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In today’s rapidly evolving public safety landscape, drones are emerging as indispensable tools for law enforcement and emergency response. From reducing response times during natural disasters to providing real-time aerial intelligence at crime scenes, drones are transforming the way agencies handle critical incidents.
In this episode of the Policing Matters podcast, host Jim Dudley speaks with Adam Bry, CEO and co-founder of Skydio, a leader in autonomous drone technology. Bry discusses the groundbreaking developments in Skydio’s X10 platform, the role of drones as first responders (DFR), and how agencies like the NYPD are leveraging beyond visual line-of-sight operations to enhance real-time crime response. From extreme weather capabilities to improving community transparency through aerial footage, Bry shares his vision for the future of drones in law enforcement and how Skydio is pioneering these advancements.
About our sponsor
This episode of the Policing Matters podcast is sponsored by Skydio. Learn more about how Skydio enhances public safety and operational efficiency by visiting Skydio.com.
About our guest
Adam Bry is co-founder and CEO at Skydio. He has over two decades of experience with small UAS, starting at 16 when he was a national champion R/C airplane aerobatics pilot. As a grad student at MIT, he helped lead an award-winning research program that pioneered autonomous flight for drones, transferring much of what he learned as an R/C pilot into software that enables drones to fly themselves. After graduate school, Adam co-founded Google[x]’s Project Wing. He has co-authored numerous technical papers and patents and was recognized on MIT’s TR35 list for young innovators. In 2021, Adam was appointed to the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee.
In 2021, Skydio was named the North American commercial drone company of the year by Frost & Sullivan, and received the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems. Skydio was also named to Fast Company’s 2021 list of the world’s most innovative companies, coming in second on the list of the top ten robotics companies. Adam holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Olin College. He received his Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from MIT.
Additional resources from Skydio
- Learn more about Skydio Dock for X10:
- Learn more about Skydio’s DFR program:
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Episode transcript
Jim Dudley: Welcome to Policing Matters on Police1.com. I’m your host, Jim Dudley, and we’ve got a great show about drones today — drones as first responders and some real exciting news from the drone industry. Hey, is your city even flying drones? Are they investigating drones as first responders, the DFR? In today’s staffing climate, I cannot understand why every agency in America isn’t investigating the use of drones as first responders.
In September of this year, I attended one of two days at the Skydio Ascend 24 Conference, an event in Santa Cruz, California. What a blast, what an event it was. Although I was only there for one day, I was amazed at the state of drones in policing today. Look for upcoming episodes as I speak with law enforcement representatives from Oklahoma City, Denver, Colorado, Baltimore County, Maryland, Flagler, Florida, Pasco County, Florida, and Chicago, Illinois — great stuff!
Today, I’m speaking with Skydio CEO and Co-Founder Adam Bry. Adam’s been flying since he was five years old and has been in aviation, robotics, and drones ever since. Skydio is now celebrating its 10th year with the release of some exciting additions to its X10 drone platform. I talked with Adam at the Skydio campus, not too far from where I live, and he spoke of the upcoming developments that were unveiled at the Skydio Ascend event. At the time you told me about them, Adam, it was top secret, and I was gathering all this information and video, and then you say, “Yeah, but you can’t use it!” So, it was great to finally see it in Santa Cruz. Welcome to the show, Adam.
Adam Bry: Thank you, yeah, I’m really excited to be here to now be able to talk about the full picture — the drone, the dock, and DFR Command.
Jim Dudley: So, you must be recovered by now. I mean, you were there for the full two days. I’m sure you were gauging and getting ready a couple of days before.
Adam Bry: Yeah, I mean, these events are super fun for us. It’s a really big production, and there’s a lot of product pieces that come together. Obviously, our whole field team is there as well. But the most exciting part is getting to see all of our customers in one place, meet with them, hear their feedback on what we’re showing, what they’re doing with their products, and what they want to do more of. So, you know, it takes a lot of energy, but it’s also a real energy-building event for us.
Jim Dudley: Well, you sure brought out all the bells and whistles. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, and you had some great videos, but you also had practical applications. People could try flying drones; they saw the capabilities. You had this gigantic wind and rain configuration up on stage — dramatic, lots of amazing things. I’ve been calling them nests for like three years now. I met and talked with you at the Axon Conference in Miami Beach earlier this summer, and you showed me how you’re planning to use them in Miami Beach. Tell us about the concepts and the potential with docks.
