Students from across the district showed off the drones they have spent months making at this year’s Mid Sussex STEM Challenge. Ten teams from the area’s senior schools and colleges took part in the event, which was held at the South of England Showground in Ardingly on Friday, July 4. Sussex and Surrey Police also arrived to demonstrate how police drones work. As their sophisticated machine flew over the heads of spectators, PC Steve Prince talked about how drones can coordinate searches for missing people.
00:00This is our frontline drone. So unlike any other police force in the country, this is our response drone.
00:08So in the back of our response cars, we've got officers like the sergeant over there who are trained in it.
00:13Because they are going to be at the job before a drone team is, so we would rather have officers down the ground.
00:19So this camera will comfortably see up to about a mile. So a mile away, you won't even know this is in the air.
00:25So from a surveillance point of view, we use it for getting facial IDs of people.
00:32Sussex Police and Surrey Police are very good at looking for missing persons.
00:37What we do is we arrive on scene and we're used to just starburst and run in all different directions.
00:42What the drone does is coordinates our search. So we can launch the drone up in the air and a mile in every direction just start searching.
00:49We train our officers to search a certain way.
00:52So depending on what they're looking for depends on how they search.
00:55So if they're looking for someone that's running away from a police officer, that person is more likely to jump garden fences and hide under things.
01:02So we'll bring the drone lower and be noisy.
01:05If we're looking for someone that's very ill and confused, we know that statistically they'll turn left and go downhill and they'll stay to their footpaths.
01:13So we'll use the drone for that.
01:15Thermal camera is excellent at night time. Day time it's alright. Everything's hot today though because the weather's so you're not going to get true reflection.
01:24But what we will do at night time, we'll launch, even in horrible conditions, we'll turn the thermal on and we'll see every person in that area.
01:34The drones are clever enough that if I'm asking it or Jay's asking it to do something it's not comfortable with or if it's running out of battery, it will return home and land by itself.
01:45Hang on for a second.
01:46After all, we send some information to the camera to B
