Development of a cost effective simulator for small arms shooting training

Abstract

Shooting simulators for firearm training are effective in improving the marksmanship of personnel in different law enforcement agencies like police, armed forces and also in shooting athletes. In order to achieve the best training quality in these training simu lators, the weapon’s shooting process needs to be replicated to provide the perception of a real shot being fired. A user friendly shooting simulator should provide reliable and accurate information about impact time and hit location at the target of the shot fired from the weapon. Desirably shooting process should display the margin by which a shot missed the target. The impact time at the target is based on the direction and speed of weapon as well as the target and also on the delay time of projectile. We propose a shooting training system with accurately modelled recoil usable for indoor training. It consists of three basic components: a graphic component for visualization, a haptic component for recoil simulation and a tracking component for simulation of shot trajectory. Graphics component displays a moving object to firer. The haptic component uses a custom designed haptic device that works on pulses of compressed air. It contains pneumatic valves that provide rearward pressure consistently to pro vide recoil. The tracking module includes visible laser mounted on a weapon that is activated by a trigger press. A stationary camera captures the position of laser pointer on the projector screen using image processing. Various different training scenarios are designed to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed shooting training system. A user study was conducted on subjects from different backgrounds to check the accuracy of our system and of user marksmanship. Subjective analysis indicates high resemblance to live shooting training indicating that the designed haptic device is a reasonable option to provide immersion of real shot fired and system is helpful in improving the xiii List of Tables marksmanship.