Parrot, DroneSense Partner on Public-safety Drone Software

Public-safety drone software provider DroneSense and French UAV giant Parrot are soaring into a new corporate partnership.

The agreement will marry Parrot’s ANAFI quadcopter with the full suite of DroneSense capabilities with a focus on the public-safety/first-responder drone market. The Texas startup’s platform is an out-of-the-box solution for police, fire and rescue agencies to build, manage and scale drone programs.

The deal should be a perfect fit – Parrot’s ANAFI and ANAFI Thermal drones offer agencies built-in 4K HDR camera or a FLIR thermal sensor. This allows users to easily capture thermal and visual readings for faster response times.

“This functionality coupled with the scene management tools in the DroneSense Platform will provide public safety operators with an unparalleled level of situational awareness that will ultimately help save more lives,” a DroneSense spokesperson noted.

DroneSense provides public-safety agencies with an integrated platform that gives pilots intuitive, model-agnostic flight control interface while providing incident commanders real-time situational awareness with live video streams and telemetry from drone sensors. For example, a firefighting unit could monitor hotpots within a building using aerial thermal imagery from an ANAFI drone. The public-safety drone software also logs all data for later storage and analysis.

“Parrot consistently offers top-of-the-line solutions to our enterprise customers, and this partnership with DroneSense will allow us to deliver a seamless and integrated experience,” said Jerome Bouvard, Parrot Director of Strategic Partnership. “With entire fleets of drones to manage, decision-makers in the public safety sector are often faced with unique challenges when it comes to effective mission planning and hardware tracking. We expect these challenges to be eased greatly through this ongoing partnership.”

“It’s our mission at DroneSense to enable first responders to build and scale fully operational drone programs that harness the value of the latest drone technology safely and effectively,” said DroneSense CEO, Christopher Eyhorn. “Through this integration, we are excited to make it easier for public safety drone programs to utilize the highly capable ANAFI drones successfully in their operations.”

Parrot recently made headlines after the company donated drones, software and support to help Human Rights Watch monitor ISIS atrocities in Syria.