Episode 242: Enhancing Public Safety Aviation with Skydio Drones with Bryan King

Episode notes

How can drones provide aerial intelligence for better decision-making?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

What’s the role of drones in enhancing public safety aviation?

What are Skydio's X10 drone’s advanced features for nighttime autonomy and high-resolution aerial intelligence?

How does the collaboration between Skydio , Tulsa Fire Department, and Oklahoma State University boost public safety innovation?

Hear from Bryan King - the Senior Solutions Engineer for Public Safety at Skydio .

Bryan talks about the company's role in public safety aviation and their involvement with the DFR (Drone First Responder) program in Tulsa. He highlights the importance of officer and firefighter safety and how Skydio's drones provide valuable aerial intelligence to help make informed decisions.

The conversation also explores the evolution of drones from toys to essential tools, the features of Skydio's X10 drone, and the ongoing collaboration between Skydio, Tulsa Fire Department, and Oklahoma State University.

So take a listen to hear what he has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Intro to the Metro Fire Chiefs miniseries in Tulsa
2. 0:36 Bryan King of Skydio joins at the Tulsa Training Academy
3. 0:58 Why Tulsa
4. 2:07 Skydio's ten years and public safety aviation
5. 4:03 Officer and firefighter safety first
6. 5:13 From the X2 to the X10 and its night features
7. 7:45 What drone as first responder means
8. 9:43 The DFR program at the Gathering Place
9. 10:57 Where DFR goes next
10. 12:31 Education and Tulsa as a drone hub
11. 14:10 Final thoughts
12. 15:53 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is DFR and why does Bryan King think it matters?

Bryan King says DFR is number one officer safety, number two cost effectiveness, and it lets you avoid sending an officer from an important place to an unimportant place. It reduces safety concerns like accidents during driving.

Hear it at 8:12

What is patrol-led DFR?

Bryan King describes patrol-led DFR as a lesser version of full DFR. An officer launches a drone from the trunk of a car using cellular connectivity, then someone back at the Arctic takes control. The officer can go back to regular duties while the drone provides overwatch.

Hear it at 8:12

How is Tulsa Fire using drones at the gathering place?

Bryan King says the gathering place is a park along a river where people sometimes get in the water and call for help. The drone goes up to check the situation while crews are getting ready, so they can see if it is a real emergency or just someone who slipped, then send the right people and save resources.

Hear it at 9:58

What are some features of the Skydio X10?

Bryan King says the X10 has attachments for speakers and spotlight, nighttime autonomy with infrared sensors for obstacle avoidance, 64 megapixel, 48 megapixel, and 50 megapixel cameras, 640 by 510 thermal from FLIR, cellular connectivity, and the ability to integrate with other software companies through Skydio Extend.

Hear it at 5:13

Why does Bryan King value university involvement in drone programs?

Universities help agencies prove out concepts without the red tape and budget constraints cities face. They document workflows and share data, which supports officers and firefighters who often do drone program work on their own time.

Hear it at 12:51

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 242 transcript

Enhancing Public Safety Aviation with Skydio Drones with Bryan King

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Bryan King

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to this mini-series of the Smart Firefighting Podcast. Today, we're covering stories from outside Metro Fire Chiefs Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where fire chiefs from the world's largest metros gathered. We had various sessions with drone experts to discuss drone hardware, software, and innovation ecosystem developments. Tulsa Fire Department and Oklahoma State University are spearheading some impressive new technology initiatives like drone as a as a first responder, and it was an honor to witness their cutting-edge efforts firsthand. Enjoy. We are here in the Tulsa Training Academy alongside Bryan King from Skydio. Bryan, how you doing, man?

[0:41] Bryan King: Good, how are you today?

[0:42] Kevin Sofen: I'm doing well. No place else I'd rather be than Tulsa, Oklahoma.

[0:45] Bryan King: 100%, 100%.

[0:46] Kevin Sofen: You're based out of Florida, is that right?

[0:48] Bryan King: Yep, based in Palm Beach County. Been there roughly about 20 years.

[0:52] Kevin Sofen: So, from Florida, and now I hear you're spending a little bit of time in Tulsa. Why Tulsa? What's going on here in Tulsa?

