NYU Tandon Students Win One Million Dollars For Smart Gun Design
Gun violence has always been an acutely destructive social issue in the United States, taking the lives of thousands of innocent people every year. New York City is no stranger to this issue, either.
This seems to have been the impetus for the competition for a smart gun design, launched by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, in hopes to create smart technology to help reduce gun violence.
A team of current and former NYU students won the competition, and were awarded one million dollars for their high-tech design.
Sy Cohen, a recent graduate of NYU Tandon School of Engineering, spearheaded this project with the help of his team members, also from NYU Tandon: Ashwin Raj Kumar, Eddilene Paola Cordero Pardo and Jonathan Ng.
Going by the name Autonomous Ballistics, the team has invented not a smart gun itself, but a smart gun holster. The holster is equipped with smart technology consisting of three security options. The first is a fingerprint scanner that would instantaneously release the gun if the user’s fingerprint matches. If the scanner is unable to read the user’s fingerprint, then the smart holster would use a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) keycard sensor to detect and unlock the gun if the authorized user is in range. NYPD officers use this same technology today. The third option is a voice recognition feature, also enabled by the RFID.
Local talked to Sy Cohen about the initial sequence of events that led to the unfolding of his idea, leading to his and his group members’ climactic achievement.
According to Sy, having been enrolled in an advanced CAD course (Computer Aided Design) at NYU Tandon during the early period of the project’s conception had empowered him to pursue anything he wanted to.
The project went through several phases; initially, the group did indeed pursue a smart gun design itself. But they encountered some problems.
“Anything we would do to change it would damage the reliability of the gun itself. We didn’t want to tell gun owners that you’re going to have to change some parts,” Sy Cohen explained.
After the first option was dropped, the second option the group considered was an attachment to the gun; but this idea was also discarded. Attaching something to the gun would be permanent, and could also potentially hurt the reliability of the gun.
After much deliberation came the third and final option that proved to be the winning one: designing a smart gun holster.
Their competition-winning smart holster houses all the electric and mechanical components needed to lock the gun and is ultimately, according to Sy, the “best way to market our product.”
Regardless of the grant, Sy says the team was committed to pursue this project either way. We asked Sy if he had plans for any new projects, in light of receiving the grant.
His answer? To develop a strong prototype to put out into the market. “We put together a twelve month [budget] proposal with three milestones,” Cohen explained. “We’d like to develop a refined minimum viable product [MVP] that can be manufacturable. Long term we want to reach out to companies for safety and reliability testing.”
