Optical Systems for Accelerated Air Force Weapon Fragment Characterization

­­This effort focuses on vastly reducing the hardware cost and operational complexity associated with 3D fragment tracking and characterization; which remain the largest barriers to widespread adoption of this new technology in munitions development and collateral damage estimation studies. Dramatic reductions in hardware cost alone (from tens-of-thousands-of-dollars for hand-built, high-speed cameras; to just hundreds-of-dollars for COTS machine vision cameras. Through a combination of commercial and SBIR efforts, MSI has already proven the technical proficiency of leveraging high speed cameras as actual instrumentation to create a step-change in data fidelity for identification, tracking, and characterization of individual fragments in a dense field. It is now time to transition this technology to leverage the cost and complexity reductions of COTS hardware and associated software to streamline the data collection and processing efforts. Making this transition requires development of more advanced camera control software and hardware. Performing this transition will allow for significant expansion of the technology in current fields, while also opening up new opportunities that are currently “priced-out”. MSI will leverage existing relationships within the AF to advance existing use cases and seek out new opportunities, such as drone swarm tracking, small arms fire or explosives, equipment failure mode analysis, etc.