PHOENIX — The most important drone of the future may be the one nobody is actually flying.
That was the direction outlined by Skydio CEO Adam Bry at the National Real Time Crime Center Association (NRTCCA) conference as he discussed what comes next for Drone as First Responder programs.
For all the attention paid to faster aircraft, better cameras and longer endurance, Bry argued that the future of DFR will depend on three things: reliability, autonomy and versatility.
Underlying all three is a more fundamental shift. Public safety agencies may need to stop thinking about drones primarily as aircraft operated by individual pilots and start treating them as part of the response infrastructure.
Here are five changes that could define the next generation of DFR.
1. Reliability will determine whether DFR can become infrastructure
An aircraft launched occasionally by a pilot can tolerate some operational friction. A drone expected to respond around the clock from an unattended dock cannot.
“Reliability is the single most important feature,” Bry said. “It’s also the hardest feature.”
That means getting aircraft to operate day and night, in wind and rain, under changing connectivity conditions and without someone physically present to launch or recover them.
Bry offered one measure of the challenge. When Skydio introduced its current dock, he said, approximately one in every 100 flights ended with the drone unable to land back inside it. That did not necessarily mean the aircraft crashed, but it could require the drone to make a safe landing somewhere else.
The company has since reduced that rate to approximately one in 1,000, according to Bry, with a goal of reaching one in 10,000. Each tenfold improvement, he acknowledged, becomes more difficult.
That kind of reliability will be essential if agencies begin depending on drones as they depend on other parts of their emergency response systems. A drone that is unavailable when a priority call arrives is not infrastructure. It is simply another tool an agency cannot count on.
2. The one-drone, one-pilot model will not scale
Early DFR programs often depended on personnel positioned on rooftops, visual observers, manually operated aircraft and separate software platforms stitched together to make the concept work.
Those programs demonstrated that DFR could work. They did not necessarily establish a model that could expand across an entire city or county.
Bry illustrated the challenge through deployment modeling. As an agency adds docks and aircraft, response times fall and more incidents come within reach. But if every additional drone requires another person in the RTCC to fly it, the staffing demands quickly become unworkable.
A network with 15 docks might conceivably have 15 operators, Bry said. Staffing 44 would be far more difficult. A fleet of 168 drones, each requiring its own operator, would be impractical.
“You’d have a gymnasium full of people flying drones,” he said.
Staffing is already one of the largest obstacles facing agencies interested in DFR.
“The number one barrier to starting programs is finding the people to staff it,” Bry said.
That is why autonomy is more than an additional feature. It may determine whether large DFR networks are financially and operationally sustainable.
“The drone should work for you, not the other way around,” Bry said.
3. The operator is becoming a mission manager
A drone capable of navigating from its dock to an incident, avoiding obstacles, accounting for airspace restrictions and returning safely requires less hands-on control than a conventionally piloted aircraft.
That changes the operator’s role.
Instead of constantly manipulating flight controls, an operator could concentrate on the mission: communicating with responding officers, reviewing imagery, looking for discarded evidence or managing another aircraft.
Bry demonstrated Skydio’s Pathfinder technology, which calculates routes through complex environments, and Shadow, which can automatically follow a selected person or vehicle.
He described Shadow’s current tracking ability as comparable to that of a novice or intermediate pilot. The company is using reinforcement learning and simulated environments to improve that capability.
Rather than simply following where a vehicle has been, the system is being trained to anticipate where it is likely to go and position the aircraft to maintain sight of it.
If a vehicle turns behind a building, for example, a conventional tracking system might follow the same path and lose visual contact. A more capable autonomous system could change altitude or position in anticipation of the obstruction.
That would allow the operator to spend less time controlling the aircraft and more time interpreting what it sees and communicating that information to personnel on the ground.
Bry said more than 100 agencies have been enabled for multidrone operations with FAA permission. That does not mean every agency is operating a large autonomous fleet today, but it points toward a model in which one person can supervise multiple aircraft.
