From the Archives: Drones for Small Communities with Chris Baker, Oswego’s Drone & Robotics Coordinator

Speaker A: Welcome to dronecast Rethinking Public Safety One Drone at a Time, a podcast by DroneSense. We explore real world applications of drones and emergency response, offering a close examination of evolving trends in drone technology and its impact on public safety. I'm your host John McCloud, director of customer success here at DroneSense. Hello and welcome to DroneCast. I'm your host, John McLeod. Joining me today is Chris Baker, who's the drone and robotics coordinator for the city of Oswego, New York. Chris has been with the city for a technical for the last five years, but working with the Adrenaline robotics team for about a year. To me at least, what makes that unique other than being a core part of the city's tech infrastructure and all the benefits that creates. But also we see consolidated support and funding for this resource for fired law enforcement, but abstracted from those departments individual budgets, which is interesting. Additionally, Oswego is quite well known, at least in the drone business as being very technology first pioneers in drone as a first responder with DroneSense Remote and is even more notable for a community of about 118,000 residents. So very excited to talk with Chris today on these topics and more. Welcome to dronecast, Chris, appreciate you having me.

Speaker B: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Speaker A: All right, well, I will admit to the users here from the beginning or the listeners, I should say that I'm a little bit biased because as Chris may know, I was kind of there at the birth in the training of your DFR program. So I've stood on a lot of roofs and Oswego, as we figured out the program, you've got some great people on your team that I won't sit here and name because I'll forget someone and I don't want to make anybody feel left out. But just a great people, great organization, great community. So I'm super biased and not ashamed of this topic just to say what a great program you guys have. But I did want to start with one question in particular which I thought was really interesting about the community was it's very intimate, it's very tight knit. There's a lot of people who have grown up in that community who I spoke with and I remember asking one of your coworkers about another person. They referenced that they had known them since middle school. And I was like, that's really interesting compared to some of the other communities we have customers in. I would love your thoughts about working within this community where there's a lot of intimacy. You might know people individually and how do you manage those different Relationships overall,

Speaker B: being from a small community to me is something that I really enjoy. One of the things that you can't say from being from these larger towns is I met my wife in high school. I was in 10th grade, she was in 11. We've been married for 20 years now. So it's just you don't get that in those big cities because people move on, they just separate and it's something special to be here. The other part of being from such a small community is I get to get to know all of our police officers and fire department personnel, any and all first responders. So to me I get to know them more personally. And when I'm doing what I do to assist them with the drones and fly for some of their missions, it's more personal to me because I know these guys and I go over to the police department and I get treated like any one of the other guys over there at the police department. We're bothering each other, hounding each other and it's just you're part of a brotherhood that is different somehow. Then I sit down frequently and have lunch at the fire department. There was a lot of days I'd be sitting there with having lunch with all the guys there and Chief Griffin before he retired and talking about what can we do, what does a Swigo need and how can we make things better. Another piece of being from a small community is Sergeant LaRue and I have started to upfit all the police cars was something that we sent out to have done and now it's something that we do in house. So we've gotten to know the patrol cars really well, the computers, the wiring, putting the cages in and all of that. You're not going to get that in a big community. All of that stuff's going to be sent out. It makes it quicker and easier for me to be able to fix something for those guys when they call me at 8 o' clock at night and pull up to my front door and they're like, hey, I'm outside, can you come out here and fix this? And I'm like, I'll be right out and we'll take care of it. And they're, they're getting right back to their shift out, uh, doing what they need to do. So I really enjoy being from a small, tight knit community.

Speaker A: Awesome. I mean one of the things I also noticed was you kind of took over a program in flight, right? So that's always interesting too when you take over in the middle of a program. But the other Side of it is, compared to a lot of the folks we work with, everyone in the program effectively is sworn law enforcement. Most of the time. That's not necessarily the world you come from. So I'm just curious what that experience has been like for you. Kind of integrating more closely in some ways into that process and how it's been. What are the challenges been?