Adam Bry: So, there are two ways you can look at it. From a technology perspective, there are a lot of pieces that come together. You’ve got an autonomous drone, a docking station, connectivity, and cloud management. But I think it’s actually more interesting and more correct to look at it from the other angle: how are people using it? The use is really simple. It’s just to get the sensor exactly when and where you need it really quickly, with no friction. It takes all this technology to deliver that, but that’s the ultimate goal. The better the technology gets, the lower the friction is on the other side. That’s the real power of it. There’s just no reason you shouldn’t be able to get immediate, real-time aerial intelligence over any situation — any emergency, any 911 call, any fire — to make better decisions. People have been doing things like this for years, but we’re finally in the position to make it all work together and make it a low-friction, standard operating method for how law enforcement works.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, for sure. The use of drones has evolved over time — the years you’re talking about — but I think the curve just went straight up in the past couple of years, from pilot operators with their little handheld sets with very limited capabilities to now all the amazing things you’re doing.
Adam Bry: Totally. I think there’s been this journey where a lot of pioneering, visionary folks within the public safety community have started bringing their hobbyist drones to work and proving that you can do more and more useful things with them. That’s kind of built a following, and many of those programs have gotten up to meaningful scale. Now, there’s enough critical mass and positive impact that mayors and police chiefs are just saying, “This stuff is amazing, we want more of it, we want it all over our city.” We’re now at the moment where the technology is good enough to make those two things come together.
Jim Dudley: One of the breakout pieces of news that you had was that NYPD unveiled beyond visual line-of-sight operations. In the past, you had to have a drone operator and an observer. Tell us about that.
Adam Bry: Yeah, so the existing paradigm within regulations for the last five or 10 years has been built on the notion that you need to have an expert pilot flying the drone, and they need to have visual line-of-sight to that drone. That was a reasonable operating paradigm for the historical state of technology. What NYPD was able to do was get a waiver from the FAA that enables them to fly beyond visual line-of-sight across most of New York City without needing to have a visual observer there watching the drone. It’s a really exciting milestone because that’s one of the key pieces that needs to exist for the vision of ubiquitous DFR to be possible. NYPD is on the leading edge of this, but we’ve worked with 40 other customers to do similar things, and we’re seeing this become a more repeatable motion.
Jim Dudley: One of the demos I mentioned at the beginning of the show was the X10 drone on stage, where you turned up the wind and threw in some rain — really extreme conditions. It goes to show that drones are not limited to just fair-weather conditions. Was that an issue before?
Adam Bry: Yeah, absolutely. The more conditions you can operate in, the more impact you’re going to be able to have. Plenty happens at night or when the weather isn’t good. It’s hard to make the technology work in all these conditions, and we love giving live demos. Our earlier generation drones couldn’t fly in the rain, and our last generation dock only worked during the daytime. But now we’ve got the complete package: it’s robust, day or night, in wind and rain.
Jim Dudley: Right. Like a lot of people, my initial impression of drone usage was really limited — law enforcement aspects, search and rescue, surveillance — but you had a large contingency of people showing how drones and their features can be used in monitoring critical infrastructure, both man-made and natural hazardous events. What’s the feedback you’re getting?
Adam Bry: They’re transformative tools in these emergency disaster response situations. We showed an example at Ascend where one of our customers, Alaska DOT, flies our X10 drones in response to natural disasters and storm events. It basically takes their response time from weeks or days down to hours or minutes because they can pop a drone in the air, stream that data to HQ, and know exactly what’s happening. We’re seeing similar operations in North Carolina now in response to the hurricane. Our customers and our team are on the ground, with drones in the air 24/7, doing search and rescue operations and helping with disaster management.
Jim Dudley: The idea of using them in cities with line-of-sight limitations — now we’re talking about using them in suburban and rural areas with trees and canopies. I have a cabin up north, and forest fires are a real concern. Being able to get a drone in there and send real-time data back to fire command is so important.
Adam Bry: Yeah, totally. This spans multiple industries. A lot of what energy utilities deal with can have an emergency response nature to it — storm events, ensuring the integrity of assets. There’s a lot of commonality across industries, even though what they want to do is sometimes different. Law enforcement is a key market for us, but so are energy utilities and departments of transportation.
