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AMERICA’S CUP TECHNOLOGY<br />
The Answer my Friend is<br />
Blowing in the Wind<br />
Skipper and Team Principal Ben Aisnlie at the helm. pic by Harry KH/Land Rover BAR<br />
Imagine running in a s<strong>to</strong>rm. The wind is blowing over 50mph, and the rain is<br />
driving sideways in<strong>to</strong> your face. Now imagine trying <strong>to</strong> tell someone fifteen feet<br />
away that there’s a hurricane coming and they need <strong>to</strong> get off the street. It’s only<br />
going <strong>to</strong> happen if you run right over <strong>to</strong> them and yell in their ear.<br />
But these are the conditions that the Land Rover BAR sailing team have <strong>to</strong><br />
operate in when they are racing; sailing at speeds up <strong>to</strong> 43 knots, kicking up a ball<br />
of spray that can mean living in a permanent vertical deluge. This is not the ideal<br />
environment for communicating in a high pressure, time intense situation, so a<br />
solution for improving communications on board was required.<br />
The sailing team member tasked with finding a solution <strong>to</strong> this problem for his<br />
crewmates is bowman, Matt Cornwell. He’s been racing in the America’s Cup since<br />
2003, and has seen the problem of onboard communication simultaneously get<br />
more difficult <strong>to</strong> solve, and escalate in importance.<br />
“It’s something that we have now identified as a real performance<br />
differentia<strong>to</strong>r,” said Cornwell. “It’s vital <strong>to</strong> get the comms right, we have certainly<br />
Explaining bone conduction technology.<br />
had <strong>to</strong> step up the game from the pre-2010 era when it was nice <strong>to</strong> have it, but it<br />
wasn’t absolutely essential - and you could get the job done with some fairly basic<br />
kit. Now we are having <strong>to</strong> get much more sophisticated.<br />
Cornwell had one technology in particular that he was interested in, and he<br />
enlisted the Technical Innovation Group (TIG), powered by PA Consulting, and<br />
Project Manager, George Sykes <strong>to</strong> see if the team had any partners who could help.<br />
It so happened that the BAE Systems Applied Intelligence Labora<strong>to</strong>ries were<br />
world leaders in bone conduction technology. The technology, which uses the<br />
body’s natural ability <strong>to</strong> transmit sound through bone conduction, provided a<br />
potential solution as a way of dramatically improving communication between the<br />
crew on-board and the support boats.<br />
Cornwell and Sykes began working with Mohammed-Asif Akhmad, Principal<br />
Scientist and Research Engineer Daniel Black.<br />
Mohammed-Asif Akhmad explained, “Bone conduction involves a surface<br />
transducer creating physical vibrations from an audio signal. The transducer must<br />
be <strong>to</strong>uching the head of the user <strong>to</strong> conduct vibrations directly <strong>to</strong> the inner ear. The<br />
inner ear then translates these vibrations in<strong>to</strong> nerve impulse signals sent <strong>to</strong> the brain,<br />
allowing the user <strong>to</strong> hear audible sound.”<br />
The first challenge was <strong>to</strong> get the radio right, there were several requirements<br />
from being the right frequency, <strong>to</strong> being robust and marinised for the on water<br />
environment, as well as having enough range, so the support boats can talk <strong>to</strong> the<br />
race crew - that means over a couple of hundred metres.<br />
The next challenge, the microphone. As Akhmad explained, “The main<br />
challenge for bodyworn headset microphones in harsh marine environments is<br />
having <strong>to</strong> deal with loud background noise, as it can affect the clarity of the speech<br />
being transmitted. Similarly, they need <strong>to</strong> be rugged <strong>to</strong> operate in extreme conditions<br />
whilst still being comfortable and ergonomic for the user.”<br />
And then there are the headsets....<br />
“The headsets fill with water and it doesn’t take a lot of water in a microphone<br />
before the sound gets very muffled. And the same with the ear pieces, they fill<br />
with water and die pretty quickly when they get wet with salt water every day. We<br />
also need some sort of noise cancellation. It’s not just all the noise that is coming<br />
from the boat - wind noise, the whistle from the foils, I think a lot of people will be<br />
surprised how loud that is - but people also raise their voices sometimes, and a lot of<br />
comms systems don’t deal with that very well.”<br />
If that wasn’t all hard enough, there are other <strong>issue</strong>s. “And you also need clear<br />
communication outside the headset, since you still need <strong>to</strong> have a conversation with<br />
the guy who is s<strong>to</strong>od right next <strong>to</strong> you. Not all the crew will be talking on the comms<br />
all the time. So now we need solutions that take the speakers out of your ear.”<br />
Daniel Black confirmed the advantages of the new system, “The fact that both<br />
ears are free and open means that external sounds can be heard and positioned –<br />
this is key when sailing as you need <strong>to</strong> not only hear what is happening around you,<br />
but also <strong>to</strong> know the direction that the external sounds are coming from; something<br />
that’s impossible with traditional headsets.”<br />
“The team have been testing the raw technology and are very happy with their<br />
progress. Once they have settled on the microphone and speaker specification, they<br />
will look at cus<strong>to</strong>mising its installation in<strong>to</strong> the helmet. “We’re definitely going in<br />
the right direction,” concluded Cornwell, “I’m very happy that we’re going <strong>to</strong> have a<br />
great solution this time around.”<br />
“They deal with the military market and there are a lot of parallels with a similar<br />
environment <strong>to</strong> ours,” said Cornwell. “They need their kit <strong>to</strong> be waterproof and very<br />
robust, and with a certain level of simplicity. They also need noise cancelling; their<br />
environment is louder than ours, and of course the kit needs <strong>to</strong> be really robust <strong>to</strong>o.<br />
BAE have been looking at those solutions for the military market and we were able<br />
<strong>to</strong> tap right in<strong>to</strong> that.” •<br />
40 <strong>August</strong> <strong>2016</strong> <strong>SAILING</strong> | www.sailing.co.za