Baton Rouge, Louisiana - High Lander, working with Stephenson Technologies Corporation (STC) and the BIRD Foundation, has integrated the Mission Control drone fleet management platform with the city of Baton Rouge’s citywide system of gunshot sensors. The East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office will be testing the system over the coming months.
The city's gunshot detection system automatically reports incidents to the police command center. Working with STC, High Lander connected this system with Mission Control. In the event of a gunshot, a police drone will be autonomously dispatched to the scene.
Police forces across the US are adopting drones because they are ideal first responders. However, their effectiveness is limited while they must rely on pilots to dispatch them, and indeed for people to report crimes in the first place. Autonomous detection ensures that no incident goes unreported, and automating the response system could slash response times while ensuring that no incident goes unattended.
Having a drone on scene quickly has many benefits for police forces. For example, they establish presence rapidly, reconnoiter surroundings for officer safety, can be fitted with loudspeakers to communicate from a safe distance, are ideally suited to searching for people, and more - new capabilities are being discovered all the time. This new integration is a good example of that. Baton Rouge police drones will also benefit from Mission Control’s suite of features, such as cockpit mode and live video link creation, and safety features such as terrain recognition and collision prevention.
The innovation was created in collaboration with STC, a Baton Rouge-based technology supplier, and made possible by the support of the BIRD Foundation, a industrial research and development investment fund that promotes cooperation between Israeli and American companies. BIRD approved this project back in July 2022, and we’ve been working hard on the project ever since.
We'd like to thank the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office for showing us some real southern hospitality, we had a blast.
