James P. Cycon

Applications for Mini VTOL UAV for Law Enforcement

Remotely operated vehicle systems, ground and air, have great potential for supporting law enforcement operations. These systems with their onboard sensors, can assist in collecting evidence, performing long-term surveillance or in assessing hazardous situations prior to committing personnel. Remote ground vehicles are presently used by many police departments for ordnance clearing missions. Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) typically offer long endurance, and are intuitive to operate, but can be severely limited in where they can go by terrain and obstacles. Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have 3-D mobility, but have landing and takeoff restrictions, mission time limitations, and typically are demanding to operate. A new capability has been demonstrated for the U.S. military that shows great promise for aiding police agencies. This concept uses a shrouded rotor, vertical take off and landing (VTOL), an unmanned air vehicle to provide mobility to sensors and other payloads. This system can either perform surveillance from the air or travel to a remote location and land to position onboard sensors to perform long-term surveillance from the ground. This mobility platform concept can also be used to position packages (e.g., communications repeaters) or deliver and deploy non-lethal agents. This paper presents the concept of a small, UAV, VTOL, sensor mobility system for support of law enforcement operations. It then discusses operational feasibility and briefly reviews demonstrations of surveillance and sensor placement operations in military urban terrain scenarios performed by the Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center San Diego (SSCSD) and Sikorsky Aircraft with their full-size Cypher UAV. We then discuss the practicality of reducing the size of this capability to a system small enough to be transported in standard police vehicles and which can be easily operated by law enforcement personnel.