Few scenarios are more appropriate than the Mobile World Congress that is being held this week in l’Hospitalet de Llobregat for the Mossos d’Esquadra to present the tools they are already using and the projects they are developing that take advantage of the potential offered by Intelligence. Artificial (AI).
On one side of pavilion 6 of the Gran Via venue at Fira de Barcelona, ??the Catalan police have their own stand for the second consecutive year. A space that has grown in square meters and that presides over a mock-up replica of the new fixed-wing drone that incorporates AI to facilitate piloting and image management.
This time, the Mossos have taken one of their latest acquisitions from the central laboratories of the scientific police. A type of portable backpack, very reminiscent of the one worn by the protagonists of Ghostbusters, and which has become an especially useful tool in ballistics investigations, those in which a firearm is involved.
At the stand, Sergeant of surfaces damaged by the impact of a bullet. The system has built-in AI technology that is capable of recognizing the chemical substances generated after the impact of a bullet on any type of surface. And not only that. From this analysis, the tool itself tells you which projectile was used and at what distance it was fired. “We constantly feed their database with new patterns and the results are very good,” explains the sergeant.
Right next to him, a police officer and a corporal from the technological development area of ??the general police station of Information and Communication Technologies take turns to show the two projects that the police are developing with the collaboration of the spinoff of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, IThinkUPC.
The most impressive is the program capable of creating robot portraits based on the description that a victim makes of the person the police are looking for. A tool that allows the investigator to introduce nuances, advance or go back in the sketch, according to the contributions of the witnesses. In long-term disappearances, the program creates a current and very reliable portrait based on images of the victim throughout her life.
In Mobile, the Mossos use as a demonstration the robotic portrait of the hitman Yader Jair Castro, who in February 2009 murdered Félix Martínez Touriño, then director of the Barcelona International Convention Center, on Santaló Street in Barcelona. From that hand sketch that the Mosso and renowned writer Marc Pastor once drew, the program created another robotic portrait astonishingly similar to that of the man who was later arrested and convicted.
The other project that can be seen in the Mobile is a tool, also in development, that through AI manages the management of the patrols that a room manager has in service and at his operational disposal in the event of an incident. Although the police command has the final say in decision-making, the program offers what the tool considers to be the best option, based on the instantaneous analysis of countless data.
The technology is also applied to security solutions in critical infrastructures such as the port of Barcelona. A drone equipped with a camera with powerful zoom and infrared flies over the docks controlled remotely from the control tower or completely autonomously following predefined patterns. In both cases, the images are combined with an artificial intelligence system “capable of detecting a spill in the sea or a person walking through unauthorized areas,” exemplifies Raul Iglesias from Accenture, one of the legs of the project in which he is also involved. The Barcelona company Unmanned Life and Orange were involved.
The drone that flies over the sea is managed these days from one of the Mobile pavilions as a practical demonstration of the uses of the private 5G technology network that the telecommunications company has deployed in the port of Barcelona.
This is a connection that neither cruise passengers nor anyone else can access, only authorized personnel to guarantee its maximum speed dedicated exclusively to logistics or security solutions, allowing control of something as delicate as a drone in real time and in an environment as complex as the port.
