Communications of the ACM
MIT Wants Tomorrow’s Soldiers to Talk Through Their Shirts
The tiny gold microfibers in this Army Combat Uniform, developed by an MIT science team, might one day enable soldiers to talk to each other on a confusing battlefield.
Credit: Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies/MIT
The Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, staffed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the U.S. Army, is developing microscopic fibers that can be woven into soldiers' uniforms to enable them to communicate with other soldiers on the battlefield.
The researchers set out to fabricate a uniform that included a kind of fiber-optic-like thread that would enable a soldier's uniform to detect light, heat, and sound. "These are new kinds of fibers that are themselves devices," says Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies director John Joannopoulos. The fibers currently are about a millimeter in diameter and too thick for a uniform, but the researchers want to scale them down to 100 microns.
Joannopoulos says the researchers plan to spend the next 10 years refining the technology. "The idea with these fibers is that eventually, we’d like to enable full-body sensing for the soldier," he says.
However, the fibers currently are line-of-sight devices, meaning that if something gets in the way of a straight line between two soldiers wearing the uniforms, the data transmission is compromised.
The fibers also have only been tested up to 75 meters, and the researchers have yet to determined the best data transmission method.
From Wired News
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