Speaker B: I would say there hasn't been too many challenges. I mean, obviously there's challenges with everything. But I started with the city in 2019, and that was right about the same time that, that Chief Griffin was discussing with the mayor to get a drone for the city of Oswego. And that was done completely independently of the tech department because it was a piece of equipment for that fire department. But then I very quickly got involved because they would be having issues with the wi fi and all sorts of connectivity issues. So I ended up getting involved with it very early on. And there were many, many late nights where I'd be over at the fire department. Well, Sergeant LaRue is on shift till 11 o', clock, and the fire department's on 24 hour shifts. And I'm just over there at 7 o' clock at night because I love this stuff, I love technology, and get in there and try to figure out how to get it all to work. And as it grew, it was one of those things that we very quickly understood the benefit of having them in our community. And I wouldn't even say that I took over kind of in the middle because I've been alongside since the beginning, just helping from the, in the background. So I very quickly got to know the needs of the police department, the needs of the fire department, and how the drones could help them.

Speaker A: So it's also interesting too. I mean, there's a lot of places the drone program can live in a community. Right. But there are some just inherent advantages to having it in technology effectively, in terms of just knowledge of all the different systems that are adjacent and being able to troubleshoot things. Why did you guys make that decision to move it into kind of your neck of the woods? Exactly.

Speaker B: Working with both of the departments and seeing how they were utilized there, and then at the same time seeing the added time that those officers and firefighters were needing to dedicate to maintenance of these drones, flying them, um, programming the software, troubleshooting issues. So it was one of those things where as Chief Griffin was retiring and Chief Canzone was coming in, I. I had went to the mayor to discuss, would this be a good idea to not have this be an item for the police department or the fire department that they need to maintain and have to keep flying. So I went to the mayor to discuss pulling this under the IT department. He was very quickly on board with it. And I went and spoke with both the police and fire chief to discuss how would you guys feel if I took this over? So it wasn't something I just went and was like, going to do this now, but explain to them the benefits of being able to have it be under one budget item I can budget annually for the drone program to where they were budgeting small amounts from both of their respective budgets. And there wasn't really anything budgeted to grow. It was mostly to just maintain what we already had. So they saw the benefit in that and at the same time understanding that it's going to free up their guys to get back to doing what they do, be a police, uh, officer and a firefighter. So it's. Overall, I think it's worked out very well. It seems like we're in a unique place being that the drone program is under the tech department. But I personally feel like it's really just helped us grow it and evolve it in a much faster way. Because in between regular duties of having to fix computers and phones and all of the stuff that comes along in the IT world, I can take time to dedicate to researching new drone products and going to live demos and, uh, having conference calls with people that have more information on how these could help us.

Speaker A: So you go from running alongside to the program to one day, it's your baby, right? So there's always kind of a moment, at least in my mind, with programs I've taken over in the past, where you look at this and go, oh, this thing needs to evolve in specific areas. Like, there's opportunities here that we can really make things great. We did just a couple things. Maybe sometimes they're big things. When that kind of hits you. What were you thinking about?

Speaker B: Well, one of the biggest things I was thinking about at the time is we're currently taking these drones, the larger 300, the, um, Matrice 300, and the, the, um, M 30s, and carrying them up to the roof of the police department to launch our drones from the rooftop to get better reception, to make sure that we have clear line of sight. And in the middle of February, that can be kind of a hairy situation to be out there on a rubber roof that's a little slippery. So I wanted to see how could we stop putting our guys in unnecessary situations where an accident could happen. They could get hurt, anything like that. So I wanted to figure out how to stop that from happening. And then I got to researching and finding out that there are drone in the box situations and products that are coming out and demoed many of them. We saw multiple different ones and I thought that that was going to be a key way to keep our people safer and then at the same time understanding the need for airspace monitoring. We have a small airport where in class G airspace, so we don't have a lot going on around us. But coming out of Fort Drum, near Watertown, flying to Rochester, a constant stream of military helicopters that like to fly anywhere from 300 to 500ft directly over the city or just off the shoreline. So we don't want to be the cause for any aircraft to fall out of the sky, especially a military aircraft. So that was another thing that I had started researching right away is how can we know what's coming before we can see it or hear it?

