A SWAT Team's Experience with Transcend Robots and Hot Gas Delivery

Transcript

We plug 'em in we charge 'em, and we send 'em out and they go, we've beat 'em up pretty good in some training scenarios and they just keep on going. And that's the big thing for us, is having something that does what it's supposed to do and keeps doing it, and does it well, which is these robots do. I've drug 'em hundreds of miles away to other agencies, set 'em up and run 'em through, buildings and training facilities there, what we're unfamiliar with and they work, we don't lose transmission. We don't run outta batteries. We don't get 'em stuck.

There's a lot of other equipment we've had in the past that we, it's just constant issues. These bots don't have that. That's the biggest positive feedback I've had from everybody that's used 'em here, is that they're simple to use and they work and that's what we wanted. So, they do all the things that you guys advertise and they save lives and they make everybody's life easier. But they do it without having to put a ton of work into keeping it going.

So that's, for us, that's a big thing. We can get the robot on scene, get information really quickly, relay it to the officers that are responding and the SEU members that are responding. And it allows them to plan their response better and quicker. And with a little more precision, they go in knowing what they've got. Especially we can get a bot inside and we can see a suspect, or we can see the layout of a building even. We may not be able to find somebody, but we can at least say, Hey, we've got doors here, we have stairs here, and we can get a good, idea. And it's really just a huge tool, for safety and planning, any tactical stuff that we have.

And same goes for other departments that may not be law enforcement, such as the fire department's. A good example, they came to us and were like Hey, what can this thing do? We showed 'em, it's got the thermal cameras so it can identify hotspots, and fire response. And for us up here with the interstate, we have a lot of hazmat, accidents and it's a it is a huge asset for the fire department to be able to just drive the robot in check placards or check a scene and make sure it's safe to send people in before they actually do it.

We still train for it every single time. But it's such a valuable tool that the operators on the team would definitely miss it. Every time we do a training scenario now or a training call, one of their first requests is like can we have the bots at the scene? We've used it to deliver like a throw phone. We strapped a throw phone to it and brought it into the scene that way. We've had demands from the hostage situations.

They've demanded things such as food or whatever, and we've brought it in with the robot and delivered it. We had a training scenario where the entry team was stuck and needed a ram to go through a door and they didn't have it with 'em. And just to test it, we strapped the entry tool to the bot and delivered it to 'em and it worked. So there's a multitude of different uses for the bot. We've got mounts for it for the fire department to strap hazmat equipment to so that they can get readings on air samples and stuff like that.

So yeah, it's, the more we've used it in training, the more uses we found for the bot outside of how it comes from you guys. And every time we put it through, will this work, it, it's come out, successful.

So, yeah. We've had call outs, in the last few years where we've had to deploy gas into a house and in our area we have a lot of houses that are really big, multi-story, and it's hard to get gas when you need to get it in the house sometimes. It's hard to know where the person is in the house. Sometimes it's impossible that you get the gas in there. And if you get operators in the house, again, it's, it, it's a lot harder to get the gas in.

In some of these big houses we have and in the training that we've had we've found with the gas deployment system, we can scout the house, we can locate, either a room or a pretty good area of where the suspect might be and give commands and deploy gas if need be. We don't have to deploy it every time. So it allows us to be a lot more specific in where we deploy the gas, when we deploy the gas. And if the person moves throughout a building, or the house or the scene, we can follow 'em with the bot. And we've also done training with the gas deployment system off the bot, which has been good as well.

We can get it in the building, but we don't have to deploy it right away. So it allows us to be a little bit more tactical in how we deploy the gas too.

It's worth the money no matter how much you spend. The life of an officer isn't worth, there there's no cost that equals that. So, we spend as much money as we need to on the tools to make the officer safe. If it's 50, a hundred grand, half a million dollars, if it's a tool that we can use, that will help prevent somebody getting hurt or maybe losing their life, then it's worth the money. For sure. Especially on a product like this where, we use it in multiple, aspects of our of our work. The fire department can use it. We can send firefighters into hazmat scenes. But if we have the robot that can go in instead, we don't have to put that risk, out there for the firefighters or the SWAT team or the officers or whoever it may be. So.