Bismarck PD Shares Experience with Mini Vantage Robot

Transcript

Overall, we've sent our robot in on a couple welfare checks now, one specifically, it's not, it's kind of out of the norm for what we did, is it was a guy that was suicidal and had a firearm. But we had gotten repeated calls over several days about this person and then family wanting a welfare check done on 'em. Eventually what we ended up doing was propping the door open and sending the robot in and it made it very easy for us to find where that person was and start a conversation with them. I, it was basically just making it so we didn't have to worry about putting ourselves in the face of danger and basically escalating something into a confrontation that we didn't want.

I think another big one that we had was we had a domestic situation. We needed to go arrest the suspect and we were told that person was still in the house by themselves. That suspect wasn't coming to the door. We knew that person was in there, and we looked at calling out swat, but it didn't quite meet the criteria to bring them out. So we ended up, breaking out a window and like I said, we just pushed the robot through the window and literally just drove it around and looked in every room, gathered intel on what was where, and in the end, this person saw the robot and ended up just turning himself over to us. So it worked out real well for what we were trying to accomplish. So, and nobody got hurt and that was the good thing out about that.

I can send it in it crawls over everything. I don't have to worry about it running into a wall and bouncing off of a wall. I've used both robots and drones both have their positives and negatives. And it's like I said, with the drones, you're always worried about if it bumps into a wall or you're going through a doorway, it can bounce off the wall and flip upside down and renders it inoperable versus a robot, it just crawls over what it needs to and it gets to where you need to go. And this one does that. Very simple. It's very easy to use and I like it for that reason.

So make things a lot more difficult. I, like I said, it, the whole idea of being on a call out or going into a scene is just kind of slow things down and try and look at the bigger picture of what's going on. If we don't have that robot, it makes it a lot more difficult for us to do our job. We have to find other avenues or other equipment. And this just streamlines, it makes it easier for us to figure out if somebody's even in a building or in an apartment or wherever they're at.

We haven't had any major issues with it. If you're looking for a recording capability, it's got that for evidentiary purposes. And like I said, anybody can use it really, and it, so it's one of those things that it's been very useful for all of our patrol officers to be able to take. And I've actually watched people who have never used robots or drones or anything, they'll play with it in the office and just try it out and use it and try, see what it's capable of.