Engineers design GPS technology for football

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When Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger fired a low pass on a recent Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens, his wide receiver, Hines Ward, scooped the ball up just before it hit the turf.
In this case, the referees -- and the camera -- had a clear view of the play. But what if their vision had been obscured, even with the multiple camera angles of today's National Football League?
That's where Priya Narasimhan and her students think they might be able to help.
Narasimhan is a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and she and her students are equipping gloves and a football with remote sensing technology to measure everything from grip and trajectory to speed and position.
In the case of the Roethlisberger-Ward hookup, the technology would ultimately be able to tell without a doubt whether the ball was caught before it bounced off the ground.
It could also show such things as who actually has the ball in a pileup, whether a runner has crossed the goal line and whether a receiver has control of the ball before he goes out of bounds.
Narasimhan teaches a course at Carnegie Mellon in "embedded real-time systems," which is a fancy way of describing the kind of touch sensors, GPS receivers and accelerometers that the students are putting to use.
But the football engineering project is not part of that course. Instead, it's a personal effort that grew out of the fact that Narasimhan, who grew up in India and Africa, found herself becoming a rabid Steelers fan after she moved to Pittsburgh seven years ago.
"When I moved here, I loved the people and their energy, and then I fell in love with football and I just started watching the Steelers and now, you can't get me out of the home on Sundays."
Impassioned as she was, she also found herself "throwing things at the TV many times when calls didn't go my way," and she began to wonder whether the wireless technology she was familiar with could help resolve some of those disputed decisions, as a further iteration of instant replay.
"You'd never want to replace the human referees because they make these calls based on years of experience, and no technology can replace that," she said. "But in addition to the instant replay, if you had a supplementary system that said this is exactly where the ball landed and where the player stopped with it, you could make these kinds of calls accurately."
So far, she and her squad of undergraduate and graduate students have focused on two things: gloves with touch sensors that can transmit that information wirelessly to a computer, and a football equipped with a global positioning receiver and accelerometer that can track the location, speed and trajectory of the ball.
Eventually, the same kind of sensors used in the gloves could be adapted to shoes, to measure stride and running patterns, or even shoulder pads, to calculate blocking positions and force.
The football the students are using is a regulation ball, but it's been partially unlaced and filled with couch cushion foam, said Aaron Harris, a junior mechanical engineering major from Los Angeles who briefly played cornerback for the Carnegie Mellon varsity squad.
The current prototype transmits information once a second and is only accurate to within 30 feet -- obviously not good enough for practical application. A newer prototype, though, will transmit four times a second and will combine its data with information from fixed GPS receivers near the field to provide much tighter measurements.
Narasimhan said she would love to work with a college or pro team to see what measurements and information would be of most help to them, but doesn't have such an arrangement yet.
(E-mail Mark Roth at mroth(at)post-gazette.com)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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