If you’ve watched an NFL game recently, you may have seen this NFL Network promo, which opens with a shot of a tackling dummy zipping across a practice field. It’s an odd sight at first, but player safety advocates are hailing it as the next big thing.
The Mobile Virtual Player (MVP), which was first developed at Dartmouth College by four engineering students, is a motorized training dummy that can be operated using a remote control. Elliot Kastner, one of the original creators of the MVP and Director of Research & Development for the product’s startup company — also called MVP — says that the dummy was designed to move and feel like a real player while absorbing hits in practice so the real players don’t have to.
“The primary goal of our device is to reduce player-on-player contact in practice because recent research has shown somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of concussions or sub-concussive impacts occur at practice,” Kastner said in an interview with SportTechie.
The timing couldn’t be better. With football concussions dominating headlines, the NFL is trying to change its reputation of mishandling head trauma and embrace new technology that can make the game safer. The MVP, which will hit the open market in January, is already being used by seven NFL teams and getting some rave reviews.
“It’s an awesome piece of football technology,” Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin told Steelers.com in May. “It never gets tired. It runs at an appropriate football speed. All of the position groups are getting an opportunity to use it. It’s funny, you just put it on the field and watch the guys and they show you the applications.”
Meanwhile, Kastner was thrilled with Tomlin’s enthusiasm. “He was out there tackling it and dreaming up dozens of different drills,” Kastner said. “He was super pumped about it, which was great to see.”
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The path from proposal to prototype to practice field wasn’t an easy one. It all started in 2013 when Dartmouth head football coach Buddy Teevens challenged the school’s engineering students to create a piece of technology that could reduce practice injuries. Teevens, who has been a major pioneer for football safety issues, completely banned player-on-player tackling in his practices in 2010 because of the high occurrence of injuries. The rest of the Ivy League eventually followed suit in 2016, when it banned full-contact tackling in regular-season practices.
While practices got safer, the existing tackling dummies and sleds weren’t sophisticated enough to recreate game-like situations. So Kastner, who had been a defensive lineman for the Dartmouth football team since 2009, teamed up with three other students and decided that Teevens’ challenge would be their senior-year project.
As Kastner described in an article for IEEE Spectrum, the first prototype of the MVP had many issues. Kastner and company originally envisioned a completely omnidirectional robot that rolled on a central ball, but the ball created serious traction issues. They fiddled with the shape so that the dummy could pop back up after being hit, but the weight distribution wasn’t quite right. And they hastily used a car battery to power the dummy, but it was a bad fit. When the 2013 school year ended, the engineering team was disappointed with the results.
After graduation, everyone went their separate ways. Kastner started a Master’s program at Dartmouth while Quinn Connell, who is now the Director of Engineering for MVP, went overseas for work. Kastner stored the prototype in his fraternity house, but in May 2015, his girlfriend spotted it in the house’s dumpster.
After Kastner recovered the MVP from the trash, he called Connell, and the two of them decided they would spend the whole summer of 2015 to try and make it work one last time. They launched a Kickstarter campaign and successfully raised $5,000, which allowed them to overhaul the robot.
They replaced the car battery with a more lightweight lithium battery and eventually installed an electric motor. They abandoned the central ball design in favor of a two-wheel drive system, similar to the wheel design of Hoverboards and Segways. After testing out the new robot, they realized the changes had worked — the MVP was moving the way they wanted. The next step was to test it out against a player.
On the way to the football field, Kastner and Connell ran into Dartmouth rugby player Madison Hughes, who would later become captain of the U.S. rugby team at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Hughes agreed to test out the dummy, chasing and tackling it as Connell controlled its movement. Again, the test was a success, and Hughes tweeted out a video of the experience.
Later that day, Connell sent Kastner a text: “The video has 3,000 views.” Kastner was shocked, but that was just the beginning. An hour later, the video had 100,000 views. The next morning, it had close to a million. Suddenly, everyone knew about the MVP and a slew of potential customers presented themselves.
“Everything changed because it turned from a class project and kind of a last-ditch effort to a now fully functioning business,” Kastner said.
It has been a continuous whirlwind since then. Kastner and Connell made two MVP prototypes available to Dartmouth for the 2015 season, repairing the dummies and replacing parts every night. A couple months later, Kastner and Teevens made an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. After the season, MVP partnered with Rogers Athletic Co. to receive assistance in manufacturing. And in 2016, MVP finally began beta testing with NFL teams.
The current version of the MVP is now doing most of the things that Kastner and Connell intended. It can zigzag around players, it can rotate in place, and it can stop on a dime. Its dense 180-pound frame feels solid to tackle, and its shape and geometry allow it to pop up immediately so it’s ready to be tackled by the next player. It can go up to 18 miles per hour and can run the 40-yard dash in five seconds flat. After years of testing, Kastner is happy with those specifications.
“We’ve catered the speed to what we feel is useful and safe,” he said. “Obviously you could make the dummy go faster or slower, but if you slow it down then the challenge in practice is decreased or diminished, and if you make it go faster then you potentially risk injury.”
On top of that, the MVP is easy to control. User testing has shown that it only takes about 10 minutes for most people to get a feel for it.
“It drives very similar to your old remote control cars when you were a kid,” Kastner said. “It’s easy to pick up, and once you figure out how fast it goes and how quickly you can turn and whatnot, you become comfortable with driving it.”
So where do they go from here? The next step, Kastner says, is “figuring out ways we can use the current and existing model in as many uses as possible.” The MVP was originally conceived to only be a tackling dummy, but coaches like Tomlin have found dozens of different ways that they can be used in practice.
The company has also dabbled in other sports, testing the dummy with the Dartmouth basketball team and the Vanderbilt baseball team. It’s now finding significant interest from rugby clubs as well. In the future, the company hopes they can offer different, more sport-specific models of the dummy.
But the potential doesn’t end there. “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,” Kastner wrote for IEEE Spectrum.
What he means is that future dummies could be smarter and perhaps even autonomous. If a dummy is given an operating system with localization and mapping capabilities, it’s possible that it could independently establish and change its position on the field while also communicating with other dummies to run complicated plays. That would make it one of the most humanlike robots to ever be used in sports.
Of course, the potential of an autonomous dummy brings plenty of concerns. The biggest is cost. The price of the MVP is already $8,300 for the first full commercial launch in January ($8,000 if you pre-order before Jan. 1). That amount is already too much for many high school programs and most youth teams. Adding more electronics would only drive the price up.
Another concern is safety. If something goes wrong with an autonomous dummy, it could end up hurting players — which would be a terrible irony, given the dummy’s purpose. So unless those issues can be ironed out, we’re not likely to see an independently functioning dummy in the immediate future. “There’s still a lot of development that needs to go into that phase,” Kastner said.
Still, most coaches and players agree that the current version of the MVP is an effective surrogate for player-on-player tackling — and a safer one too. With the high incidence of concussions and falling youth participation numbers as a result, safety has to be the most important issue for the sport.
“After all,” Kastner said, “football only exists if people are playing it.”