'Lab' results: Auburn grooms dogs to sniff out bombs

Melissa Brown | Montgomery Advertiser

Show Caption Hide Caption Auburn University Vapor Wake Dogs Auburn University's Canine Performance Sciences Program, an interdisciplinary veterinary and research department, researches and breeds dogs specifically for detection purposes. Auburn has patented a technology called Vapor Wake, which allows detector dogs to sniff out body-worn explosives in crowd situations like major concerts and airports.

Some Auburn University students are preparing for an exciting summer school session.

There are a few tests to prepare for, but a lot of time is carved out for ballgames and socializing. Meals are specially prepared; no cafeteria food for them.

Roxy and Rambo, the university’s youngest and furriest students, are occasionally more interested in gnawing on a handler’s sleeve or investigating their reflections in a mirror lining the back of their playroom.

But everything in the room they’re sniffing, including the plastic box partially attached to a wooden slab, is preparing them for an eventual future as explosive detection dogs.

The siblings are products of Auburn’s Canine Performance Sciences Program, an offshoot of the school’s College of Veterinary Medicine developed in the early 1990s to research the basic functions of dog’s olfactory capabilities.

CPS has shifted and refined its approach over nearly three decades, developing into a multispecialty research and design unit developing cutting edge technology to hone man’s best friend into finely tuned explosive-detection units.

“These dogs, these puppies, are selected, developed and their behavior is very conducive to be used as a detector dog,” said Dr. Paul Waggoner, co-director of CPS. “You don’t want one of our dogs as a pet, because if you don’t give it a job to do it’s going to find something in your house to work on.”

Today, CPS is focusing on refining its Vapor Wake program, dogs trained in detecting “body worn explosives” on moving targets. Auburn has patented the technology, a method of selecting, training and deploying dogs a step above the average bomb-sniffing pup.

Security experts say the methods — which allow detection dogs to move freely in large groups of people — could be the future of crowd security.

Vapor Wake dogs have been used extensively by mass transit authorities like Amtrak. The New York Police Department counterterrorism unit deploys 14 Vapor Wake canines born and bred at Auburn.

Waggoner and his colleagues initially developed the idea from fluid dynamics research at the Penn State Gas Dynamics Laboratory, which found that people leave a thermal “plume” in their wake.

“When you’re sitting, if you can visualize the heat signature come off of yourself, it’s really quite enormous,” Waggoner said. “When you start walking forward, that plume gets caught up in an aerodynamic wake so you have this vapor wake behind you, even small particles are coming off of your body.”

Waggoner said canine researchers realized that putting a dog in position in a crowd to sniff out the plumes or vapor wake could be more advantageous to crowd security than other forms of detection work. Traditional detection dogs, for example, might be assigned to sniff a stationary body from the front at a security checkpoint in a train station or stadium, which often bottleneck crowds or are conspicuous enough for possible suspects to avoid.

Traditional detection dogs, whether looking for bombs or contraband, are led by a trainer and directed to possible areas to search. But because of air currents, Vapor Wake dogs can search an area and sniff multiple people at once, leading its trainer to a possible suspect if it sniffs a suspicious trace.

Working and moving naturally within a crowd is more effective for Vapor Wake dogs, researchers say.

“It actually accentuates their sampling capability by putting them in that wake,” Waggoner said. “The plume amplifies the signal that comes off of you.”

Though the use of live animals as security devices might seem archaic in the age of technology, Waggoner says dogs still can't be beat.

"There have been incredible advances in the development of electronic sensors over the years, in screening methods, but still the gold standard is dogs, in terms of their sensitivity and discrimination between odors," Waggoner said. "The dog’s capability of detecting a very small signal in an odor-noisy environment far surpasses any of the instrumentation that’s available."

While dogs aren’t the only animal with enhanced smell — rats in particular have incredible olfactory senses, Waggoner said — the species has a unique mix of characteristics and is the rare animal that has co-evolved with humans to create a mutual social sensitivity.

Auburn prefers to work with Labrador retrievers, Waggoner said, because they’re talented but highly trainable, have healthy genetic lines and are also seen as nonthreatening by the general public. Labs have over 220-300 million sensors in its snout, compared to 5 to 6 million in a human nose.

“The social interaction makes them attractive and easy to work with in terms of people training them,” Waggoner said. “Dogs respond to praise and approval from people. Dogs are incredibly mobile, we think of them as a mobile sensor platform. They are very capable and can have a long service life.”

Auburn breeds about 60 dogs every year, with students and researchers from veterinary sciences, psychology and engineering helping to socialize and acclimate the puppies in their early months. CPS developed a partnership with prisons in Georgia and Florida, where inmates are trained to raise the pups and teach early training behavior. Around a year old, dogs are then transferred to Auburn’s private partner VWK9, a company in Anniston that specifically trains in Vapor Wake technology and eventually places the dogs.

All told, it can be a time consuming and expensive process, though Waggoner said the dogs’ detection ability can outpace any electronic sensor in place today. But CPS hopes to fine-tune its process even more, which is where Auburn psychology professor Jeffrey Katz comes in.

“It’s very expensive to go from birth to a full-fledged detector dog,” Katz said. “We’re hoping to combine a bunch of different measures together so we can identify the key elements in a dog we know will make them successful.”

Katz and a team of graduate students have designed a series of tests for Auburn puppies like Rambo and Roxy to play with. The tests track puppy’s resourcefulness and problem solving skills, as well as their responsiveness to familiar humans.

The CPS team has trained their dogs for MRI scanning, a sensitive process that requires them to be awake and alert, but completely still. The process takes about three months of work, but Katz and his team are now evaluating which part of a dog's brain responds when looking at pictures of familiar human faces versus unfamiliar, or happy faces versus angry. The Auburn team has theorized facial and emotional recognition can ultimately predict a dog's success in the Vapor Wake program.

"We want to take those puppy developmental scores we’re getting, the images that are showing us the key parts of the brain involved with dogs that become detector dogs, and then a layer of genetics," Katz said. "We can say now that this is what we need to look at early on in puppies. Which dogs will make it to Vapor Wake? Those are the ones we want to focus on, and the others can go on to other types of jobs."

As CPS continues to refine its Vapor Wake technology, it is also looking ahead to tackle biological threats such as man-made chemical threats or natural viruses. Off-lead dogs, unencumbered by a human handler, are also a goal.

"We’re looking at new threats, at new ways to improve and enhance the dog’s capability, at how they process information," Waggoner said. "In doing this, we can better communicate with a dog. How do they catalog odor information? If we can understand more about the dog, it will give other scientists insight to produce artificial intelligence systems to enhance electronic sensors. ... This research can translate to improvement of human life and human health. It’s a two-way street."