Bee Cave, Texas PD to launch autonomous DFR program

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

The small, Austin suburb of Bee Cave, Texas hopes to be the first city in the country to launch a fully autonomous drones-as-first-responders (DFR) program for its police department.

Bee Cave Police Chief Brian Jones told DroneLife that the city expects to begin its pilot DFR program using a single drone developed by Austin-based start-up company eve Vehicles. Plans then call for the city to expand the system to eventually involve three quadcopter drones, three drone bases and related equipment, built by eve using mostly American-made components.

“Law enforcement agencies all over the country are experiencing manpower shortages and this is just an additional way that we can leverage technology to deliver a more efficient law-enforcement service,” Jones said.

The system will be used in conjunction with the 9-1-1 emergency system to dispatch drones as the police department’s first response to an incident, providing eyes in the sky at the scene of a traffic accident or wildfire, or the site of reports of a suspicious person or an individual with a gun.

“eve Vehicles is building the drones completely from scratch,” Jones said. He said he expects the first drone to begin responding to 9-1-1 calls as early as mid-September, while the remainder of the system should be on line within the next several months.

“They’ve built the first drone and once they have made all the modifications or corrections to that drone, they will replicate it two more times.”

Founded in 2021, with an early partnership with the University of Texas at Austin, eve Vehicles is partnering with the city of Bee Cave, with its police department serving as the alpha test for the company’s technology, CEO Roger Pecina said.

“We signed that partnership back in January,” he said. “We’re really excited to be working with them; they’re really thrilled, and they’re excited to be operating this new type of technology.”

Initially the system will employ a single drone, based at the Bee Cave polices station, with an observer on the ground tracking each flight. Later on, when the company obtains a certificate of authorization (COA) from the FAA, allowing it to fly beyond visual line of site missions, the DFR system will be able to operate fully autonomous missions, Pecina said.

 Because the company is using Bee Cave as a testing site for its DFR system, which it eventually will market to other municipal governments, it plans to donate the drones and related equipment to the city and, in the first year, to operate the system for at a nominal fee of $1.

“Ultimately they will scale it, but we are the first agency to use it,” Jones said. Once eve builds the system out and it goes into full-scale operation, the city will share the data it collects in the operation of the system with the company.

Under the proposed program, once a 9-1-1 call comes in and the call is determined to merit a DFR response, a police department pilot in command would program the location of the incident into the system and the drone will autonomously launch and fly to the scene, Jones said. Once it arrives, the drone will begin to transmit video of the scene back to its base.

“The video feed would be available to the officer who requested it, or any of the officers that are authorized to view it. The dispatcher would have the aerial footage of the call before the officers get there,” Jones said.

The drone, which has a battery life of 40 to 45 minutes, will hover near the scene as long as is required until the situation, whatever it is, is resolved.

“If it’s a more of a prolonged call, then the drones speak to each other and when one of the drones starts to lose battery power it would request a flight of the other drone,” he said. The second drone would then take off from its nesting place to take the place of the first drone dispatched to the scene, allowing the first drone to return to its base and recharge.

System designed to ensure residents’ privacy rights

Jones said the system is designed to protect the privacy of community members not involved in the incident under investigation. The drones will travel along vectors aligned so as to minimize flying over residential areas. The vehicles’ cameras are equipped with 80X optical-zoom capabilities, which allow the drones to capture a clear image without having to hover directly above an incident scene, Jones said.

In the case of 9-1-1 calls originating from a residential community in the town of 10,000 people, the drones will be programmed to avoid unnecessarily recording the activities of nearby residents.

“If the call is at a house, they don’t have to be sitting over that house,” he said. If a call involves an incident at a residence, the drone would not capture video footage of community members unless they’re at that particular residence.

At the conclusion of the incident in question, the Bee Cave PD will decide whether the video footage has any evidentiary value, in the same way it evaluates body cam and dash-cam footage. If the footage is judged to have no evidentiary value, the department will delete the video after 30 days.

System designed to enhance law enforcement response

Prior to entering into an agreement with eve, the city had an existing drone program, with two FAA-certified pilots and a fleet of five DJI drones, an M-30T, a Phantom 4 Pro, a Mavic Pro and two Avatas. Jones said eve had first contacted the city about establishing a DFR program, in part based on the town’s proximity to the company’s headquarters. With an area of 10 square miles, the city’s size and population also made it the ideal proving grounds for testing out the eve system.

Jones said city officials have been working diligently to get the public’s buy-in toward the introduction of the DFR system, posting about the benefits of the system on social media.

So far everybody’s been very positive about it,” he said. “I think people will appreciate that our resources can be more adequately diverted to other calls for service.”

He said deploying the DFR system “will allow us to not only bring more safety for our officers, but ultimately, I think it could save lives.”

Pecina said the drone system is compliant with the National Defense Authorization Act, and the drones will be built in America, with mostly American-made components, including the flight controller, the electronic speed controller, telecommunications system and battery.  The only Chinese-made component is the motor, produced by T-MOTOR of Nanchang, China, but Pecina said he hopes to change that situation soon.

“We have sourced an American motor manufacturer that we could replace our motors with. The reason we haven’t made the jump just yet is we get a little bit more efficiency out of our T-MOTOR setup,” he said.

He said law enforcement agencies are increasingly demanding American-made drone products, particularly in light of  proposed congressional bans on Chinese-produced drones.

“We have gotten a lot of interest developing the NDAA solution, but I genuinely believe that the most interest is going to come the moment that the ban becomes real and you can no longer procure DJI drones for public safety operations,” he said.

Read more:

• DFR in Australia: Sphere Drones Secures Contract with WA Police Force
• FAA Approves BVLOS Operations for Oswego City Police Department’s Drone as First Responder Program
• Aerodome: Drone as First Responder Solution Built for the Future of Air Support

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.