A Day In Seattle Trying To Find The U.S.'s Drone Industry
Break glass in case of DJI
The drone whirred above us. The loud hum combined with some precious Seattle sunshine made it easy to follow the four-armed machine as it zoomed into the distance. The drone’s creator, Blake Resnick, watched with a big grin. “This is always our most dramatic demo,” he told me, as he unfolded a clear pair of safety glasses.
We stood in the parking lot of a drone company called Brinc, founded by Resnick in 2017. They produce extra fancy hardware, like the Lemur 2 that zipped over our heads, for tactical responders in the public safety field. Firefighters can use its glass breaker to bust into a building and scope out an inferno. Police officers can flick on its thermal vision to find criminals in hiding. A SWAT team, per Brinc’s website, can prompt it to “deliver a pack of cigarettes during a negotiation.”
“We’ve seen those drones get shot, seen it stabbed, we’ve seen them flown into ceiling fans,” Resnick told me. “They go through some stuff.”
Our drone had a far more important mission on this day: to impress a journalist. Its teleoperator was Dmitry Tarasov, an operations manager at Brinc and one of Resnick’s closest colleagues. He flipped through features as Resnick said them aloud. Show her night vision, now flip on the police lights and sirens. They played a pre-programmed message, alerting the neighborhood about a fictitious missing child. He called the drone to demonstrate its two-way communication capability. “One, two, three, four, five,” Resnick’s voice boomed through the drone.
The drone descended, navigated itself underneath some of the parked cars before Tarasov piloted it directly into a concrete wall — on purpose. Resnick rattled off words to describe each component: LiDAR, tungsten carbide, 20,000 RPM. He seemed like a proud dad listing little league trophies.
Finally, the drone approached a sheet of glass propped up nearby. With a little tap — tink, pop! — it turned to dust. “This was the first drone in the world with the glass breaching capability,” Resnick said, never losing his grin.
IF YOU weren’t already aware, I’ll tell you now — there’s a lot of drama in the drone world.
