IEEE Spectrum October, 2016 - 40

uring practices, American football
coaches typically stay on the sidelines,
grim-faced, as they order their players
through drills. But during an afternoon
this past May, in the cavernous training
facility for the Pittsburgh Steelers, head
coach Mike Tomlin couldn't resist getting in on the action. As a human-size
robot sped over the artificial turf, the grinning coach
ran onto the field and tackled it.
The MVP, or Mobile Virtual Player, was designed
to take precisely this kind of hit-the sort of jarring
blow that, inflicted repeatedly, can injure the brains
of human players. American football has been rocked
by controversy over the last decade, as it has become
clear that the repeated collisions inherent to the sport
are giving players concussions and sometimes causing
debilitating and permanent brain trauma. In response,
the U.S. National Football League (NFL) has altered
rules and contributed millions to medical research.
Meanwhile, the same head-injury concerns have found
even greater resonance in college and youth football.
Doctors, politicians, and parents are asking an urgent
question: If these smashing impacts begin when players are young, what will be the cumulative effect after
many years?
In 2013, I was part of a team of undergraduate engineering students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover,
N.H., that sought a technological solution to this problem. We wanted to invent a robotic tackling dummy that
could move like a real player and take the hits during
practice sessions. By serving as a realistic stand-in, we
figured, a robot would reduce player-on-player impacts
during tackling drills, when many head injuries occur.
We aimed to build a zippy padded robot that could be
knocked down by a powerful linebacker and immediately pop back up, ready for the next player's charge.
The path from a college lab to an NFL gym wasn't
smooth. But after years of hard work, I'm now director
of R&D for a tech startup, also called MVP, that's further developing the bot. We've partnered with a sports
equipment company to manufacture commercial units,
and our first batch rolled off the line in August. Over the
past few months we distributed those robots to customers on our waiting list, which included NFL teams and
some of the top college football teams in the country.
For that visit in May to the Steelers' training facility we
brought a beta version of the MVP. I'm proud to say that
after a two-week tryout, it made the cut: The Steelers took
two of our new production units, at US $8,000 apiece.
As we've watched how coaches use our robots, we've
realized that the MVP can be more than just a tackling
target. With more development, it could stand in for
any player and take part in complicated plays. And
though each MVP is now steered by remote control,
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we're experimenting with ways to make them more autonomous.
We can even imagine a futuristic football practice in which players
jog onto the field and find an entire robotic team waiting for them
on the line of scrimmage.

"i love The game of fooTBall, but I love my players more," said

Eugene "Buddy" Teevens, coach of the Dartmouth football team,
while testifying this past May at a U.S. congressional hearing on
concussions in youth athletics. Despite increased attention on the
issue, a recent study found that concussions are still on the rise
among adolescents and young adults in the United States. Teevens,
a leading voice for player safety, went before the committee to
describe his radical response to this crisis.
Dartmouth has a storied tradition of football dating back to 1876,
and its team has won 18 Ivy League championships. So Teevens
shocked the football world at the start of the 2011 season when he
announced a complete ban on tackling at practice. Players could
hit padded tackling sleds, but not each other. To put it bluntly, the
players, fans, and other coaches all thought he was crazy.
They don't anymore. Dartmouth has had winning football seasons every year since Teevens instituted the ban. But the coach
kept wishing that he could safely approximate game conditions
in practice sessions, allowing his defensive players to chase and
tackle elusive runners. So in 2013 he brought a challenge to Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering. Could students come up
with a technology that would let players practice their tackling
skills without injuring each other?

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2016