Speaker A: Yeah, airspace considerations are always scary and intimidating because you're absolutely right, that's not a way you ever want to make the news with the program. For sure.

Speaker B: No.

Speaker A: So one of my observations is certainly I came from the tech world for a long period of time into working with the public safety world. And certainly at least my impression has been those two groups have a different language and they think about things a little bit differently. And so when you certainly at a company like ours, at DroneSense, when I'm dealing with customers and then dealing with software, I kind of have to code switch in my head back and forth all the time. Right. And it can be challenging. So I'm curious how you do that, how you adjust to that and how

Speaker B: that works, Working with technology for so long and working for a, uh, small local business that handled 200 plus clients. You would get calls every day, constant stream of calls coming in, and it would be from all kinds of different people, whether that was lawyers or doctors or auto dealerships. And you have to triage each of their issues that's coming on. So overall, I feel like I've kind of just developed this way I can quickly turn my brain into a new avenue of whatever needs to be done. So I come in for my job Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and I come in every day in the IT modes. What projects do I have to do today, what needs do to needs to be repaired, and then quickly getting a call or hearing a call come out on the radio for any number of things that could require a drone, and I just quickly turn over to Drone mode. Put the drone up in the air, start streaming so that the officers and the firefighters can see that live feed in their squad cars or their fire apparatus, getting on the radio if need be. And then once the drone comes back, lands and it docks, I just switch right back to it. I just. So it's. For me personally, it's very easy because it's one task right to the next, and I can turn it on and off as need be.

Speaker A: Makes sense. One of the things that I see as drone as a first responder is really kind of, uh, early people are still kind of growing those programs across the country and getting started. One of the things I see when I talk to people out in kind of our universe is I think an assumption that a DFR program is really only explicitly useful in a dense urban environment. We think of like a Manhattan.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And I kind of disagree with that particularly, and I think you guys are a great example of this, of different sized cities where it can work really, really well, and how you can distribute that technology across the city. Can you talk a little bit about kind of the mission you're executing using DFR in your community and how it's been going from your perception?

Speaker B: Sure. And I would have to agree with you that, uh, overall I feel like those larger cities are not the ideal locations for these sorts of programs. Being in a small community, I would say that we're in a way perfect for a DFR program because we don't have the resources of a large city. We have limited staff at both the police and the fire department, and there are often situations that we run into where there might not be an extra officer available. And if a call comes out for an assault or a, uh, burglary in progress, that officer might be the only one en route to that at first. So with a DFR program, we can ideally get the drone in the air and over the location of that call before the officer arrives, and they can assess the situation while in their patrol car watching that live feed. So they could see a couple of different things where there's nothing going on, there's just somebody standing outside on the sidewalk. Maybe I can reduce speeds and not be flying across town and putting the community potentially in unnecessary danger, or find out that somebody is actively being robbed with a gun and that they need to pick up the speed and also have other officers break away from what they're doing to get to that. So I would say in a small community that's it works better because we're able to respond to these Locations faster. Being from a small town, the drones get overhead quicker. And overall, it's just. We can cover the whole city currently with just two docked drones and a single Cassia G airspace monitoring device. So I wouldn't even know where to begin to tell you how much it would cost to cover a place like Manhattan with drones and airspace monitoring. It would get wildly expensive very quickly. And then at the same time, you've got buildings of all kinds of different sizes taking up a taller footprint, a wider footprint, and that makes it very hard to actually keep a drone where it needs to be. If you have to constantly fly over a building or around a building, it's much better to be able to just kind of fly over a small community that has minimal large buildings so that we're able to get to where we need to in a quicker way.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense.

Speaker B: I personally feel like it's definitely better to have a small community for something like this.

