BRADFORD – A small company that has created a remote-controlled tackling robot for football or rugby practices is using the same technology to make a shooting target intended for the military and law enforcement.
In 2016, MVP Robotics introduced a dummy that can weave, dodge, or just race down an athletic field inviting a practice tackle, controlled by a coach on the sidelines.
The football dummy, which looks like a person-sized chess piece, is amply padded and springs back to stand vertically after it’s knocked down.
The latest product from MVP (for Mobile Virtual Player), which is still in the prototype phase, looks a lot more human. Like the football dummy, it travels around on a wheeled base. But the man-shaped mannequin is built to weave and dodge as it avoids live fire in training sessions.
The new training robot is called the HEKTR — the Humanoid Engageable Kinetic Training Robot. MVP Robotic says it has a $700,000 grant from the U.S. Air Force to develop the robots in partnership with a company called Columbia Tech in Westborough, Massachusetts, which is manufacturing them.
“We’re trying to bring these to market on a larger scale,” said company co-founder Quinn Connell.
MVP Robotics got its start after Connell, who grew up playing rugby in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, graduated from Dartmouth College in 2013 with a degree in engineering and later teamed up with Elliot Kastner, another engineering graduate who played football for Dartmouth for five years.
The two tossed around the idea of creating a business using the robotic tackling dummy, which had been developed earlier as part of a class project. A chance encounter in 2015 with Connell’s former rugby teammate, Madison Hughes, now captain of the U.S. national rugby sevens team, gave the company a boost. Hughes tweeted a 30-second video of a prototype robot on the field, and the post got a million views.
A rush of attention followed. Late night talk show host Stephen Colbert suited up to tackle an MVP robot when he had Kastner and Dartmouth football Coach Buddy Teevens on as guests. Football programs started calling, seeking to learn more.
In 2017, the company won $50,000 in an NFL startup competition. Connell and Kastner raised money from family, friends and Kickstarter to take functional robots to NFL training camps.
But while football programs tried out and in some cases bought the dummies, their use hasn’t become widespread. Their first customer, the Los Angeles Rams, bought two but isn’t using robotic dummies at all anymore, said spokesman Artis Twyman. Teevens, of Dartmouth, didn’t return calls.
MVP is still producing the dummies for football. Connell said about 100 of the original MVP robots are zooming around football fields at a maximum speed of 20 miles per hour. Last year, MVP released a 130-pound version for junior football that goes about 12 miles an hour. The original 190-pound version is about $8,000. This year, MVP is releasing a less expensive version, the 165-pound MVP Sprint, aimed at high school teams.
But Connell sees a large market for the HEKTR, which has been under development for two years. His goal is for the company to ship its first unit at the end of this year.
He said his company has invented technology that moves in the way a person moves, and can report where and when it was hit by fire.
“You can program it to drop when it’s been hit a certain number of times in certain locations,” Connell said. “It’s useful to implement in a live fire scenario where it’s too dangerous to have a person out there and you need something you can effectively train on.”
The company has carried out two rounds of fundraising, mostly involving Dartmouth alumni, and haven’t received any venture capital. It has no debt. MVP has seven employees, four in the engineering office in Bradford and three who work out of a sales office in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The football robots are made at Rogers Athletic in Michigan.
All four of MVP’s engineers graduated from Dartmouth. Kastner and Connell, both 27, get feedback from a board that’s mostly made up of Dartmouth alumni.
MVP started out in the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center near Hanover, New Hampshire, but moved to a 2,000-square-foot facility in a Bradford industrial park in November in search of larger and more affordable shop space. They didn’t look far outside the immediate area, Connell said.
“I guess you could say the greyhairs of the company all have their lives here, so it made more sense for things to remain in this area,” he said.
Now that they’re in Vermont, he said, they are paying noticeably higher taxes. But they like their new neighbors.
Their new location is located next door to a shipping company, a machine stop, and Sargent Metalworks, which restores rare automobiles, Connell said.
“If you find yourself in a tight spot and need something welded, you can just carry it next door,” he said. “It’s been great.”
