Pratt County Shares Their Experience With Their Vantage Robot

Transcript

We've had the Vantage for probably four to five years, and we use it for a lot of different things. We've had a butane pipeline burst. We've had suspicious packages or even suspicious items that have been placed on the railroad tracks concerning the railroad staff. We're able to use those robots to get close, look at things. We can record some of the video with it and be able to study that without putting somebody up into the area that's a hot zone and harming someone.

We've used it for tactical purposes. The nice thing about the Vantage is being as the way it's tracked, it's a little different than other robots. It climbs stairs very easily, but also, we've run training in debris fields where it chews up a lot of debris and doesn't necessarily bog down like a lot of the other robots do. So it's been a very good thing for us. We like using it for a lot of different things, not just for the SWAT capabilities, but basically for public safety to enhance fire, to enhance our emergency management for hazmat, and even to give the bomb squads kind of an early look at what we have before they actually even get on scene.

We're able to send in a piece of technology. They can talk to the person, communicate through them. You can even kind of see potential threats that the person may have. Sometimes you can even read the conduct that they're going on. Are they truly somebody that's aggressive, or are they somebody that is just having a mental breakdown where they're looking at self-harm? And you can kind of look at what weapons do they have available to them. You can sit there and try to talk to these people, and you can also get a look at how you might be able to move other items of technology in to help deal with some of these things.

You can break down and use the robot to carry quite a bit of weight. We've actually done body drags with it. We've strapped guys to it and actually drug them across carpet floors. So the robot has a lot of ability to move payload and also people if you had to do that.

You're dealing with limited flight time. You might be able to move it in and set it somewhere, but eventually you're going to have to move it in and out. The robot just tends to have you the ability to move into an area, move around, look at things, and still be able to communicate, listen to what's going on. Also, the fact that it has night vision capabilities and even thermal capabilities. If you've got somebody that's hiding from you or down, you have the ability to kind of go in use the thermal to look at areas and heat sources, those different things that may be limited in some of your other technology.

Drones are really becoming the thing, but I don't think you can limit yourself to any particular one piece of technology. But the robot definitely has a significant number of things that you can use to throw at including if you wanted to mount hazmat sensors to it, or even if you wanted to go in and drop hot gas or cold gas, those abilities to deploy those things. And basically affect movement. If you can push people certain locations and you can do it relatively safely, where you're not having to throw something which may ignite a fire. You don't have to shoot something in that you may hit someone.

All those things just add to another layer of your technology that's very helpful in what you're dealing with.

The ability for the robot to move in can create some reaction. It may be good, it may be bad, but you can definitely get it moving around in there. That puts them off their game. If you can initiate the gas system, again, that's another thing that takes away from their planning. You can push with it. Our system does not have the door opening system, so you can't force open a door, but you can push a lot of things with it, and this thing will climb quite a ways up a structure like a wall or anything like that so you can elevate and move the pan tilt zoom around. The pan tilt zoom camera really has a very good zoom feature, so you can look at a lot of things from a distance, and be able to eyeball stuff relatively clearly, without having to have a lot of grainy camera stuff.

We are very happy with the fact that we have that ability to use it, and we recommend it to anybody that is looking for one to definitely give the Vantage a chance and take a look at it. I've run several different robots in the past, and as for the climbing ability and the tracked ability of the Vantage, it's probably the best one that I've run in that aspect because of the way it's designed. And so every robot system has a good thing or a bad thing. I would definitely tell agencies to give this one a chance, take a look at it, and decide for themselves if that's what they want.