 Okay we're back we're live so exciting four o'clock on a given Friday one of our favorite shows with the drone leads featuring Ted Ralston as a host and I'm Jay Fidel and I'll be sitting in the studio but Ted is on the main where are you Ted? Yeah I think I'm in Kyla Wakona today Jay over on the Big Island. Great and we have our special guest Stuart Rudolph he's joining us by Skype from Fort Lauderdale Florida and he's the president of a company called C2 welcome to the show Stuart. Thank you very much it's great to be here and that's smart C2 for those. Smart C2 pardon me that we assumed that we assumed it was smart you know so the title of this show is the drones with where the drone leads of course but leading to a new level of commercial business and I take it from you know the title your title that as president of smart C2 that has something to do with drones and it's commercial business involving drones and it is successful am I right? Yeah we're trying to change the way people do business and work with the evolution of the drones into commercial industry. Well tell us about the company tell us what it does how you started it why you started it and what its dynamic has been. Well we're focused on corporations and distilling aviation best practices and corporate compliance for the next generation of devices that will be used out there if the unmanned. I have a long history with Ted and working with Ted in government projects in the past and I saw a big deal with the commercialization of unmanned aircraft and the need to be able to deal with the end-to-end business part of the solution and be able to deal with all the compliance from both the corporate end as well as the FAA and the regulations and bringing it all together and also dealing with risk management and the ability of what drones which are very powerful tools and their ability to make sure that the users who are different than the typical pilots who spend a lot of time going to school to learn about flying and flying some very delicate aircraft with unmanned aircraft and the change of paradigm that is for those pilots and those who are being trained today to go out and flying. Who are your clients? We go after corporations as well as those who are service providers and as well as manufacturers of the aircraft would be key components, key customers for us. Ted Rawlston, you've heard what what Stuart had to say. How much of what he said do you agree with? I don't generally agree much of what Stuart says. You might ask him the competition we've been having for some time and right now I think he's actually winning. I'll tell you what the stakes in a competition are maybe sometime privately but that's just a joke. As an aside, the big picture here is Jay that we're moving from a UAV domain characterized by a transition from model aircraft and RC aircraft and 1Z2Z1 of a kind systems that are dependent on freeware and on really unstructured operational software. We're moving as of this week into a completely new domain of commercial UAV operations. As you all know on Monday the new Federal Aviation Rule 107 went into effect and I myself as well as 15,000 other people took the test this week to become certified unmanned aircraft pilots and with the processing time of the FAA in a week or so maybe two weeks there'll be a lot of people on the street with unmanned aircraft tickets. A lot of them really have no aviation background. They prepared for the test. They got the training necessary to pass the test but really bringing the whole concept of aviation management into the UAS domain is what we're all about and that's where Stu and the systems he's got excel because we can now get above the domain of simple freeware into the more complex domain of business control and risk management software in order to allow UAS to serve in the world of construction in the world of disaster operations in the world of the electric utilities and such but without a really robust trusted durable software frame of reference for managing the system from the flight determination all the way to the software and analytics and and data basing without a robust system that is going to serve the customer and survive the tests of those who want to penetrate it and cause it to fail without that you need don't have that side of the business in place we on this show we've been focusing a lot on the on the aircraft side on the ground controller side on the technology side but Stu really pulls it all together into an operating framework that has the credibility and the survivability to be something that a commercial entity would invest in. So Stu let me ask you did you take the test also? No I am not a pilot I don't fly I'm all about the business part and I took that test years ago. Okay so what would you add to Ted's you know description of your place in the market? Well you know just to kind of you know go a little deeper it first of all corporations are going to have people let's say your electric utility company and you send somebody out and they have their cherry picker and they drive up. In the next couple of years what you'll find is part of the toolbox there'll be an unmanned aircraft in there to examine those wires or examine that transformer to examine that cell phone tower and that will be commonplace as these industries move forward for their infrastructure and you'll do that in as beyond visual line of sight comes in and what you need to do is you need to manage all aspects of that environment a corporation and train somebody there's a liability just like they train them to use that cherry picker and just like they need to have a license to drive back to a location you need to have all that infrastructure in place including the maintenance of that aircraft because God forbid that thing creates a problem fire and crashes as things move forward the liability in the risk management and you also need to know when that person's out there flying what did they do if that thing takes off on them or create some kind of havoc around them in an incident what's the plan how do you bring that information to them directly it can't be in a piece of paper and it can't be just in training and so those are the things that we look at and again you have to have compliance that person needs to be insured and corporations today are going to be training their own and they're going to be hiring outside service providers what kind of insurance to those people provide how are they handling that data well how do they handle their aircraft and maintain their aircraft their pilots what kind of