Jim Dudley: We’ve seen examples of drones picking up heat sensors from overheating gas and electrical equipment, feeding that data back, and preventing potential explosions. Let’s talk about how agencies are using their drones. I spoke with Captain Haya from Chicago PD and Captain Andy Denbo from Pasco, Florida. These are two extremes — one is a packed city environment, the other, open spaces and swamps. Are drones one-size-fits-all, or are there modifications you make for specific situations?
Adam Bry: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. The reason why it works is because there’s a huge amount of commonality between all these different geographies and applications in terms of what you need from the drone. Everybody wants good sensors, good wireless performance, and nobody wants the drone to crash into anything. You want the software features to be able to share the data you’re getting with others in your agency. There’s definitely a lot more in common than there are differences. The differences tend to show up more in the software layers and integrations. For example, in big cities, we see a lot of customers with bespoke IT environments, with custom-developed software for call and dispatch management and information sharing. You see less of that in smaller agencies in more rural areas. So, we’ve built our system to be flexible in those dimensions. The APIs are standard—you can pull and integrate the data in different ways. But the vast majority of how you use the drone and what you’re doing with it is quite similar. A lot of the core technologies generalize well. We’ve invested a lot in our visual autonomy system that enables the drone to fly and avoid obstacles without relying on GPS. That’s just as useful under tree canopies as it is flying between buildings in Chicago, for example.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, and I’ve seen the X2s and now the X10, the large drone, and you’ve got the X10 dock. Early on, when we spoke, you mentioned how the drone has to be set up, launched, and batteries replaced—it felt like the people were working for the drones. But how is the dock going to be different?
Adam Bry: The dock completely changes the paradigm. In my view, it’s the way it should work, and in 10 years, we’ll think it was crazy to have drones without docks. The dock provides full automation. It’s a network-connected, weatherproof charging base station that keeps the drone on-site, ready to fly 24/7. You connect over the internet using our software. In public safety, we call it DFR Command. It gives you the ability to fly and operate multiple drones remotely from a central location. One analogy I use is the transition from needing a sophisticated desktop computer to just having a cloud server in the background doing the work. Like right now, we’re using a cloud server for this call through Zoom. We’re not thinking about it—it’s just there, doing its thing. That’s the way it should be with drones. If you get a 911 call or have an emergency, the drone should be out there doing what it needs to do and telling you when it has useful data for you. That’s what the dock enables.
Jim Dudley: No joke about remote command. When I was at the campus in San Mateo, I saw an operator get a drone in the air, review some critical infrastructure, and I asked him where it was. He said it was in Colorado. He was in San Mateo, California, operating this drone over 1,500 miles away. Amazing.
Adam Bry: Exactly. One of the clear, powerful trends in law enforcement is the real-time crime center, where live data feeds into an operation center, and a team of analysts and operators process that data to assist officers in the field. Drones fit naturally into that paradigm, and I think, over time, they’ll become a centerpiece of real-time crime centers. Drones can be distributed across a city, county, or jurisdiction, but the operators can be centralized at the agency’s information hub, managing them and feeding data back to officers to make better decisions.
Jim Dudley: Yeah, for sure. You’ve shown so many different applications. I was thinking of one where a drone in the air saw an ambush being set up. A person was taking a gun out of his pants and putting it in a sock, something the officers would never have seen on their own. I think about other applications, not just for enforcement but after the fact. A body-worn camera is great, but it only shows what’s right in front of the officer. My two sons are police officers in San Francisco. I recently saw a reconstruction of an officer-involved shooting incident using body-worn camera footage. A drone would give you a better overall view—show what the suspect is doing, see the officer’s perspective, and their respective actions and reactions to the suspect. It’s great for keeping officers safe, but it’s also helpful for reconstruction afterward, especially when trying to be transparent with the community. This kind of footage could show the de-escalation tactics being used and explain what happened when things escalate. Drones would be awesome for that as well.
Adam Bry: That’s a great point, and it’s something we hear from our customers. Las Vegas Metro PD is upfront that this is one of the key values of their drone program. The sheriff there has an impressive posture on transparency with the community. They publish all the body camera footage after every officer-involved shooting very quickly. They view drones as a key tool to show an objective aerial perspective of what happened, what they did, and let the community judge for themselves.
