Motorola Solutions announces strategic alliances with Drone as First Responder (DFR) company BRINC and SkySafe—a provider of drone-detection technologies—that allow resale of their offerings, as well as plans to integrate data from their solutions into the Motorola Solutions 911 platform
By Donny Jackson, Editor
Motorola Solutions announced strategic alliances with Drone as First Responder (DFR) company BRINC and SkySafe—a provider of drone-detection technologies—that allow resale of their offerings, as well as plans to integrate data from their solutions into the Motorola Solutions 911 platform.
Motorola Solutions’ vice president of response, reporting & evidence solutions, Jeremiah Nelson said the drone announcements—both of which included undisclosed Motorola Solutions investments into BRINC and SkySafe—come at an important time in the drone sector.
“DFR is having its moment,” Nelson said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “Until recently, it was difficult to get the beyond-visual-line-of-site [BVLOS] waivers, so you had to have pilots looking at every drone, limitations on how far you could fly, etc.—so, there were a lot of costs tied up in the pilots, quite frankly.
“With the regulatory changes, now it’s easier to get started with a program, and it also changes the cost profile of the programme. I can spend more of that budget on purpose-built equipment, and less on having someone stand on a roof and stare at a drone.”
BRINC—an American company based in Seattle—fits the purpose-built aspect of the equation, according to Nelson and David Benowitz, BRINC’s vice president of strategy and marketing.
“We’re the only [drone manufacturer] that is focused just on public safety,” Benowitz said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.
“They need to be purpose-made. Public safety is a space where those nuanced features that impact your speed of deployment and impact your efficacy—even just a little bit—have a real implication on lives. Our belief … is, ‘Agencies are going to choose purpose-built tools, because they tend to be deeper in functionality and richer in that regard, as well.’”
BRINC certainly welcomed the Motorola Solutions investment, but Benowitz said he is particularly excited that the agreement between the companies will enable integrations that will better serve the needs of public-safety agencies.
“This alliance between BRINC and Motorola is going to superpower integrations between drones and the standard day-to-day tech that agencies integrate through Motorola to make it that much easier to bring drone technology operationally into the field,” Benowitz said.
Benowitz offered an example of a use case that is not in place today but should be generally available by the end of the year, in collaboration with Motorola Solutions’ CommandCentral platform.
“Imagine you have an officer in the field who is in a dangerous situation,” Benowitz said. “They hit that emergency button on the radio, and one of those options is to deploy a drone to that location. We can pull in the GPS location of that radio and dispatch a drone directly to that location.
Nelson echoed this sentiment.
“What BRINC brings to the table is that singular focus on a purpose-built drone portfolio for public safety,” Nelson said. “Others in the market are serving a lot of different customer segments. BRINC is unique in its purpose-built drone portfolio [for public safety].
“And the new DFR drone that they’re building is an incredibly capable drone for DFR … They’re thinking around payloads and additional things it brings to the table. All of that is capability that we’re excited to integrate into the public-safety workflow.”
Nelson said SkySafe brings a very different—but increasingly important—capability to Motorola Solutions via its drone-detection system that can help public-safety agencies make sense of potentially chaotic drone traffic in the skies via its sensor-centric networks that currently are deployed in about 20 US markets.
“Drones are going to be increasingly prevalent every day—you’re going to see them in more places, delivering packages, delivering meals, etc.,” Nelson said. “They’re going to become an increasingly common part of our day-to-day lives.
“Having the ability to understand what those drones are—are they expected or illicit?—is going to become a critical piece of intelligence for many types of users. SkySafe creates a network that understands what all the drone traffic is in real time—not only where it is, but what it is—and then you can feed that back into a real-time crime center or a PSAP to drive an appropriate response, based on what it is.”
SkySafe CEO Grant Jordan agreed, noting that all critical-infrastructures entities increasingly are becoming wary about drone threats.
“If you’re a critical-infrastructure operator, it’s pretty important for you to know whether that drone that’s coming into your natural-gas plant … is the drone that’s meant to be there to do the inspection, or is that some random drone that you now have to be worried about and take action, in some way,” Jordan said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.
“I think that really every group—whether commercial or government—that’s started using drones in their own operations realizes pretty quickly that it becomes important to have that data and that awareness of what other drones are in the airspace at the same time.”
Such information promises to be particularly relevant to public-safety entities, according to Jordan.
“We’re able to provide our services and data—through Motorola—to all of their public-safety customers,” he said. “Part of that is integrating into their CommandCentral Aware platform, … so that those public-safety customers have that single pane of glass bringing in all of the different types of tracking and awareness management.
“This allows us to expand a lot, especially in Motorola Solutions’ core customer base—public-safety agencies. They’re just really well positioned to serve those customers with our data and services.”
