapons have a bit of growth left in them, thanks to microelectronics.
Recently other work has been done on "smart bullets" to preprogram them to explode before or after a target, in order to damage targets behind cover. These advancements could in theory be combined a in a single future super-round.
Sources: Sandia [Press Release], Associated Press
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