Initial Project Proposal

Kyle Casey, Patrick Frith, Derek Landini, Nathan Rauser
Capstone
Team Proposal

For our team proposal, we are doing the haptic feedback in conjunction with
the geotrooper project. Our device is going to have three main components but this
number could easily increase over the course of the project. Our components include
some kind of form fitting shirt that has 3 to 5 vibrating pads on it, an input device that will
either be a glove or an armband that serves as a touch device, and an android phone
that contains the software.
The soldier will where this vibrating shirt under his gear. The shirt will connect
to the phone by running a wire through the trooper’s clothes. Basically the soldier
parachutes down at night. As soon as he lands either his phone or a small digital
compass will get his general heading and then sync it with the software. He now has
his relative direction in conjunction with the way point. The software draws a virtual
path from the soldier to the way point. The soldier will follow this and if he should stray
off the path, the vibrating shirt will either vibrate on his left or right shoulder in order to
steer him back in the correct direction. This is our most important task to accomplish
at the start. Once we get this working, we will work on the touch interface. This would
be used to issue different commands to the phone such as, find current distance to
way point or skip to next way point. The device would then respond to the trooper
through vibration. For distance, the device could respond by pulsing for every 100
meters to the target. So if the target is 1000 meters away, it will pulse ten times. These
are the main goals for our project.
If we get these tasks working up to near perfection, we do have some secondary
goals in mind. The first secondary goal would be to address the issue of security. Our
idea for this was to include a heart rate monitor for the device that could determine if
the soldier has been killed or the phone has been removed from the soldier forcefully.
This would lock the phone down or possibly even wipe it depending on the situation.
Another long term goal would be to network multiple soldiers’ phones together possibly
through the beacon. This would allow the soldiers to communicate to each other
through vibrations and eventually increase their awareness on the battlefield. We could
also continuously add new commands to the device as well up to a certain extent. We
want each vibration response to be simple enough so that it requires very little training
to interpret each vibration. If it gets to complicated, it would be equivalent to learning
another language. That is something we really want to avoid.
As this device comes together, the possibility for expanding it really seems
almost limitless. This device would allow soldiers to communicate in a hostile
environment without having to speak a word. This coupled with basic security would
create a secure system that could serve our troops in extremely hostile environments.