Jim Dudley: Absolutely. I appreciate the time you’ve spent with us, but before we close, I have to ask. I was surprised to hear you bring up lobbying in your keynote. What prompted that? I’ve heard about Homeland Security changing from foreign drones. What do you want law enforcement agencies to know right now?
Adam Bry: We debated whether we should talk about it, but ultimately decided to address it because it’s a line of attack our competitors have used against us, which we think is unfounded. We’re not afraid to address tough questions, so we used the opportunity to address it head-on. We believe, and I think there’s consensus now among the federal government and anyone thinking about cybersecurity, that it’s not healthy to rely on foreign adversaries for critical technology. There’s a valid range of opinions on how best to deal with that. From our standpoint, we’re focused on making our products as great as they can be. By a wide margin, we’re now the leading U.S. drone company, and we see that as a serious responsibility. We want to make our products awesome and useful for public safety. That’s our focus. There are companies disrupted by this, like DJI, the leading Chinese company, and their resellers, who feel threatened by the movement away from Chinese drones. I empathize with that—it’s difficult for people who have built their businesses around this technology. They’re looking for someone to blame, and our name comes up. But I think that’s misguided. Our focus is on our products and customers. Drones will be 10x more important and impactful in the next 10 years than they have been in the past 10 years. It’s a mistake to focus too much on the past. We need to focus on where we are and where we’re going. The future can be 10x better than where we’ve been. The next wave of autonomy technology, with the dock, changes usage paradigms. We’re excited about the future and, most importantly, what our customers are doing.
Before we sign off, I’m curious about your thoughts. You’ve spent 30 years in law enforcement in San Francisco, you’ve seen a lot, and you’ve seen technology evolve. What impact do you think drones will have, and where do you see this going?
Jim Dudley: Oh, my gosh, I wish we had them before I retired to the extent we have them now. The applications in policing are endless. I spent a lot of time with our SWAT team, our special operations group, and the rest of our city family—police, fire, EMS, public health. I met my wife, who was the director of epidemiology and disease control for San Francisco Public Health. After 9/11, we were given a series of exercises for Homeland Security grants, where they threw everything at us—dirty bombs, natural disasters, man-made terrorism. We had to assess if we had enough equipment, training, and capability. Drones could only make us better in those situations. Event management, for example—we have about 300 planned events every year in San Francisco, in a small city of 49 square miles and 850,000 people. We have parades, festivals, fairs, and events that might draw international attendance, like the America’s Cup, international soccer games, Super Bowls, and World Series. We also have critical infrastructure that could be appealing to those intending harm. Even for celebrations, drones would be invaluable. I wrote an article after the Kansas City parade, after they beat the 49ers in the Super Bowl. There was a shooting involving opposing gang members flashing their weapons at each other. Are you aware of ZeroEyes? Their technology recognizes firearms from video feeds and sends alerts to real-time crime centers. It could give us precious minutes to respond and stop a mass shooting before it happens. This kind of technology saves lives. Like you said, 10x—we’re going to see what drones can do in the coming years. In Chicago, I was surprised to see ShotSpotter unplugged, but talking with the captain, they’re planning to use drones more, which was encouraging.
Adam Bry: That’s great. I really appreciate hearing your perspective and background.
Jim Dudley: Thanks. So, any secrets you want to unveil on the show, or anything exciting coming up?
Adam Bry: Well, we’ve made some big product announcements recently. The DFR story is now real—it’s here, and we have customers using it. What you’ll see more of from us and our customers over the next year is larger-scale deployments and the impact they’ll have. We’ve done a lot to get here, but I feel like we’re just getting started. The most exciting announcements aren’t about the product or technology—it’s about the deployments and the impact. We talked about some of that at Ascend, but you’ll see a lot more over the next year.
Jim Dudley: Thanks for what you’re doing in drone technology and the DFR forefront. You have great people working for you, and I look forward to seeing you all again soon.
Adam Bry: I appreciate that, thank you.
Jim Dudley: To our listeners, I hope you enjoyed today’s show. Drop me a line and let me know what you think, and check out the show notes where you’ll find links to Skydio and their great videos and information. Take care, stay safe, and hope to talk to you again soon!
