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Hovering Camera Drone for Police
An Austin TX, US company Chaotic Moon Studios [chaoticmoon.com] is developing a drone that can hover above a traffic stop. Covered in the Dallas News [dallasnews.com] as well as Government Technology [govtech.com] (same text) the drone is attached to a police cruiser and is launched to record a bird’s eye view video:
At a police stop, the drone can hover above the scene, recording the action and sending live images to headquarters. When the encounter ends, Blue Eyes returns to its landing pad to recharge and ship its video to the cloud.
While an interesting concept, Chaotic Moon Studios hasn’t worked with any law enforcement agencies and might be using the drone as a marketing tool and publicity stunt. They have a highly theatrical YouTube video [youtube.com] that shows the drone might be controlled remotely through very Hollywood computers. I was hoping it would be able to function as a chase cam for the officer but maybe that isn’t in the works yet and police video drones, while providing a different perspective than the body camera, still have the same issues of storage, purchase, training, and maintenance expenses.
Moving from theatrical to practical, AirDog has an auto-follow drone [airdog.com] for outdoor sports which hovers over a wrist controller and is available for purchase today. This seems a bit more useful right out of the box.
