Compact UAVs and the evolving role of security overwatch

Helicopters created the ‘eye in the sky’ idea of security and law enforcement work, but unmanned arial vehicles – or UAVs – can be as effective at a fraction of the cost – if equipped with the correct sensor payload.

The evolution of UAVs has been transformative for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) or security. This evolution also allows law enforcement authorities, police precincts and security sectors to have multiple solutions, instead of sharing pooled helicopter resources.

For the most demanding security and ISR missions, teams need all the sensors they can to enhance mission awareness. Cameras are the primary sensors onboard a UAV’s stabilized gimbal. However, when what is observed on a camera feed needs to become actionable, laser rangefinders prove their worth.

Seeing, sensing and measuring all create awareness and lower risk, whether it’s a perimeter intrusion or law enforcement situation requiring a tactical response. Laser rangefinders provide exact depth and distance measurements, which can combine with the UAV’s GPS coordinates to create real-time localization data, accurately positioning incident locations or potential threats.

Low altitude security and laser rangefinders

Unlike helicopters, UAVs can operate at more effective lower altitudes, in dense urban areas and between power lines or tall buildings.

Beyond their superior low-altitude flight ability, there’s also their stealth.

As first responders, security and law enforcement response teams must make rapid decisions when situations become tactical. Any response team dealing with an armed intrusion or encounter needs exact real-time information on numbers, position and intention.

This is where the UAV’s laser rangefinder proves invaluable. Instead of putting security and law enforcement officers at risk to observe and confirm a threat, the UAV provides all the required situational awareness on where the risk is, in position to everything else. The laser rangefinder confirms what a tactical team’s UAV cameras see with distance measurements – in all weather conditions. As part of the UAV’s sensor payload, laser rangefinders supply depth perception, distance measurement and help with exact localization.

Clarity and focus

Valuable distance-ranging and localization data aren’t the only function of the laser rangefinder – they also help teams keep visual clarity in low-light situations by supporting camera focusing.

In an urban security and law enforcement environment, shadows around buildings and in alleyways hide threats and can trigger focusing errors on a UAV’s primary cameras.

When a tactical response team must confirm threat risk in a shadowy or dimly lit area, the UAV’s laser rangefinder ensures camera-focusing clarity by relaying exact distances to the system. Instead of a camera’s internal focussing mechanism ‘hunting’ for contrast and misfocussing into a complex lighting situation, the laser rangefinder feeds it exact distance information, ensuring an image with clarity, even in challenging lighting conditions.

Enhanced training

There’s more to UAVs than first responses and tactical interventions, they also help with analysis, training and strategic development.

All crime scenes are sensitive, and having an overhead view, without disturbing potential crucial evidence at ground level, is a powerful analysis tool. Laser rangefinders confirm data points, allowing a much better understanding of intrusion paths, escape routes and the location of crucial elements of evidence.

What might take a team several hours or days to understand while working at ground level can be understood in minute.

Each security and law enforcement response has valuable learnings. The footage and data a UAV’s sensor payload generate allow teams to evaluate and evolve strategies for better future responses. Teams can assess how a mission developed, and at which ranges, distances and positions the threat profile changed.

A training syllabus where instructors guess from memory what the ideal approach and positions are for teams responding to a threat situation, is flawed. The depth and localization information a laser rangefinder helps produce during UAV security missions, creates real-world data for enhanced training and better first responder training.

Compact security UAVs and ease of use

Security and law enforcement teams need UAVs that are easily deployable and flyable. That means a package that fits into a vehicle trunk or cargo area behind the tailgate, and doesn’t require exhaustive training to fly.

As first responders, security and law enforcement teams want to get UAVs out of their vehicles easily and airborne quickly – making compact UAVs with a mid-range sensor payload ideal.

Crewed helicopter deployments are too expensive, resource-intensive, and invasive for rapid responses in every police district and security zone – especially in urbanized areas. So are complex large UAVs carrying ultra-long-range cameras and laser finders. For many threat assessments, high-risk scenarios and crime scene overviews, the detection ranges are close – with UAVs operating at a low altitude.

Compact UAVs with mid-range laser rangefinders as part of their sensor payload are much stealthier and easier to operate for first responder teams than coordinating helicopters or large UAVs.

From California to London and Tokyo, law enforcement agencies are successfully deploying compact UAVs in complex low-altitude airspace where large UAVs and helicopters are unsuitable. A helicopter hovering overhead creates anxiety for a community, while a compact UAV can deliver the same overwatch and situational awareness at much lower social and operational costs.

Compact UAVs with mid-range laser rangefinders are easy to fly, requiring much less training than large uncrewed systems. As more law enforcement agents qualify to operate compact UAVs, the demand for the mid-range laser rangefinding sensors that are such a crucial part of their sensor payload must increase.