Speaker A: Okay, uh, one of the things that's interesting to me about program administrators kind of in, in our neck of the woods has been you kind of have to be this jack of all trades. Sometimes you have to maintain relationships with the community, with your agency, with political leaders and all the stakeholders. You have to kind of become a unpaid marketing officer and promote your program because you're going to need support and resources and money and time and patience and everything else that goes along with it. So. So I was curious how you have tackled that so far and how do you feel like it's going?

Speaker B: Well, there's a lot to cover there because you've got so many different things to do, with one of the biggest ones being the community. They don't want anyone in the community to feel like there's any sort of invasion of privacy because that's not what these are used for. These are used as a tool to protect our first responders and help our community by allocating resources in the appropriate way to get them where they need to be. So, uh, I put up social media posts about different reasons we've used the drones. I reshare social media posts from neighboring communities. We get a lot of mutual aid calls out in Oswego county and Onondaga County. So we try to continue to push that information out there. I've done an interview with Spectrum News and then I've also had a couple of interviews in the paper. So that's been one way to engage the community. And then within our, the admin staff at the police and the fire department, and then the mayor and the counselors. Right now I currently supply all of our monthly flight numbers to the police chief and they go in his monthly report. So for every month that goes by, they'll see that we're having X number of flights for an X amount of hours. And early on, the stakeholders, the council, the mayor, saw the benefit to the drone program, but didn't realize how much further it could actually be taken. So when I was first looking at getting these docks installed here in the city, I contacted DroneSense to find out where can I get these, because I heard they're going to be hard to get a hold of. So DroneSense put me in contact with a, uh, UVT, an American drone company to distribute these docks. So I reached out and spoke with Matt at uvt, who quickly got me the information that I needed, understood our city and how it's on the smaller side, and worked closely with me to get a quote put together. And then on top of that had given information on how I could present this to our council and to the mayor. So I took the information that they had provided and added to it, added more and more pages to a PDF or a PowerPoint document. And with the first time I had went to council to discuss this, there was not much support for wanting to spend this large amount of money to get these docs in and airspace monitoring. So it was pulled off the agenda and I had to go back and kind of rethink what we were doing. So that's where I took this PowerPoint presentation and I met with each of the counselors. And not in a council session, we can only have a maximum of three, two meet at a time. So Sergeant LaRue and I had I think five different meetings that some with two counselors and others with just one, to go over the real benefits on how it's already been used and how this will enhance and make things better for us. And by the time we had I had gotten done with these presentations to the counselors, I had unanimous support from all seven when I went back to council to get the funding for this. So they've seen everything that we do with that presentation I put together for them. And then just ongoing seeing these social media posts and they get the multi reports from the police department. So they're seeing our numbers, they're seeing how much they're actually being utilized and then seeing that we're also being asked to assist Drone Sense with building out their dock portion of Drone Sense Remote. So we get a lot of support internally. And I think that overall things are going very well. The community supports it. The other day I pulled up in front of my house and I have a city vehicle that has the drone logo on it. And as a guy was driving by, he pulled right over and jumped out of his car. And he goes, I just want to tell you that I think what you guys are doing with these drones is fantastic. I see the benefit and I see how they can help the community. And he was a retired professor from the college and he had said that even though he's retired, when he goes to the campus and the technology department, they're talking about, are you seeing what the city's doing with these drones? And have you seen how they've advanced this? And to just have some random guy jump out of his car to tell me that he loves what we're doing is great. And I think it goes to show that we have support from the community because they really see the benefit on how these help our first responders and the community as a whole.

Speaker A: You know, that's a great story. There's a lot to unpack there. That's super helpful. I mean, to have the political acumen to think about that problem and address it is really impressive. And I know for some of the folks we talk to, for sure, and our customers can be a little intimidating to work with political leaders. Right. They're wired a little differently. They're also working with their constituents and being prepared for that. Are there any kind of tips and tricks you might offer folks to say, hey, before you go down that road, here's some things you might think about?

