Few settings are more appropriate than the Mobile World Congress, which 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 and which take advantage of the potential offers artificial intelligence (AI).
On one side of pavilion 6 of the Gran Via site of the Fira de Barcelona in L’Hospitalet, the Catalan police have their own stand for the second consecutive year. A space that has grown in square meters and presides over a model 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 kind of portable backpack, very reminiscent of the protagonists of Ghostbusters, and which has become a particularly useful tool in ballistics investigations, those in which a firearm is involved.
At the stand, Sergeant Xavi Garrido, head of the central ballistics and instrumental traces unit, details with barely concealed passion the extent to which this laser, with which his colleagues from the National Police also work, has helped them in the analyzes of surfaces damaged by the impact of a bullet. The system has built-in AI technology that is able to recognize, on any type of surface, the chemical substances that are generated after the impact of a bullet. And not only that. Based on this analysis, the tool itself tells you which projectile was fired and at what distance it was fired. “We constantly feed the 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 for Information and Communication Technologies take turns to show the two projects that the police are developing with the collaboration of the spin -off from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, IThinkUPC.
The most shocking thing is the program capable of creating robot portraits based on a victim’s description of the person the police are looking for. A tool that allows the researcher to introduce nuances, move forward or backward 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 his life.
In Mobile, the Mossos use as a demonstration the robot portrait of the hitman Yader Jair Castro, who in February 2009 murdered Félix Martínez Touriño, then director of the Barcelona International Convention Center, in Carrer Santaló in Barcelona. Based on the hand sketch once drawn by the policeman and renowned writer Marc Pastor, the program produced another robot portrait surprisingly similar to that of the man who was later arrested and convicted.
The other project that can be seen on the Mobile is a tool, also under development, which uses AI to administer the management of the patrols that are on duty and at their operational disposal by a ward chief in the event of an incident. Although the police command has the final say in decision-making, the program offers the best option for the tool, based on the instantaneous analysis of endless data.
The technology is also applied to security solutions in critical infrastructures such as the port of Barcelona. A drone equipped with a powerful zoom and infrared camera flies over the docks remotely controlled 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 discharge into the sea or a person walking through unauthorized areas”, exemplifies Raul Iglesias, of Accenture, one of the legs of the project in which the Barcelona company Unmanned Life and Orange are also 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 cannot be accessed by the cruise lines or anyone else, only authorized personnel to guarantee the maximum speed dedicated exclusively to logistics or security solutions and allows to control something as delicate as a drone in real time and in an environment as complex as the port.
