Motorola Solutions’ Drone as First Responder (DFR) system with BRINC can dispatch a drone to the location of an officer pressing an APX NEXT panic button
By Donny Jackson, Editor, Urgent Communications
Motorola Solutions has announced the ability for its Drone as First Responder (DFR) offering with BRINC to dispatch a drone automatically to the location of an officer who presses the emergency button on an APX NEXT P25 smart radio.
Motorola Solutions corporate vice president, Jeremiah Nelson said this new capability is the product of integration integrating Motorola Solutions products—CommandCentral Aware and the APXNEXT radio—with BRINC and SkySafe, which are two companies that agreed to strategic alliances with Motorola Solutions earlier this year.
“What we’ve done is integrate BRINC’s drone and software capability into Aware. Along with that, we’ve been able to connect different parts of the workflow in unique and interesting ways,” Nelson said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “The most compelling of those is the officer-safety use case.
“If you have an APX NEXT radio and you hit the panic button, that event can automatically have a drone launched and get coverage in minutes, as opposed to waiting for a car to drive there or waiting for someone to show up.”
This functionality only can be realized for officers with an APX NEXT radio who work for an agency that utilizes the BRINC drone system and the CommandCentral Aware platform, according to Nelson.
“The beauty of this integration between the drone and the radio is that it is just that simple—hit the panic button and get the drone on the way,” Nelson said. “That’s enormously valuable; you don’t want to make it more complicated than that.”
This fundamental capability can be enhanced by Motorola Solutions’ AI Assist—particularly in the area of providing searchable live transcriptions—and SkySafe, which is designed to deliver aerial situational awareness of all drones within a geographical location, including those not owned by the agency.
“Before, that would have been two different applications on two separate screens,” Nelson said. “But all of the SkySafe data is now accessible in CommandCentral Aware.
“In addition to your real-time missions and being able to fly the drones while seeing where they are, you get the situational awareness of your airspace [via SkySafe], so you know about expected drones and unexpected drones—all of that intelligence in the same pane of glass.”
While the focus of today’s announcement is the deployment of drones in response to the emergency-button push on an APX NEXT radio, the fact that the location data—or projected location data, in the case of the officer being in a moving vehicle—is in CommandCentral Aware will let dispatch consider all available responses, Nelson said. For example, some cities may have fixed cameras in the area that can be focused on an area to provide greater insight to the situation, he said.