Speaker B: Well, understand that the political leaders are the holders of the purse strings, so they're controlling that money. And overall that they want to know it's you have a good reason to need this money to spend from our taxpayers and that there's going to be a lot of questions coming your way that you're going to need to be able to answer on the fly. So really do your research beforehand if you can put together a presentation. I had not only information from UVT to assist us. I did research on actual UAS versus manned aircraft accidents to put in there to say, we definitely don't want to do this. This is happening. I had reached out to the police and the fire chief to have them write a letter of support to, to the program. I would say do a lot of research, put together a really detailed PowerPoint presentation and just be prepared to spend time with them and go over all these questions that they're going to have because they need to Ask them before they allow you to spend this money. So I would say don't be intimidated by them, but just have a lot of research done and just go in there confident. Because if you know how well this sort of thing can benefit your community, you should be able to reiterate that to them very easily.

Speaker A: No, that's great advice for sure. When I talk to folks who are thinking about DFR programs, it's very interesting, particularly thinking about their financial budget when they're allocating expenses and forecasting. I think the thing that trips up a lot of people is they think, hey, the biggest part of this is the cost of the hardware and the software that I'm going to buy to get off the ground. A dock can be somewhat expensive and you have a setup cost. You got to run Internet out to wherever it is or power. But often those costs are dwarfed by the cost of personnel and overtime and all sorts of things to run a program. Is that something you guys are involved in as well too? Are you abstracted from that because those budgets are being carried by fire and police and you're just dealing with the technology budget?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, it was definitely a point that was brought up during these conversations with council and the mayor that this here is going to be utilized as a tool to assist. And it's a tool that's here 24 7, 365. It doesn't have any additional cost to it as far as health benefits. There's no vacation, there's no sick time. It is here, it is ready to go. And in a way it's cut down on, um, over time because prior to getting these docks here, we would have to. If it's 2am and we get a call where a drone is needed and we don't have a pilot on at, at police or fire that night, they're going to have to call somebody in, which is roughly 20 to 40 minutes away. So they're going to have to get up and come in and there's all that overtime that's associated with getting them here. And then how long are they here and things like that to where now we're able to take them off roughly within two minutes, utilize a VO that we've trained here at the police or fire department and keep costs down because we can get things done quicker. They're able to respond, they're able to assess the situation. And then at the same time, if you're looking for say, uh, a missing child, we had an instance here where there was a child went missing during A harborfest event that we have here, which brings in roughly 20 to 50,000 additional people to just the city. And we're a city of 17,000, so there's not a lot of people here. And we have this missing child that gets called out over the radio. So you're then going to be taking all of those resources, the officers, the fire personnel at the time. We also have border patrol here and state police. So they all immediately stop what they're doing and start looking for this missing child. Then thankfully, with using the drone, we were able to locate that child in roughly two minutes and direct the closest officer directly to that child, who then got them back to their mother. But let's say that that wasn't a two minute thing that we were able to assist with and this turned into a four hour search. How much personnel are we utilizing to actually search for someone? It's a number that you just really can't figure out. If you've got 30 people looking and, and, and they're all looking for this child, it adds up quickly. We were able to not only cut down on the cost, but quickly find the child and get him back to his mother, which is really the main thing here. We, that's one of the best things that could ever happen. It's terrifying to lose a child and to be able to find them within just a couple of minutes and get them back with their parent helps keep trauma down for the child and helps keep the parents calm. So it definitely helps in keeping costs down. And I don't personally have to deal with the budget of the police department and the fire department and their staff, but being able to have it under my budget, it's kind of right out there. We know how much it's going to cost and it's there to assist the officers at any time because it's always ready to go.

Speaker A: That's a great point. And for sure one of the use cases that drones have revealed themselves to be quite good at. To your point of search and search and rescue, kind of off the bat, particularly the thermals. And so it's always, we get a lot of great hero stories around that. It's so exciting how many great outcomes people have had with that because it doesn't have to be that way. Ten years ago it might not have been. You obviously enjoy technology because of what you do or you wouldn't be in that spot. Right. And you do a lot of planning. When you kind of look over the horizon at stuff people are engineering or developing today and you're Thinking about future capabilities and how they'll add to your program and your capabilities. When you think like a year or two down the road, are there things that are coming or that you wish that were coming you thought would really be interesting or move the needle for the program?

