A few years ago, Corporal Doug Green of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police used his Draganflyer X4-ES UAS to save a man’s life.

The young man caught the edge of the shoulder as he was driving along Highway 5 in Canada, causing him to lose control and roll his car. But when emergency responders arrived on scene that night, the driver was nowhere to be found.

This was in 2013, and the RCMP had been using Draganfly’s Draganflyer X4-ES for various missions since 2011. One of the officers on scene remembered that, and when STARS Air Ambulance had trouble finding the victim, they called Green, a Forensic Collision Reconstructionist, and asked him to bring the UAS to the location.

It was a cold night, and emergency responders knew it might be too late if they didn’t find the missing driver until the morning. In an effort to help locate him more quickly, workers back at the station identified the victim and called his cell phone.

“When he answered he was pretty disoriented. He said he had no shoes on and was cold and wet. He had just walked through a bunch of swamps,” Green said. “The cell phone provider gave us the GPS location of where that call was coming from, and it turned out to be two miles south of the rollover scene. We went to that location, but by the time we got there he had wandered off some more. We did a ground search and found nothing, so we decided to deploy the Draganflyer.”

The Draganflyer was equipped with a small FLIR thermal imaging camera, which picked up three heat signals while in the air. The first heat signal was 200 meters away. They used the portable UAS to direct two firemen to that heat signal, which is how they finally found the driver. He was curled up on the tree line and very near the end of hypothermia.

That life-saving mission is one of the most memorable the RCMP has flown over the years, but it’s one of many. They use the Draganflyer X4-ES as well as the smaller Draganflyer Guardian for a variety of missions, such as crime scene investigation, collision reconstruction and emergency response.

And they’re not the only law enforcement agency turning to UAS. Both small and large agencies are realizing the benefits of unmanned systems, and are learning how to incorporate them into a variety of applications, including crime scene investigation, car accidents, search and rescue and natural disasters.

Crime Scene Investigations

The Mesa County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado first began looking at UAS in 2008, and became the first law enforcement agency in the United States to start an operational UAS program in 2010, said Quartermaster Ben Miller, the unmanned aircraft program manager. They fly the Falcon fixed-wing from Falcon Unmanned for search and rescue missions, and the Draganflyer X4-ES for accident and crime scene investigations.

They’ve completed about 90 missions and 300 flight hours, Miller said, and can fly anywhere in Mesa County. Six officers are trained to operate the UAS, and primarily use the Draganflyer for crime scene investigations.

At first, they used the pictures taken from the air just to gain a different perspective of a crime scene, Miller said. The cameras onboard the Draganflyer takes photos straight down, and through orthomosaic reconstruction they can use those images to create an accurate map of the crime scene.

“There’s a lot you can do mathematically with a photo taken straight down,” he said. “Picture a homicide scene. You can fly a grid pattern, collect 50 photos and then put them in the software. The software aligns them and makes an accurate map. That map is then captured forever as a digital image. Homicide investigations go on for a while. This gives us a map of the scene on the day the homicide occurred that we can refer to in the future.”

The team has added a process that enables the UAS to capture photos from different angles. They put those photos into the software to create a point cloud, giving them a realistic, geometrically accurate 3-D model of the scene, Miller said. They can animate the model and even recreate how a victim was chased during a homicide.

The geospatial information tells them exactly where everything was placed during the crime and the distance between various objects, Miller said. Often, distance is the key variable when investigating a homicide. Investigators can look at the map and know that, for a suspect to have committed the crime, he would have had to get from Point A to Point B in 3.5 seconds. They can then go into the model and measure the distance, and determine if it was possible to travel that distance in the known timeframe.

Creating these maps is something they’ve never been able to do before, Miller said, and is information that can make all the difference during a jury trial.

Sgt. Matthew Rogers, with the Michigan State Police aviation unit, uses the SkyRanger from Aeryon for crime scene investigation. He said the UAS excels at providing straight down pictures of the scene, and agrees the map created from the photos is invaluable during a trial. The MSP recently received authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly their UAS statewide, the first authorization of its kind.

“The SkyRanger provides documentation of crime scenes from an aerial perspective,” Rogers said. “The prosecutor can present these aerial photos to the jury to help them understand what went on there.”

Traffic Accidents

When Green and his team first talked about implementing UAS in 2010, they were focused on using them to take photos over collision scenes, he said. Just like with crime scenes, the UAS can take images and collect footage from above a fatal or serious injury collision.

“You can see more in the overall scene from the higher angle than you can from a straight picture off the ground,” Green said. “We never had the capability to gather these aerial photos before. Our first attempts of any type of aerial photo was to put a 35 mm camera on a painter’s pole and trigger it to get a picture of the area of impact. We could get 30 feet at the most. Now we can get a straight down picture of the scene.”

Green and the rest of the five-member forensic collision reconstruction team work 50 to 60 collision scenes a year, he said. All five team members are trained to use the UAS, and have a unit in their vehicle at all times.

When putting a report together, Green can use the map the software creates to describe the scene and the sequence of events that led to the crash. He can point out exactly where the vehicle came to rest. And just like with crime scenes, the stitched together images can help a judge and jury see what happened if one of these collision cases goes to trial.

Without the UAS, investigators can’t take photos of the entire scene. Instead they start taking photos away from the scene and work their way up, capturing it in bits and pieces—making it difficult for juries to keep track and actually visualize what happened. With the UAS, they can capture the entire collision scene in one shot.

Using UAS for traffic accidents also gives investigators something to reference to check their measurements, Miller said. If they use the push wheel to measure skid marks to determine if the driver was speeding, they only have one shot to get that measurement right. But if they can put the measurements in a map created with the images taken from the UAS, they know what’s in the map is within millimeters accuracy of the actual skid mark. They can look at that map two years later and reaffirm the measurements are accurate, which can be beneficial during a trial.