[0:58] Bryan King: A couple of boons ago, I came here for Oklahoma State University Drone Symposium, I guess you'd call it, and had a chance to meet Gabe Graveline from Tulsa Fire Department. And we've since become not just professional friends and acquaintances, but we're actually personal friends. So, we share a lot of information and talk about experiences and it gets me back here every so often to come and experience what Tulsa Fire has to offer, what Tulsa PD would But yesterday we were in Broken Arrow, you know, getting all around the area here. Cause there's, you know, the Oklahoma ambitions to have technology a part of their, either law enforcement or fire department is pretty strong. So it's good to come back here and get the experiences from the field.

[1:39] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, you can kind of just like smell it, sense it, feel it. That there's very big and top-down organizational support from the city side to the fire and law side and the industry side. and from kind of Skydio's piece of the puzzle, you know, what's, tell me a little bit about kind of, you know, high level kind of what, who, what, when, where, why Skydio, and then I want to dive into a little bit of Skydio's role within Tulsa, but yeah, give me a little bit high level of who and what is Skydio?

[2:07] Bryan King: Yeah, I mean, Skydio's been around, we just hit our 10 year anniversary, and I think Skydio has had the opportunity to learn a lot from the market. We are the, you know, the new person on the street when it comes to drone manufacturing, and especially in the U.S. made drones, We're one of the leaders, and so we've taken a lot of information, a lot of experiences, a lot of development from our team in California to get out in the field and understand what not just the drone operators need, but the leadership needs to make decisions and so on and so forth. We're starting to see that the hard work that a lot of these drone operators put in back in the day, when I say back in the day, maybe five, six years ago, maybe even more than that. it's starting to trickle up to the top because there's a lot of valuable aerial intelligence that comes out of these drones, be it fire, law enforcement, emergency management. They're really able to collect a lot of data to help them make decisions. And you're hearing that, like I said, from the top. Just yesterday, we're talking to a chief here in Tulsa Fire and he was giving examples on how he wants to use drones. And then Gabe and I were talking about how we see it and we're meeting in the middle and there's some really cool ideas and concepts that are coming out.

[3:16] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, and it does evolve quite a bit from these just being these old drones that you could buy. I remember the first time I saw drones was in the stores at airports, you know, you could buy those little, like, I forget exactly what brand it was, but buy those old drones. And then now it's going to evolve to where these are not toys, they're tools. And a lot of it comes down to Mike O'Shea's famous line of what's on slide one, safety. It all comes down to safety and, you know, again, how to continue to integrate these within public safety, effectively and efficiently. How's Skydio continuing to approach doing this evolution of public safety aviation, where it's not just, these aren't toys, these are tools with life-saving applications, and the utmost focus always comes back to safety. What's your hot take, thoughts on that?

[4:03] Bryan King: Officer and firefighter safety is number one always, and that's from the gear that they wear on their backs to the tools we can put in the sky, like the drones. Skydio has an extensive team that is out in the field helping fire departments and police departments evaluate drones, use drones, capture the gaps, the misses in the technology so that we can go back and develop it because officer safety is number one. Getting that data to the important people so they can make decisions so they don't have to send an officer, they don't have to send a firefighter is really important. And the new product we have out the X10 has really given us the ability to even take more data in and get it to the places we need to with our cellular connectivity, range wise, all that stuff has really helped us open up a lot of avenues for a lot of agencies.

[4:54] Kevin Sofen: And so when I first heard about Skydio and learned about it, I know you've had a couple of product iterations. I remember the X2 and now we're onto the X10. You know, it's sitting right there. I'd love to, if we could pull it up for our visual watchers here, but yet the X10, tell me about what we're looking at here. What is it? You know, and what are some of the newest nuances and features with it?

[5:13] Bryan King: Yeah, I think it's important to tell the story of the X2, right? And in some cases, some people may not like the story or how it ends up or where it went. But anyways, the X2 was a platform that was developed, you know, for public safety for commercial use cases. And it had some limitations and had some constraints on it, but we were able to show agencies how to use them and in certain conditions and we had a lot of success stories, a lot of success stories with the X2. But all that work in the X2 and all that work the agencies did using the X2 gave us feedback to build the X10 has attachments, speakers, spotlight, has the ability to have nighttime autonomy, 64 megapixels, 48 megapixels, 50 megapixels. We have 640 by 510 thermal from FLIR, very module. We have Skydio extend to integrate with people like Airwise, integrate with people like G-next or you know live view for connectivity all these different companies are knocking at the door because they want to integrate with Skydio and we've opened that door now to be able to integrate and give complete solutions to all these agencies.