Speaker B: Well, we've got two different sides of this here. We've got things that I'm still trying to get done, and then where would I like to see the technology go? The biggest thing that would really help is battery time. Currently, we can only keep a drone in the air for about 30 minutes. And when you think of potentially utilizing a drone versus needing to call in a helicopter for something, they can stay in the air for hours when we're having to cycle them out every 30 minutes. So extended battery life would be huge. The cameras can only get better, not that they need to at this point, because they have impressive zoom and the thermal capabilities are. Are fantastic. It's one of our earliest success stories was utilizing the Matrice 300 with thermal imaging. It was very early on in the drone program, and a call came out for a man that fell in the river. It was May. The river was roughly around 42 to 48 degrees, so it wasn't warm. And Sergeant LaRue at the police department was able to get the drone taken off very quickly and locate the man in the river using thermal and guide the fire department boat directly to him. Thermal imaging is fantastic. I don't know how it gets better. I know it will, but it'll be able to pinpoint and make things even better in the future. So if it just keeps to grow the way it is, it's only going to get better.

Speaker A: One of the things that's interesting about working, particularly with drones, is my wife's a teacher. When someone asks her what she does, it's pretty easy to explain. People understand what a teacher does. Sometimes drones are a little complicated for folks to understand because it's so new. And so we often rely on kind of stories about our program, either the success of it or even things were just amusing to us that have happened that we've seen because of those. Do you have a favorite story you've seen with your program that you share with people? Sometimes.

Speaker B: It's really just one of our. One of my proudest moments as a success story for being able to assist the community and our first responders. We had a call come out on a Sunday for a structure fire in an abandoned factory that houses a lot of homeless. It was December, so it was cold, and they take cover Wherever they can to keep warm. They started a fire in the building. The building is condemned, so they're not supposed to send any officers or firefighters into the building to look for anybody or to locate the fire. So I came in and took off. We had the, uh, matrice 300 at the time and quickly found the hot spot and the source of the fire and was able to work with the duty officer there to get his guys to go to the rear of the building where the fire was. And they pulled the side of the building off, saw the fire, and were able to get a stream of water on it very quickly. And at the same time, while I was doing that, we had, uh, mutual aid assistance from the Novelis fire company who had the Revada. So they were able to take and fly that drone inside the building while keeping everyone outside safer and not have to enter this building, and was able to locate the source of the fire and tell them that they had their stream of water on the source of the fire and we're able to clear it and make sure that there was nobody inside, there was nobody trapped, there was nobody unconscious. So they were able to clear the building and put out the fire without ever having to actually send any of our personnel in the building and put them in danger of collapse or something like that. For me, it was a very proud moment because the deputy chief at the time had put a quote in the newspaper talking about how the imagery from the drone helped shape the attack and show the hotspots and provide overwatch of all the officers that were on scene. And then at the same time, the following day, I got an email from Chief Kinzone thanking me for coming in on my time off, when to fly the drone and provide better safety for all of his personnel. And for somebody who is not a first responder, anything I can do to assist them is just. I thoroughly enjoy it. And ultimately, this is what our program is all about. It's to help the community and it's to keep all of our first responders as safe as they can be.

Speaker A: Well, you can't say it any better than that. I mean, definitely that's where we all are who have a heart for this. So thank you so much. I don't have any more questions for you today, but I really do appreciate you spending time with us and all the work you do in the community. So thank you so much and thanks to everyone listening on the Internet for listening to dronecast and we'll see you next time.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Dronecast Rethinking public safety One Drone at a Time is brought to you by Drone Sense. To find out more about DroneSense and how our comprehensive situational awareness platform can help you fly, share and manage your drone program, please visit DroneSense.com that'S-R-O-N-E S E N-S E.com and then make sure to search for dronecasts in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or anywhere else that podcasts are found. Please don't forget to click subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at DroneSense, thanks for listening.