US Army RFID troop monitors
p2p news / p2pnet: The US Army is using a civilian RFID company to monitor troops for Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training.
Ultra-wideband RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) sensors from Denver’s Ubisense, “track soldiers engaged in a mock village comprised of a number of multi-floor, cinderblock buildings,” says the RFID Journal, going on:
“Platoons of soldiers engage in combat training throughout the MOUT site, running drills of various operations, such as seizing buildings. As the soldiers move into and out of structures, they wear 900 MHz radios with GPS units, used to track their outdoor movements.
“They also wear Ubisense tags – Ubitags – so they can be tracked indoors. The 900 MHz radios then transmit the soldiers’ GPS coordinates to RF receivers installed throughout the MOUT site.”
The Ubisense site says the company provides a real-time 2D and 3D view of an exercise with zoom, pan and jump to a location interface and, “During an exercise Ubisense makes it possible to detect key events such as kills, hits, misses, dangerous situations or friendly fire incidents and locate exactly where and when they occurred.”
RFID systems, often called spy chips, have been used in a number of interesting applications.
Badges worn by prime ministers, presidents and other high-level officials during the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society conference had secret RFID chips in them; the principal of the California school which ordered students to wear spy-chip ID cards around their necks was disappointed when, thanks to protestations from parents, the project collapsed; and, a South African company says it can pinpoint any UHF RFID tag within read range.
See:-
RFID Journal – U.S. Army Uses UWB to Track Trainees, November 15, 2005
