Drones + AR: Visual Intelligence for First Responders <<WEBINAR>>

Earlier in August, we teamed up with DJI Enterprise and the Alachua County Fire Rescue for a fantastic webinar titled: Drones + AR: Visual Intelligence for First Responders.

The webinar kicked off with Romeo Durscher. Romeo is the Director of Public Safety Integration of DJI. As part of his work advising first responders and humanitarian organizations, Romeo has actively participated in various public safety drone missions. Commercial UAV News named Romeo one of the 25 most influential people in the commercial drone industry, as well as one of the top seven drone visionaries in emergency response and public safety.

In the webinar, Romeo gave listeners an idea of how DJI got to the point it is in, in the drone industry. Their steady rise to the top was inspiring, as it started as a company of hobbyists, which later became an enterprise. Through their mission to focus on high performance, accessibility, flexibility, and affordability, the team embarked on public safety efforts starting with a partnership with EENA from 2015–2018. The team worked towards becoming the focal point for discussions and initiatives regarding the use of drones for public safety purposes. Romeo went onto share the lessons that were learned along the way, which played a role in their hardware solutions. That later led to the need for software solutions with AR overlays over live video streams.

That was the point in which our CEO, Adam Kaplan, came in. Adam is an avid drone pilot who merged his passion for flying and volunteerism with an extensive background in technology. He drives the Edgybees mission to provide real-time visual intelligence technology to pilots, ground personnel, and command and control systems around the world.

Adam gave listeners an overview on how Edgybees brings full visibility and understanding to any dynamic scene by creating collaborative virtual worlds of any complex environment with Augmented Real-time Intelligence. As the world’s first dedicated AR technology for high-speed moving platforms, we fuse pioneering 3D video generation, computer vision and multi-sensor data analytics to provide a highly contextual visual presence of non-tangible intelligence, which is commonly used by first responders so they can instantly understand emergency operational scenes.

Tim Davis, the Network Administrator of the Alachua County Fire Rescue was the final speaker of the webinar, and he went into detail about how his team used Edgybees’ technology for public safety purposes. Tim has worked in the public safety sector for 25 years in many roles, including paramedic, firefighter, and rescue lieutenant. In 2014, he cofounded the Alachua County Fire Rescue in an effort to bring critical, real-time actionable data to command staff during emergency situations and post disaster.

During the webinar, Tim went into detail about the UAS team development, equipment being used by the team, and the many benefits of using Edgybees in fire rescue operations. These benefits include:

• Dependability
• Reduced radio traffic
• Allows command staff to conduct operations in real-time
• The ability to track fire rescue personnel

Following this explanation, there was a demo of an operation being conducted, then an insightful Q&A. View the webinar below to catch it all!

If you would like to directly reach out to Romeo, Adam, or Tim, you will find their contact information below:

• Romeo Durscher: romeo.durscher@dji.com
• Adam Kaplan: adam@edgybees.com
• Tim Davis: trd@alachuacounty.us