How can policing use advances in robotics to reduce or remove the need for police officers to enter hazardous environments e.g., water, fire, electrical, natural disaster, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear)? Further, how can a seamless and secure operation be enabled in such environments?

Background

"Mobility is the ability to move to/from locations quickly to prevent, detect or respond, including to access difficult locations safely to maximise intelligence and minimise risk.

We are interested in exploring how low-cost swarm robotics could expedite policing activities, such as crime scene analysis and help enable forensic specialists to concentrate on complex or central evidence. We anticipate that robotics will be particularly valuable in challenging and hard to reach locations, reducing the need for police officers to enter hazardous environments to rescue, treat casualties and bring the situation under control. As autonomy and AI improve, robots may become smarter and more able to operate independently of their operators, which may lead to complex ethical, operational, and legal challenges that we seek to understand."

Next steps

"We welcome your engagement with our ARIs in the following ways:
• If you have evidence that completely or partly supports or answers one of our ARIs, we invite you to share that with us. For any ongoing research relevant to policing and crime reduction, we encourage you to register your research on the College of Policing’s research projects map, which has been designed to promote collaboration and support requests for participants.
• If you are, or plan to be, carrying out research that relates to one of our ARIs, we’d like to hear about it. While we cannot respond to speculative approaches for research funding, we will where possible act to support your ambitions, including finding you policing partners where possible.
• If you are submitting a funding or grant application that aligns with one of our ARIs, we hope that referencing policing’s ARIs will help to strengthen your case for the possible public impact of the research.
• We will use the ARI document to structure our academic engagement, prioritise events and build new connections with external partners. We will be using our ARIs in our engagement with UKRI, and we will publish any opportunities for funding via our website https://science.police.uk/
Please send any correspondence and questions to csa@npcc.police.uk, including ‘ARI’ in the subject heading."