BEE CAVE, Texas — The Bee Cave Police Department is running a pilot program with an electric vehicle company to test out fully autonomous drones to help them better respond to emergencies.
“It’s going to really be an advantage for us to be at the forefront of this technological innovation,” said Brian Jones, the Chief of Police for the Bee Cave.
Eve Vehicles Corporation has been working on developing this type of technology to make it easier for first responders during emergencies for about two years. They started working specifically on a model called the WREN back in April.
With just the push of a button, 911 dispatchers and officers can send these drones off by themselves to any type of emergency. The drone will send back a live feed of the scene, so first responders can get a closer look at what’s going on, even before they arrive.
“The drone can arrive first and give us real-time information before the officers even get there, so we’re not necessarily walking into something and not know what we’re getting into,” Jones said.
The drones have a 40x optical zoom lens and can fly up to about 60 miles an hour. They also have a one-of-a-kind feature called autonomous bounding, which means if a unit’s battery is low, the drone itself can call another drone in the network to come and replace it. The drones will be stationed at “nests” around the city that serve as their home-base and also charging unit.
CEO of eve Vehicles Corporation Roger Pecina said when people are calling 911, it’s usually one of the worst days of their lives, and because of the stress, there can be a lot of miscommunications with the dispatchers.
“Dispatch has to make a judgment call because they’re listening to you,” Pecina said.
But he says that the drones getting to the scene first, and sending video back to first responders in real-time, will help bridge the communication gap between the calls, and what resources the department needs to deploy.
“Dispatch can make a much better decision of what resources to send that call, that can not only save the city money, but it can save lives as well,” Pecina said.
Bee Cave Police Department said their retention policy on the footage for these new drones would be the same as their other manual drones or body camera footage, where they discard it after 30 days unless the video value as evidence.
Right now, Bee Cave PD is in the testing phase and working with one drone, but by October, they plan to test out two more.