Unmanned Aerial Vehicle The latest drone news
DES MOINES, Iowa (WOWT)– Traffic may not be so bad on interstates and highways after crashes thanks to some new technology.
PHOTO: Drone, Photo Date: November 24, 2014 (Source: Andrew Turner / CC BY 2.0)
The Iowa State Patrol is now looking to the skies to help them reconstruct accident scenes. That means lanes won’t be closed for nearly as long.
The Iowa State Patrol calls these unmanned small aircraft systems. They are drones with the capability of capturing 3D images of crash sites. The technology inside the drones will help change the way state troopers investigate crashes.
“It’s going to make an entire scene measurable by taking still photos and then going back in and putting them into a system,” said Alex Dinkla, with the Iowa State Patrol.
Now instead of shutting down a portion of a roadway to investigate a scene for hours, it will take between 20 and 30 minutes. The drones are able to capture images that reconstruct showing what caused the crash. That means troopers won’t have to manually investigate.
“I can still kind of leave the roadway open. I can fly the drone in a shorter amount of time, get the same amount of data, actually more. The other day I flew a scene the other day where we thought we had all the stuff marked and as we flew the scene we found some new evidence,” said senior trooper Aaron Nordyke.
Drones are not something new to law enforcement. But these drones are new to ISP. They’ve spent the past two years searching for the perfect technology. There’s an entire fleet of these drones that will help not only southwestern Iowa– but the entire state.
