You can run from the robot invasion, but you can't hide—not even in prison. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) signed a deal this summer with Minneapolis-based ReconRobotics to help field-test the company's throwable robot, the Recon Scout.
The dumbbell-size device is already used by law enforcement agencies across the country and military personnel in Iraq—ReconRobotics won't specify how many it has sold outright, though CEO Alan Bignall told PM that "250 of them are in use around the world." The agreement with the CDCR marks the robot's first deployment behind bars—the bots arrived there at the end of September.
In what amounts to a complicated rental contract, the CDCR received 10 of the tiny, 1.2 pound robots. Correctional officers in various facilities will try them out for an unspecified length of time, and provide feedback to ReconRobotics. The robot's mission won't be to patrol cell blocks or spy on prisoners. (Although it's built to be stealthy, with a pair of electric motors that Bignall says produce less noise than a human whisper.) The Recon Scout is deployed more like a remote-controlled grenade: You pull a pin to turn the robot on—the lack of an on/off switch makes it easier to activate while wearing bulky gloves and respirators, and prevents it from being turned off by the impact of hitting the ground. The most likely use for the drone will be for confrontations, and particularly during standoffs.
It's not necessarily a common scenario, but it does happen: A prisoner barricades himself in a room, disables the cameras, and says he's taken hostages. Or maybe he's holding himself hostage, threatening suicide. Instead of charging in blind, a response team can drive or toss the Recon Scout past the barricade. The robot can be operated from up to 100 ft away with the handheld controller, which has an integrated screen. Even if the drone is spotted, and immediately stomped to death, a quick peek could reveal what kinds of weapons are present, and what condition the hostages are in. ReconRobotics also sells a command monitoring kit, which consists of an additional antenna and software that allows the footage to be viewed and recorded on a laptop. "You could throw it in, and do a quick 360 of the room," says Bignall. " So even if all you get is 30 seconds of footage, you can go back and review it frame-by-frame.
The Recon Scout is inexpensive when it comes to robots—it costs $6000, or $9000 with an IR camera—and is built to survive a 30 ft drop onto concrete. ReconRobotics has also tested other options, like dropping the robot from a low-flying unmanned aerial vehicle, and launching it from the same kind of compressed-air guns used to fire tear-gas canisters. Dramatic as unmanned airdrops and robo-grenade launchers might sound, the Recon Scout serves the same relatively low-key role outside of prisons as it will in them.
Sergeant Jef Behnken, a SWAT commander in Burnsville, MN, has only used the robot once in the year since his department bought it. This past summer, a woman was threatening to kill herself and burn down her entire condo complex. After more than two hours of negotiations, Behnken was ordered to enter the apartment. By tossing the robot into a broken window, he was able to steer it through the apartment, and find out that the woman had barricaded the front door with a couch, and then locked herself in the bathroom. The drone didn't necessarily save the day, but it allowed Behnken's team to know exactly what they were up against before storming the apartment. "That robot got us to a safe zone," says Behnken, "We didn't have to waste any time getting through the front door. If we had come in, and she was trying to start a fire and burn down the condo, we wouldn't have hesitated. We would have used force. Maybe even deadly force. With this camera, we were able to resolve it without any type of bloodshed." The woman was Tased before being taken into custody, so the situation ended relatively peacefully.
Whether the Recon Scout will be able to defuse—or at least downgrade—worst-case scenarios in California's prisons remains to be seen. But if it can help even occasionally, as in Behnken's case, the deal could indicate another frontier for the robotics industry. "We have high hopes for its value in the prison-corrections world," says Bignall. "It's going to open up a market we hadn't really expected to be a part of."
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