Earlier this month, Albuquerque's Team 1st Technologies traveled north with a special, non-human guest — a 300-plus pound, four-wheeled security robot that will cruise Santa Fe High School's campus this summer as the Albuquerque-based security robotics company looks to prove the robot can keep school campuses secure.
It'll be the first time Team 1st Technologies has rolled out its security robot on a school campus, and it's a testing ground for other large campuses subject to security threats, said Andy Sanchez, Team 1st's channel partner manager.
"Any place that has a large campus that needs patrolling, or any area that is having difficulty finding security guards and placing security guards, is our vertical," he said.
The 60-day trial at SFHS will inform both Team 1st Technologies about its security robots' effectiveness, and the school district on whether the bot could be a good long-term fit for its schools, Sanchez said.
"This robot really allows us to continue the growth of our home-grown security program," said Cody Dynarski, SFPS' public information officer. "Currently, we have safety aides at our high schools — I believe at Santa Fe High [School] we already have five or six — and this just gives us another set of eyes, or in this case cameras, to keep an eye on things."
Team 1st Technologies' autonomous, AI-powered robots work by sending live camera feeds back to security professionalsfor monitoring the perimeter of certain areas. The company programs the bots to follow a specific patrol path, and the robots are also programmed to move around any obstacles that are in their way.
When an anomaly — whether a person, object or other thing — enters the environment, the robot notifies security professionals attached to its network — in the case of SFHS, school security officers. But if the threat seems particularly severe — a person wearing a dark hood approaching a school during the summer, Sanchez gave as one example — the robot plays pre-programmed messages to ward off the intruder.
The whole point is threat deterrence, Sanchez told Albuquerque Business First.
"When you see something patrolling that's 400 pounds and moving by itself, talking by itself and putting lights on and different things, there's a sense of, 'Hey, I probably want to stay off that campus or stay away from that facility'," Sanchez said. "That's the idea with our robots. You try to get the bad guys to move someplace else."
The bots cost less than $13 per hour for 24/7 security, Sanchez said, adding the cost could drop to below $10 per hour for school campuses, and the company has around 15 deployments nationwide, including its largest — the Carlsbad, California, campus of Thermo Fisher Scientific, a scientific materials supplier headquartered in Massachusetts. Sanchez said before the end of the year, Team 1st could be sending out upwards of two dozen robots to large corporate partners.
Team 1st assembles the security bots at its Albuquerque facility at 4500 Anaheim Ave. NE, and the company, in late 2021, became the exclusive North American distributor for SMP Robotics, a large California-based robotics company. In the next couple years, Team 1st Technologies could set up its facility to build the more than 1,200 parts needed to assemble the bots, Sanchez said, bringing on 10 new employees to its current team of 15.
"The idea of bringing more high-paying jobs in the science and technology field into New Mexico is part of the vision the CEO, Dave Dworsky, and myself and the rest of the company has," Sanchez said. "Those are kind of the next progressions we see."
