When an incident occurs, law enforcement and first responders need accurate and uninterrupted data to ensure speedy and effective response. In this regard, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, can play a critical role.
Needless to say, smart cities are faced with emergencies and disasters from time to time. When an incident occurs, law enforcement and first responders need accurate and uninterrupted data to ensure speedy and effective response. In this regard, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, can play a critical role.
Overcoming spatial awareness limitations
Drones have various use scenarios in smart cities. One of them is emergency response and smart rescue. Inevitably, emergencies and disasters – for example earthquakes, floods, landslides, fires, terrorist attacks and large-scale accidents – may arise in a city and quickly escalate. When this happens, law enforcement and first responders must be equipped with updated and uninterrupted information to make informed decisions and respond to the incident with utmost accuracy and precision.
However, it should be noted that ground-based surveillance, AI and IoT technologies suffer from various innate, intrinsic flaws and limitations.
“Smart cities worldwide face several persistent challenges that traditional ground-based infrastructure alone cannot fully solve. First, urban spatial awareness is limited – ground cameras and sensors have blind spots, and many incidents occur in areas not covered by fixed surveillance. Second, response speed is constrained by geography and traffic – when emergencies happen, first responders often lose critical minutes navigating congested roads or hard-to-reach locations. Third, data silos across departments – public safety, traffic management, environmental protection, and urban law enforcement each operate separate systems, making coordinated decision-making slow and inefficient. Fourth, labor-intensive patrols are costly, inconsistent in coverage, and expose personnel to risk in hazardous situations,” said Lizzy Liu, GM of International Business at GDU Tech, a leading drone solutions provider in China.
On the other hand, drones can overcome many of the aforementioned challenges.
“Drones address these challenges fundamentally by adding a three-dimensional aerial layer to city governance. At GDU Technology, our smart city drone ecosystem creates a fully automated aerial data acquisition and event processing system. Drones provide real-time, bird's-eye situational awareness with zero blind spots; they deploy in minutes from docking stations, reaching incident scenes faster than ground units; and our UVER platform integrates data across departments, enabling a single flight mission to serve public safety, traffic, environmental, and urban management teams simultaneously,” Liu said.
Indeed, when a disastrous incident happens, every second counts. Drones can be quickly deployed and send back vital information upon which city officials can act. In GDU’s case, their public safety solution is built around the principle of “one-minute dispatch, three-minute arrival, and five-minute data return."
“When an incident is reported, the command center can trigger an automated drone mission from the nearest docking station with a single click. The drone takes off autonomously and streams live 4K video back to the command center via 5G, giving commanders a real-time bird's-eye view of the situation before first responders even arrive on scene. This is transformative for firefighting, search-and-rescue, traffic accidents, and natural disasters – commanders can assess the scale of the incident, identify trapped victims using infrared thermal imaging, locate hazards, and deploy resources strategically rather than blindly,” Liu said.
GDU’s drone solutions
Based in Shenzhen, China, GDU offers a range of drone solutions. Their smart city drone ecosystem consists of industrial UAVs (P300 Series, P200 Series, S400E), automated docking stations (K01/K02/K03), vehicle-mounted systems (K05 VMDS), and the UVER intelligent management platform.
The P300 and P200 series drones are particularly suited for emergency response. The P300 features a 640 infrared detector with AI super-resolution up to 1K, thermal sensitivity NETD ≤30mK, and 32x AI super-resolution zoom – enabling clear thermal detection of body heat and fire hotspots through smoke, darkness, or dense vegetation. Its triple fog-penetration technology improves visibility by up to 50 percent in rain and fog, ensuring operations continue even in adverse weather conditions. The P200 Series is built around a domestically developed octa-core AI processor with 21 TOPS of onboard computing, delivering real-time target detection, automated tracking, and 4K full-color starlight night vision for the most demanding night operations. The K05 vehicle-mounted drone system can launch, recover, and recharge autonomously from a moving vehicle (up to 30 km/h), taking mobility a step further.
All videos and data can be managed through GDU’s UVER platform, which can be integrated with the user’s existing VMS, allowing them to see video from different sources on a single pane of glass.
“GDU's solution is designed with open APIs and standard protocols to integrate with users' existing video management software (VMS) and command center systems. Our UVER platform supports standard video streaming protocols (RTSP, RTMP, HLS) and provides RESTful APIs for third-party system integration. This means drone video feeds can be seamlessly incorporated into existing VMS platforms alongside CCTV cameras and other video sources, creating a unified air-ground surveillance picture,” Liu said.
Video streaming and AI
When drones are dispatched to disaster or emergency sites, it’s incumbent upon them to stream high-quality video to the pilot and/or the command center in a continuous and uninterrupted manner. GDU’s drone solutions do this in two ways. One is through a direct communications link between the drone and the pilot’s controller or ground control station. The other is through 5G/4G networks where video is streamed to the cloud, which then distributes the video to the command center or the user’s mobile devices.
Meanwhile, AI can significantly enhance and expand the functionalities of drones. GDU, for example, has more than 47 AI-based intelligent recognition algorithms that can empower drones during rescue missions. These include real-time object detection and recognition, where people, vehicles, license plates and fire/smoke can be properly identified; infrared thermal analysis, where thermal imagery can be analyzed to detect fire hotspots and identify people through smoke/darkness; and AI fog penetration and image enhancement, which improves visibility by up to 50 percent in rain and fog conditions.
Other applications
Drones are extremely versatile. Beyond emergency response and rescue, drones have a range of smart city applications. These include traffic management and congestion relief; urban management and law enforcement; infrastructure inspection; event security; and environmental monitoring, in which GDU has much experience and expertise.
“This is one of GDU's strongest application areas. Our drones equipped with gas sensors, infrared cameras, and high-resolution optical payloads perform automated aerial monitoring of air quality, water pollution, illegal discharges, and forest fire risks. For example, in the Yangtze River Conservation Project, GDU drones with AI recognition and infrared thermal imaging conduct all-weather patrols to detect illegal fishing activities – dramatically improving enforcement effectiveness over traditional boat patrols. We also support biodiversity monitoring in wetlands, atmospheric pollution source tracing with 2D/3D mapping, and water quality sampling via drone-deployed sensors,” Liu said.
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