[6:21] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome and I also I'm kind of looking on this right here of these two components I mean is this the speaker and a light or what are these two attachments?

[6:29] Bryan King: We've got spotlight here we've got speaker mic on this side on the top you have this is IR Night Sense. So what this does, this illuminates the navigational cameras that Skydio developed to give the drone basically full autonomy while it's flying. So you have protection around the drone. So not just that in daytime, which was apparent with the X2, now we have it with the nighttime.

[6:51] Kevin Sofen: So that's really enabling the obstacle avoidance?

[6:54] Bryan King: At night, yes. At night. Yep, and it's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing. But a lot of our demo is what we'll do, where we put the drone at about four feet on the ground and we'll put it on the other side of a parking lot and the other side of buildings and we'll say, hey, come home at that height, that four feet. And it goes around trees and it goes around cars. And it really shows the autonomy that Skydio has put a lot of work into to make the drone safer to fly.

[7:19] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, it seems like you've done a good job listening to customers and translating that into the actual final product.

[7:25] Bryan King: Yeah, and that never stops. I mean, we've got a new spring release coming out and there's things built into that when X10 came out, they said, oh, it'd be great if we had this. the engineers said, okay, we'll make it happen. So, you know, every three to four months, we put a drone out, I mean, put a software release out that improves the drone, adds capabilities, and is really a testament to us listening to the customers.

[7:45] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, and so let's go deep into Tulsa. I mean, I was at the gathering point there today, and Gabe put the drone, and we saw the Skydio drone sitting on top of the gathering point, just waiting to be used. There's this evolving DFR program that's using Skydio here in Tulsa. Tell me more about, first, I'd love to hear your kind of definition of what is DFR, and then I'd love to kind of hear Skydio's involvement with the DFR initiative here in Tulsa.

[8:12] Bryan King: Yeah, so DFR has been a lingering term for quite some time. There's been a handful of agencies that have really pushed the limits on it, and I applaud them because they've really helped the entire industry really move forward with it. The FAA has been great in listening and understanding. So DFR to me is number one, officer safety, number two, cost effectiveness, and it's able to maybe not have to send an officer from an important place to an unimportant place. And I may be using terms there that don't know exactly what they're doing, but it's really like taking an officer out of an area and putting them in a different area as he's driving their safety concerns, accidents, so on and so forth. There's a ton of things that DFR is going to reduce down. Is DFR going to happen overnight with a lot of agencies? Probably not. There's a lot you need to go through. There's a lot of practice and training and safety protocols and waivers from the FAA and everything you need to go through to get there. And the X10 actually has enabled the ability to do a little bit lesser version of it. We call it patrol-led DFR. So instead of having rooftop boxes or docks or VOs with the drone, you could, out of the trunk of the car, use cellular off of the XN, the officer on the ground launches it, and then somebody back at the Arctic takes control of that. And that way they're able to do a DFR type situation where the officer can go back to being the officer, along with Overwatch overhead.

[9:43] Kevin Sofen: And then translating that to Tulsa, where are we at here in Tulsa with this DFR program and Skydio, and tell me more about that.

[9:50] Bryan King: So the gathering place is a very, really cool park, so if you've ever had a chance to.

[9:54] Kevin Sofen: 100 acre private park that's just got something for everyone.

[9:58] Bryan King: Playgrounds, everything, it's really cool. So one of the things that's been happening there is it's along a river, and there's a lot of call outs along that river of people getting in the water, the currents take them away, so on and so forth. But there's also times where people call in for potentially just somebody sitting in the water and they think they're drowning. So it's not really an emergency, but they still roll out a lot of people, right? They roll out a lot of gear, they roll out several trucks, so on and so forth. So again, going back to saving money and officers firefighter safety is the drone goes up, takes a look. As they're getting ready at the station, the drone can take a look and be like, hey, no, this is just an incident. Somebody just slipped and they're okay. We don't need to send out the full truck. We just send down a quad with a couple of paramedics. Cost savings is huge. These firefighters could be used someplace else if they needed to. So the drone is going to really help get the right people in the right places at the at the right time.

