MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, Fla. — The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office unveiled a new state-of-the-art vehicle that has the capability of being fully autonomous.
They’re calling it PUG ― short for Police Unmanned Ground ― a police patrol car powered by artificial intelligence.
“I think it’s a game-changer,” said Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz. “For us, it’s a way we can touch our community in a way that we really have never done before, and we are setting the standard of what will be the future of law enforcement in our country.”
There is no other police vehicle on the road in the U.S. that’s like PUG.
The high-tech patrol partner was donated by the company Policing Lab and is equipped with 360-degree cameras, license plate readers, audio sensors, thermal imaging and more.
“It has the capability to assist folks that are in a restricted area, or are hiding in shrubbery or in an overwatch position, like someone on a rooftop,” said Edward Prokop with Policing Lab.
PUG can drive preplanned routes on its own, and the sheriff says it will be a critical crime-fighting tool and a bridge to boosting confidence in the community.
“If we have an active situation, an active shooting or a critical response, we can send this vehicle in and it will deploy a drone that will give us aerial footage (in) real time for our deputies that are responding,” said Cordero-Stutz. “For the first few months or a year or so, we will have a deputy in that vehicle before it goes fully autonomous. What the reason is, (is that) we want hear from our community, what they like about it, and what their concerns are.”
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