Nokia, Motorola Solutions team to launch AI-enhanced, automated ‘drone-in-a-box’ integration

Nokia and Motorola Solutions today announced that the companies have integrated their drone technologies—Nokia’s hardware and Motorola Solutions’ drone-controlling CAPE software—to make an “artificial-intelligence (AI) enhanced, automated drone-in-a-box offering targeted for first responders.

Chris Bennett, Motorola Solutions’ director of AI transparency and education, said drone usage by public safety continues to grow, but many of today’s solutions require at least one member of the drone team to be technically astute—sometimes in multiple areas. Today’s announcement from Nokia and Motorola Solutions is designed to address potential drone users who “just want them to work” without the need for significant dedicated technical expertise, all while being supported by two reputable manufacturers.

“This is not the first announcement of a drone that put 4G LTE on it. This is not the first drone-as-a-first-responder application,” Bennett said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “But this is really the combination of saying, ‘What if we could get the drone workflow/reporting—that whole software experience—married together with hardware that is purpose-built by another great company to handle both the safety and mechanics of the flying, as well as understand the network connectivity.’

“From a customer perspective, we’re well positioned to support whatever those needs would be in the future and to keep doing it for them. Nokia is not a small-time drone manufacturer just attaching a 4G cellular modem to a drone; there’s a lot more sophistication there.”

Thomas Eder, head of embedded wireless solutions at Nokia CNS, said the drone in the new offering is hexacopter that is 55 inches in diameter (including propellers), weighs about 26 pounds, and can fly for 30-40 minutes per voyage, depending on the weather. The box that comes with the drone weighs more than 400 pounds and includes the docking station for drone, he said.

“It’s really like a proper piece of infrastructure,” Eder said during an interview with Urgent Communications. “It has integrated heating and cooling, as well as integrated charging.”

Eder said he believes the Nokia drone “is the right form factor” for both Drone as a First Responder (DFR) and industrial use cases. The drone features both a visual camera and a thermal camera, while additional sensors and payloads can be added as modules to meet the needs of a given mission, he said.

Bennett said that Motorola Solutions’ CAPE software allows an entity—be it a public-safety agency or an enterprise—to control the drone and leverage the intelligence it gathers within the normal operational workflow, providing the relevant personnel with valuable information before arriving at an incident scene.

“Our goal with the CAPE software is to enable the connection between the drone hardware, the pilots that are in control of it, the observers who are monitoring the process, and ultimately the other software pieces in the workflow that tie it all together,” Bennett said. “So, it feels like—from the end user’s perspective—that they’re using one cohesive system in order to get something done.”

Of course, this requires connectivity. Eder said that Nokia handles the connectivity piece of offering, leveraging cellular 4G LTE and unlicensed technologies.

This connectivity portfolio could also include low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite links in the future, particularly as the satellite-direct-to-device industry matures, according to Eder.

“I think that’s exactly where this industry is heading,” Eder said. “We’ve definitely started to look into it, but we also have to recognized that the market goes at a certain pace and that the solutions need to come to the market at the right point in time.

“We need to recognize that the drone industry has come through a maximized fast forward within the last 10 years, from a hobbyist tool for photos during your vacation to—now—it is basically becoming the Swiss Army knife for public-safety agencies around the world. We’ve got to establish drones for industry and public-safety use cases more, but the satellite connectivity definitely is a very, very crucial component when it comes to reliable connectivity everywhere in the next couple of years.”

Bennett said he believes the collaboration between Motorola Solutions and Nokia can be a significant step in simplifying drone usage for many entities, particularly those without a lot of expertise with the relevant technologies.

"The hardware side is really difficult; the communications-network piece is really difficult; building software that has a friendly user experience ... is really difficult; and making sure that we comply with all of the various FAA regulations in the U.S. is also extremely difficult," Bennett said. "Putting all of those together is challenging. But I think the great opportunity here is that both Motorola Solutions and Nokia saw that they were not able to solve every single piece of that puzzle [individually]. Being able to architect and work together--where our APIs and systems can talk to each other--is really a testament to the engineering teams."