These George Mason University students are short-circuiting voice commands, dog whistles, and clickers.
If you’ve had a puppy, you probably know the patience it takes to train them in basic commands, and it can be a noisy affair involving begging, pleading, and some yelling. Working dogs like those in police and military K9 units need to learn so much more.
Sometimes, they need to obey without hearing a word.
Rescue situations can be chaotic, with so much going on that a command gets lost in the noise. Sometimes, a team of dogs need to hear many different commands, and competing voices are confusing. Other times, operation teams need to go radio silent and any noise at all will give their positions away.
Enter Team Covert Dog Comms. This pack of cybersecurity seniors at George Mason, all of whom graduated in May, sniffed out a way to direct dogs without barking commands.
Together, they became the dream team that was the envy of anyone who has ever worked on a bad group project—and proof that great leadership combined with a passionate team yields amazing results.
“Working with this team has been a very positive experience. One key factor that made it successful was the balance of specialized skill sets,” said team leader Paul J. Wyche, who also recently spoke at his College of Engineering and Computing graduation. “While some of our backgrounds overlapped, each team member had a distinct area of expertise, allowing us to overcome any obstacle and collaborate effectively.”
Those members were Maxime Bonnaud, who specialized in the vest’s wireless and cryptographic security; Jonathan Perry, who designed the hardware; and AJ Hoepfner, who set up testing standards and regulations, along with assisting Wyche with project management.
“Mostly, what made this team great was good execution on the fundamentals,” said Bonnaud. “Everyone showed up, communicated well, and looked for areas they could work on instead of having to be assigned work.”
The end result was a securely encrypted working prototype of a vest that can be programmed with three different vibrating pattern commands that a dog can be trained to obey. While they were unable to find a working dog to test on, the team tested the vest on themselves and found it to work as intended.
When asked whether the team planned to patent or commercialize the vest, Wyche said that they wouldn’t rule it out. “We haven’t formally discussed commercializing the project. However, if the opportunity arises and we receive the necessary support, we may explore those possibilities.”
Until then, they achieved their goal of making “a fully operational haptic vest that could be refined for real-world use in special operations.”
And that is something to howl about.