Paul Waggoner, senior scientist with the CDRI. “The goals of engineering and CDRI were very similar: to integrate technology in the use of working dogs to enhance and expand their uses in military and homeland security operations and to increase the safety of military and first-responder personnel, as well as the general public.”
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any ideas were passed back and forth among the group – which included engineering faculty members George Flowers and Tony Overfelt – and each was considered for its utility, practicality and potential of interest for governmental research and development funding. When the idea was presented to use GPS and autonomous guidance with canine training, the CDRI was more than interested; as a program that had started with bomb detection, faculty and staff understood the need for a method of handling detection canines remotely. Bevly had been invited to sit in on the discussion and decided to use those topics to finalize his ONR proposal. He amended his plan and was awarded funding based on an idea to research the use of dogs for security assistance without the immediate presence of a handler. The project would use GPS and a microcontroller to automatically guide trained dogs to specific locations. “The technology was much like that used with unmanned ground vehicles, but the modeling of the system and the design of a unique control
algorithm for a dog would be the focus of the research,” said Bevly. “This project was similar to others our lab had worked on, but now our focus would be a canine instead of a vehicle.” With funding in hand, Bevly immediately began looking for graduate students who could assist with the project. Because the plan was to actually build a pack for the dog to wear, as well as develop a software program, he began the hunt for an electrical and computer engineering graduate student who would be up to the task. However, it was a computer science and software engineering faculty member whose research caught his eye, leading him to then doctoral student Win Britt. “I went to faculty member Gerry Dozier to see about using neural networks to guide the dogs,” Bevly said.
Meet Major: A four-year-old labrador retriever trained in blind retrieves. Major was the ideal canine candidate for the autonomous guidance project.
30 Auburn Engineering