Abstract

Emergency response and public safety operations often suffer from delayed situational awareness, insecure UAV deployments, and limited trusted communication between citizens and responders, creating risks during disasters, search-and-rescue missions, and large public events. To address this, Phoenix by AERD was developed as an autonomous drone system that improves emergency response through secure, real-time situational awareness by integrating encrypted communication, multi-factor authentication, and privacy-by-design principles. The project includes a public mobile and web application that allows citizens to submit emergency requests and receive verified updates while enabling responders to access secure aerial data. The system combines autonomous flight, thermal imaging, GPS tracking, and AI-assisted analytics to support rapid decision- making, and uses a modular architecture built with MQTT, Tailscale VPN, Firebase, Flask, and Google Maps API. The prototype was evaluated through user testing, field testing, penetration testing, and usability testing, which helped validate functionality, security, and the overall effectiveness of the system for emergency management use cases.