[10:57] Kevin Sofen: And as far as this kind of, it's May 2024 and it seems like it's getting closer. Where do you see, I mean, what are the next kind of milestones and where do you see this drone DFR initiative within Tulsa the next six months to six years?

[11:18] Bryan King: Yeah, I mean, I think near term, I think the doc is gonna be able to prove out the concept. It's gonna show value to the city, potentially bigger town east state to where a larger proof of concept would want to go out. And maybe it's a patrol lead because you could do that today, right? You could do patrol lead DFR today. You don't have to have the rooftop stuff. So maybe you move into that phase next and the doc out there is basically going to be the pathfinder to get to that point, right? So the doc is proving that out, showing the benefits and efficiency of having a DFR program, and then you move into a patrol lead. You've got 10, 12 X10s out there in the trunk of cars and they're doing it as well. And as you progress through that, you're talking with the FAA, you're talking with the city and you're looking at budgets and you're looking at waivers and six months to a year, things start to happen and you're like, okay, budgets are there, waivers are there, let's go into full DFR and maybe it's six months, maybe it's a year, so on and so forth. But it's happening as a lot of cities and towns that are moving aggressively towards The technology is there, the teams are there, the support is there. So it's happening. So it's hard to put a date on it or a timeframe, but it's happening.

[12:31] Kevin Sofen: No, I agree. And I think it's, if anything, I've kind of just seen it and felt it here. And I think a big piece of this puzzle, not only Gabe and what Gabe has been kind of leading here in Tulsa, but also OK State and OER. And talking with James, what's, in your words, an understanding of OER's and OK State's involvement within this whole piece of the puzzle. Why does that continue to be such an important piece of this puzzle that's making

[12:51] Bryan King: Tulsa this evolving hub with robots? Education is the key to a lot of things. And to have the schools and the universities involved with helping these agencies prove out these concepts has been vital. And why has it been vital? Because again, budget constraints, so on and so forth. There's things that go through a lot of red tape in cities and stuff like that schools don't have to go through. So they're getting the gear, they're putting it in the hands of officers, they're doing proof of concepts, they're documenting it very well. Because sometimes these universities have a little bit more time than an officer on the field. It takes, for instance, Gabe Graveline here in Tulsa Fire, he does a lot of work on his own time. And that's how the drone programs have grown around here as officers and firefighters doing a lot of work on their own time. You bring the universities to support them and give them data points and give them workflows and give them the ability to share that information on the university's website or whatever. That is a huge help to these guys that are doing a lot of stuff on their own time. Those days are getting fewer and fewer where you see a lot of guys spending a lot of time because drill programs are being proven out all over the country and the world. So less and less you need that, but it's still an amazing thing to have the help of universities to get through that.

[14:10] Kevin Sofen: Couldn't agree more in the kind of two final questions. I know you've, we've talked about the X10, we've talked about DFR, talked about OK State. What's something that you're within Skydio or the drone industry in general? What are you most excited about that's on the horizon within all things Skydio or the robotics marketing general?

[14:30] Bryan King: Yeah, I think for me, I spent my career here in the drone space working with, I started out with a Canadian company, Ariane Labs out of Waterloo. They were acquired by FLIR, so I worked with FLIR for a while. I also worked with a company out of the UK, Evolve Dynamics, and now I'm with Skydio. My thought process has been really to help drive US drone industry and keep it moving forward. I think we're seeing that a lot. I think we're seeing a lot of efforts by a lot of people to really capitalize on getting manufacturers and software companies out there and get them integrated with each other so that we can move forward with a strong U.S. economy with drones that are supporting us. If it's delivery, if it's public safety, if it's infrastructure inspection, I believe that getting the U.S. drone manufacturing industry moving forward, that's what's exciting me right now. It's really invigorating to see that we're making strides forward. And I hope that the industry is looking to support that so we can we can make a lot of moves in the near future.

[15:40] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome man, well I'm excited to continue to watch it from far but also be in the weeds here like seeing some amazing work you're doing here in Tulsa so just keep on doing it man, keep up the good work and excited to see what's next for you and Skydio.

[15:51] Bryan King: Yeah thanks for having me, this has been great.

[15:53] Kevin Sofen: Yeah thanks man, take care. Thanks for listening to today's episode. What did you think? What'd you learn? hopefully something, right? Please reach out on social media with your thoughts on this episode and any other suggestions for future content. We look forward to capturing more important stories across public safety and are here at your service.