Robots and drones for cities, counties and public agencies

Parks departments mow with robots, police departments buy bomb squad robots and patrol robots, public works inspects sewers by camera crawler, and sheriffs recover evidence with underwater ROVs. Every one of those purchases lives inside sourcing rules the maker's brochure never mentions.

Free, about two minutes, no phone number. You get an honest no when a robot is the wrong answer.

Who this is for

You run or advise a city, county, school district, utility, port or public safety agency, and you are being sold technology faster than you can evaluate it. You need to know what fits, what the money rules allow, and how the purchase has to be written.

What automates first here

• The government door: Abe, the concierge for agencies, runs the intake: what does your agency need, and how do agencies usually buy it
• Autonomous mowing: parks and sports turf, with a Tennessee parks department in the casebook
• Patrol robots: parks, garages and civic buildings, with a police department in the casebook
• Sewer and stormwater inspection: camera crawlers and drones instead of confined space entries
• The casebook: eight public agency deployments with the published numbers, graded by source
• Inspection and public safety aircraft: with Blue UAS and country of origin stated on every row

Machines that usually make the shortlist

Bomb squad and tactical robots from ICOR, L3Harris, Peraton Remotec, QinetiQ and Teledyne FLIR; underwater ROVs from VideoRay, Deep Trekker, Oceanbotics and Blue Robotics; mowers from Husqvarna, Kress, Scythe and Toro; patrol robots from Knightscope and others; weapons screening from Evolv, CEIA and Rapiscan. Two honesty lines are written into Abe's instructions: turnkey drone-as-first-responder programs sell through channels we do not hold, and license plate readers, gunshot detection and body cameras are direct subscription products where our role is the buyer's representative, not the seller.

Every machine named on this site is in the published matrix with figures checked against the maker's material and no prices, because a price before an engineer has seen the job is a guess.

What has to be true before anyone quotes

• The funding source, because federal money triggers Blue UAS and sourcing rules.
• Country of origin and trade agreement status for every machine, stated in writing.
• The procurement path: cooperative contract, competitive bid or a threshold purchase.
• Governance for anything that collects data on residents, decided before the vendor is chosen.
• Who maintains the machine in year three.

When a robot is the wrong answer here

• Buying technology before naming the problem it solves.
• Any Chinese-made drone or humanoid for an agency spending federal money.
• A data-collecting system with no retention and access policy.
• A turnkey program the maker sells only direct, where a dealer adds nothing but margin.

Someone has already done this

Common questions

Do you sell to public agencies?

Yes, as a dealer for the equipment classes we carry, and as a buyer's representative on the programs makers sell only direct. The assessment is free to agencies either way.

Which drones can a city buy with federal money?

Ones that clear the sourcing rules that came with the money, which usually means Blue UAS listed or otherwise compliant airframes with a documented country of origin. Abe states the compliance picture on every aircraft he names.

How does a small city start?

Name the problem, name the funding, and ask what the neighboring agencies bought and regretted. The casebook holds eight agency deployments with the published numbers so the conversation starts from facts.