Autonomous drone: Mansfield set to deploy eye in the sky as ‘first responder’

MANSFIELD — An autonomous drone may soon serve as a “first responder” for the City of Mansfield safety forces.

“When a call comes in at 123 Main Street, the (911) dispatcher hits that address, the box opens, the drone immediately (flies out) without a drone pilot or without a visual observer being there,” Safety Service Director Keith Porch said Tuesday evening.

“It automatically goes and it hovers over that address,” Porch said during a demonstration of the new technology to members of City Council as local lawmakers gathered before their scheduled meeting.

Flying at 200 feet at a programmed speed of 30 miles an hour, the drone can provide real-time visual information to police and fire personnel — even before they arrive on an emergency scene anywhere within a three-mile radius of the Municipal Building.

Once the mission is complete, the drone returns to its box and automatically begins to recharge for missions that can last 30 to 40 minutes on battery power.

Porch said he believes Mansfield safety forces will be the first in Ohio to take advantage of technology developed by a company based in Houston, Texas, to get drones quickly over crime and emergency scenes.

The city’s Board of Control in September approved a $49,000 one-year contract with Paladin, a company founded in 2018 that offers drone technology not based on line-of-sight controls.

The city’s former police chief, Porch has said he believes in technology as a “force multiplier” when it comes to first responders, employing ShotSpotter gunfire detection systems and Flock license-plate reader cameras during his tenure in charge of the MPD.

Officials with Paladin came to Mansfield to install the system and have trained local personnel.

The drone system is operational, though Porch said the city is awaiting final FAA approval before it can operate autonomously. He said Paladin has successfully worked with the federal agency in other locations around the country.

“We have had a drone program within the police department that we started back in about 2017. Drone technology is not something new for us. Obviously, it’s been very beneficial,” Porch said.

“We are stepping into the DFR realm. That’s what is new and essentially it’s what we want to get to.”

(Below are photos taken of new autonomous drone technology the City of Mansfield administration demonstrated to City Council on Tuesday evening. The story continues below the gallery.)

The cost for the one year “test-and-evaluate” period will be split between the city’s police and fire department budgets.

Porch said the clock on that year-long testing period will not start until the FAA approval is received.

The drone carries two cameras — one optical, one thermal — and its service radius will provide coverage for most of the city from the downtown Municipal Building.

It is built with simplicity in mind, according to Divyaditya Shrivastava, founder and CEO of Paladin.

“A live feed is all it is doing,” he said in an article published in 2021 in GovTech.com.

“It makes a world of difference. Without an overhead view there is only so much information you can give a first responder,” he said.

A Paladin drone has three basic commands: take off, stop/pause and return to home base.

Navigation is done via trained first responder professionals working for the particular public agency, with drones being directed by digital maps and by dropping pins onto those maps.

Porch said the system shows how long a drone was over a location and the flight path it took during a mission.

“So if anybody says, ‘Hey, the drone was over my house for an hour,’ we can see what the drone is doing and and everything that camera is looking at. We can see what it’s recording.

“Obviously, from the police and fire side, we have policies for operation on what this drone is going to and not going to do. So there’s a quality control, so to speak, when we talk about how we operate drones,” Porch said.

Porch said the DFR’s biggest weakness is battery life.

“Typically, what we’re being told from the company is 35 to 40 minutes of flight time. So clearly we couldn’t be hovering over a prolonged incident.

“It has to come back, land, and it’ll re-charge … or we have extra batteries where we can land it on the ground, swap the batteries, and get it up back up in the air to do the overwatch,” he said.

During events that require longer periods of time, the police and fire department drone units would take over the scene, using several FAA-certified drone pilots.

“This drone is ‘going to calls,’ so to speak,” he said.

Porch said the drone could be equally valuable to firefighters, giving an overhead view of a potential fire scene even before trucks and rescue squads arrive.

The thermal camera may locate fire inside a structure, help to locate a missing person or provide information to officers searching for a suspect at night.

The “advanced package” approved by the Board of Control includes the drone, docking station, the company’s Watchtower software and assistance with the FAA to obtain waivers needed for “beyond the visual line of sight operation,” according to Porch.

“We will get unlimited users, unlimited data storage, unlimited maintenance, repairs, batteries. Essentially, 100 percent of this project is covered by the company with this subscription model,” he told the Board of Control in September.

Porch said decisions are still being made to provide guidance to dispatchers on when to send the drone.

“We’re still trying to judge how we’re going to work. We will take a very slow approach on how we do calls and what the priorities are going to be,” he said.

“But I can tell you … the series of priorities … when you talk about structure fires, when you talk about violence or shootings, obviously those things … we’re going to deploy this technology.”