Preliminary Evaluation of Dog-Drone Technological Interfaces: Challenges and Opportunities

In many of the applications involving working canines, such as search and rescue operations and agriculture, drones are increasing in ubiquity. There has been some recent focus on training dogs to follow or interact with drones in such applications. From the Animal Computer Interaction (ACI) perspective, drones have the potential to monitor the dog's welfare when handlers are not in close proximity in such harsh environments. Our on going work has focused on canine welfare through the use of on-body sensors for monitoring behavior, physiology, and the micro-environment dogs are in. We have also used these technologies to explore computer-assisted training of canines and more recently included drones to complement these to assess the macro-environment dogs are working in. This work discusses the challenges and opportunities we learned during our efforts to include drones for computer-assisted interactions with working dogs. We focus on the enabling technology and it's implications for ACI when dogs and drones work together.