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"If Francisco Aguilar and Dave Young get their way, police officers and firefighters will someday carry baseball-shaped, throwable cameras along with the rest of their equipment.\nAs the founders of Bounce Imaging, Aguilar and Young are developing spherical, camera-laden gadgets that can be tossed into dangerous places\u2014such as the rubble of a building leveled by an earthquake\u2014and then wirelessly relay 360-degree panoramic images of the scene back to a tablet or smartphone.\nFirst responders and military personnel increasingly use technology to scout out places of interest without putting themselves in harm\u2019s way. Often this means using robots capable of crawling into a building or toward a suspect vehicle. iRobot has even developed a compact, throwable reconnaissance robot called FirstLook.\nAguilar and Young, who met as graduate students at MIT\u2019s Sloan School of Management, believe that their device will be easier to operate and cheaper than existing devices. They hope to sell the device for less than $500 initially.\n\u201CThe idea behind this is, we get it to a point where if you toss it into a room and it\u2019s dangerous to go get it, the unit is essentially disposable,\u201D Aguilar says.\nAguilar came up with the idea for Bounce Imaging\u2019s ball-shaped device while working as a volunteer in Haiti after the country\u2019s devastating earthquake in 2010. While there were some fiber-optic cameras that could be used to search through rubble for survivors, the equipment was expensive and required a skilled operator, he says.\nEarlier this year, he started working on Bounce Imaging with Young. They\u2019ve since won $60,000 in funding\u2014$50,000 in prize money from a contest organized by startup accelerator MassChallenge and $10,000 in another contest, the VenCorps NYC Impact Challenge\u2014and are working on a prototype of their first product, which they hope to start testing in January. Several police departments and SWAT units are interested in trying it out, Aguilar says, including MIT\u2019s own police department.\nYoung, who previously served in the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, thinks Bounce Imaging\u2019s ball-sized device could be particularly useful for the military. It would be easier to lug around than some of the unwieldy equipment he had to carry while on duty, he says. And, since it\u2019s much cheaper than other imaging tools, it could be abandoned, if necessary.\nOthers have demonstrated spherical camera systems. For example, researchers at the Technische Universit\u00E4t Berlin built a foam-covered ball with 36 cameras inside that is capable of taking complete panoramas when thrown into the air (see \"Eye Ball\").\nBounce Imaging\u2019s device is expected to a weigh half a pound to a pound with a battery inside. It includes six wide-angle cameras that are each surrounded by an infrared LED flash. An external casing protects the components from being crushed on impact and allows the device to bounce.\nThe cameras can snap pictures every second or half-second, depending on the device\u2019s settings; six pictures will give a full 360-degree view of the scene. An accelerometer and gyroscope help orient images, which are sent wirelessly to an Android-running smartphone or tablet where software stitches the images together.\nYoung and Aguilar hope to incorporate different sensors into the device for different applications. A firefighter might use one that includes smoke, temperature, and oxygen sensors, for example.\nOne obvious problem that Bounce Imaging faces is retrieval of its balls\u2014the gadget doesn\u2019t currently include a mechanism to bounce or roll itself back to whomever threw it, so you\u2019d either need to go in and get it or leave it behind. The company may add a tether to allow the user to pull it back, or a beacon that allows the device to be found later on. Aguilar suggests that at some point, the company could even add motion capabilities, like that offered by robotic ball maker Sphero."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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