Last week a parking garage collapsed in lower Manhattan, killing one person and injuring several others.  Concerned over inspector safety, New York mayor Eric Adams, who has extolled the virtues of advanced technology, decided to send in a drone – and a robotic dog – to investigate.

It’s an increasingly common response in American cities plagued by infrastructure weaknesses.  When a building structure fails, properly equipped drones can investigate the incident faster and more safely than traditional field crews, reducing operational costs and increasing efficiency.  It’s a win for all concerned.

Last year, when an underground parking garage collapsed in Boston, city officials deployed a drone to obtain a complete evaluation of the wreckage site before sending in a field crew to search for survivors and begin hauling away debris.   Some cities now regularly deploy UAVs to inspect their subway tunnels, using drones equipped with infrared lighting and 3-D imaging cameras that can map the length of the tunnel in the dark.

Indoor drones may be remotely piloted but increasingly cities are equipping their UAVs with sense-and-avoid technology that can allow a drone to fly through an interior space on its own, detecting and avoiding obstacles as it goes.  A remote operator may monitor the drone’s flight and if need be, direct it to stop and hover over areas of special interest, zooming in for a closer look as needed.

“This is ideally what we talk about — not sending a human being inside a building that [is] unstable,” Mayor Adams said of last week’s drone operation. “Using the necessary technology we’re able to get a clear view of what’s happening inside the building, for the most part, and [can] do whatever we can to see if there are any more victims.”

New York Fire Department chief John Esposito, who supervises the city’s Robotics Division, said drones are able to stream video inside a collapsed structure directly to the department’s command center and to all of the city’s first responder units, allowing for coordinated inter-agency planning and rapid deployment.

“The great part is we’re able to use the technology to get the information and reconnaissance we need without putting our firefighters’ lives and our first responders’ lives at risk,” he said.

And the drones don’t necessarily act alone.  The police department’s robotic police dog, originally intended to assist officers to apprehend dangerous criminal suspects, was also available to probe inside the garage wreckage to search for victims and survivors.  Working in tandem with the department’s drone, the robotic dog allowed first responders to move more quickly to attend to the injured.

Esposito said the combined robotic response operation was the first of its kind for the city, but based on its success, won’t be the last.

The results from drone inspection operations of collapsed infrastructure extend far beyond the immediate incident.  Drones can probe and film difficult-to-reach spaces in the interior of building structures, providing valuable data on how and why they failed and pinpointing areas for future reinforcement.

And drones need not wait for structures to collapse before springing into action.  In fact, a number of cities in recent months have begun incorporating drones into the ongoing operations of their building and transportation departments in the hopes of warding off tragedies of the kind that occurred last year in Boston and last week in New York.

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