The United States Air Force has pioneered a new system and is trying to make use of artificial intelligence and drone tech in order to halt any active shooters throughout military installations.
One company, ZeroEyes, has created a new system labeled “The Drone-Robot Enabled Active Shooter Deterrence system” that is going to be combined with artificial intelligence-controlled gun-detection software used by the security system throughout Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, read a report from National Defense Magazine.
“The entire idea behind the platform is being able to take a robot and ultimately impede, disorient an active threat on an installation before they can do any more damage,” stated a spokesman for ZeroEyes, JT Wilkins.
Due to the fact that the vast majority of active shooter instances feature the shooter holding an exposed weapon for around two to 30 minutes before a single shot is fired from the weapon, the drone employed by the Air Force would sound a siren or make use of a strobe to distract the shooter.
“That’s ultimately where we want to be able to get these detections out and be able to send a robot to potentially interdict while we’re getting up a squad car from one side of the base to the other,” stated Wilkins, before adding, “You know that every AI is going to throw false positives, and that’s why we put a human reviewer in there to make sure that we can mitigate some of that.”
Once the threat has been officially verified, a human being that is responsible for the launching of the robotic dogs or other responses will manually instigate the system’s reaction.
“The pilot will continue over a 15-month period through a $750,000 direct-to-phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from AFWERX, the service’s technology accelerator,” reported. National Defense Magazine.
“A review of media reports by The New York Times found 30 shootings and other violent episodes at American military installations since the Fort Hood attack in 2009,” read a report from the New York Times stated back in 2019.
“You would think that one place that would be almost immune from these sorts of attacks would be a military base,” stated Neal M. Sher, who was the representative of the victims of the first attack against Fort Hood.
After the second attack targeting Fort Hood in 2014, one survivor of the attack, First Lt. Patrick Cook, lamented the new rules that blocked soldiers and sailors from taking their personal firearms with them into the installation, claiming, “This will happen again, and again until we learn the lesson that suppressing the bearing of arms doesn’t prevent horrific crimes, it invites them.”