4. DFR fleets will include different aircraft for different missions
Bry compared the future of public safety drones with the range of vehicles already used by law enforcement.
There is no single perfect police vehicle. Patrol cruisers, motorcycles, armored vehicles and helicopters perform different jobs. Drone fleets may develop along similar lines.
“Our belief is that DFR will ultimately be as diverse as policing itself,” Bry said.
Skydio’s R10 represents one end of that spectrum. Designed for confined and potentially dangerous indoor environments, the small aircraft can be placed on the ground by an officer and controlled by an operator in another location, potentially inside an RTCC.
In the right circumstances, that means the drone can go through a doorway before an officer does.
During the presentation, Bry showed video of a suspect striking an R10 during an operation.
“It’s better this guy beats up on the drone than beats up on a person,” he said.
At the other end of the spectrum, Bry showed a developmental winged aircraft intended to reach approximately 100 mph and remain airborne for about 90 minutes.
Skydio’s proposed docking system for the aircraft includes a robotic arm that would position it for launch and recover it when it returns.
“The right answer, we believe — which seems kind of crazy and sci-fi — is a robot arm,” Bry said.
Bry distinguished the concept from the other technology shown during the presentation, noting that the winged aircraft remains in development.
A faster aircraft with greater endurance could extend DFR coverage beyond dense urban areas to highways, rural communities and geographically large jurisdictions.
Bry also raised the possibility of using such an aircraft during vehicle pursuits.
“Part of our goal is to end high-speed car chases,” he said.
A high-speed drone could potentially maintain observation of a fleeing vehicle while officers on the ground disengage, reducing the pressure to remain close enough to keep the vehicle in sight.
5. DFR is moving deeper into the dispatch workflow
Perhaps the most consequential development is not the aircraft itself, but the systems being built around it.
Bry described integrations connecting DFR operations with 911 platforms, computer-aided dispatch, Axon Fusus, evidence systems, automated license plate readers and counter-drone technology.
“I really view integrations as part of the automation,” he said.
Those connections can allow an incident to appear automatically within the DFR platform rather than requiring an operator to copy information from another system.
Bry said an integration with Prepared 911 can reduce response time by one to two minutes because the incident can appear in the DFR environment while the call is still being processed. He also said there have been instances in which a drone arrived before the incident was called out over dispatch.
That changes the role of the drone.
It is no longer an aircraft someone decides to remove from a case and launch after an incident has already developed. It becomes another component of the response system:
- A call is received.
- The incident is identified.
- The appropriate robotic asset is selected.
- The aircraft is launched.
- Information is returned to responders.
- A human makes the operational decision.
This is a substantially different model from the drone programs public safety agencies began building a decade ago.
The first generation gave officers eyes in the sky. The next generation may place robotic systems directly within the sequence of emergency response.
The questions agencies still have to answer
Greater autonomy does not eliminate the need for trained personnel. It changes where their judgment is applied.
An operator managing several aircraft will need to understand what each system can do, when it may act autonomously and when human intervention is required. Agencies must also decide what happens when communications fail, navigation becomes unreliable or an integrated system sends incomplete or inaccurate information.
The technology raises broader questions involving FAA authorization, airspace safety, privacy, data retention and public transparency. Agencies will need clear policies governing automated deployment, subject tracking and the circumstances under which personnel may rely on information produced by an autonomous system.
Those decisions become more important as drones move from stand-alone tools to interconnected components of the public safety response system.
Bry’s presentation offered a view of what that future could look like: different types of aircraft distributed across a jurisdiction, launched from automated docks and supervised by personnel managing missions from an RTCC.
Some of the capabilities he demonstrated are in use now. Others remain developmental.
“I still think we’re very early on this journey,” Bry said.
But the direction is becoming clearer.
The defining question for tomorrow’s RTCC may no longer be, “Who is available to fly the drone?”
It may be: “What do we want the drone to do?”