training of their pilots been through each corporation might have a different set of criteria above and beyond what the FAA is going to relate regulate and require that individual to do and how you know that you're hiring those people to have those things so you need to have that software infrastructure and one other item it's the training of that individual if we try to teach these people what they need to do it'll be a long arduous cost to that and we look at how software and this is what we've done in our application brings those rules and regulations and so when they go to make a decision that information that intelligence is brought to that pilot when they are making that decision on what to do and then you have the whole aspect of that business the inventory knowing when that aircraft again needs to be to maintain who maintained that all of the transparency and the accountability because when something bad happens you have to go back and be able to show that you did maintain that that your people were trained those are all fundamental basics that need to be inside of the system and what we've seen over the past year or so is that the people out there flying have been concerned more about their aircraft now that they're taking images what are they going to do with that how are they going to store it where's all that information what about those pilots and the insurance and this becoming more mainstream and with now 107 corporations are going to be requiring that the rules and regulations of their corporation of the FAA of the local environment all be into one it's not just about flying the aircraft it's about the business of flying well now that means that you consult with organizations that have drone capabilities or want to have drone capabilities how do you deliver that consultation that advice but how do I you know get the benefit of your services well we actually deliver that through our product we teach people you can go up to our website at virtual Airbus comm and you can download a white paper that we came with out with at the end of last year beginning of this year that talks about the key elements the seven key elements that you need to have compliance accountability reporting risk mitigation data management operational management and that your implementation so each corporation has an understanding of their guidelines and policies and you need to have a system that can be configured to be able to apply to that so we work directly with the client and we adapt our system to their workflow so it's software I go on your website I engage with the software and it answers my questions and gives me advice it does not do that it follows along with the guidelines we work with you and can figure the application to be able to do that and so we install if I can interject here Stu's got a couple of really good charts that provided if Zuri can bring them up we could look through them they kind of organize the structural flow of thought and collect all these various issues that that drive you to the direction of a professional level of software in order to manage this particular part of the business yeah let's do that and can describe it so what are we looking at Stuart okay the first slide that you have up there should be talking about corporations integrating drones so we kind of take the three elements the business I think the slides are mixed up what we're talking about is virtual airborne airbot airboss by smart C2 it says configurable platform for global business schedule manage report okay so in that case these are the key elements that you need to have and they talk about scheduling your aircraft and your crew in the payloads so you're doing your inventory management you know what aircraft is available not in maintenance and you understand the capabilities of that aircraft so you can deal with that and you're dealing with your flights and your fleets and your scheduling so you need to in a large corporation with many different aircraft just like you need to send the right crew out who have the capabilities to a certain job to do we allow you to do that the managing us of the actual flight understanding before you fly the weather where you're going to fly what other types of restrictions that might be in that area that you're flying deal with your checklist if your corporation has a checklist for you to do before you fly to make sure you're doing everything properly just like in a me and the aircraft environment you know when you go up and you're going to get on a commercial jet you notice that the pilot is always printing out of these old dot matrix well he's getting all the information of that flight their route the weather what's called the nodems the notification airmen's about other events going on in those particular areas of the flight any temporary flight restrictions our system bring those to the pilot allowing them to do it and they also bring it brings the things that that corporation and has said to those pilots that they want any type of checklist they understand what their safety procedures are they can answer questions about themselves to see if they are ready have they flown too much that day have they have they done all the things that they need to do as the weather conditions in line with the ability to fly that aircraft and then when you're all sent and done you need to create your reports there are flight logs there are incident reporting if you've had a problem with that aircraft if the aircraft has problems itself are you crash that aircraft and then of course the company needs to understand what their costs are and some companies actually or service providers might be charging their customer for the flight so they might want to build them to our system so we bring all of that together and understanding where they are and we make that happen within a click of a button so all the pilot does is click one button answer a question and all of this other very strenuous thought-processing reporting all gets done with a click of a button so they understand very very interesting well Stuart we're gonna take a short break and we come back Ted I'm sure you have a bunch of questions you want to elicit more about this from Stuart so thank you short break we'll come back and Ted you can proceed we'll be right back hi I'm Donna Blanchard I'm the host of Center Stage which is on Wednesdays at 2 o'clock here on Think Tech on Center Stage I talk with artists about not only what they do and how they do it but the meat of the conversation for me is why they do it why we go through this a lot of us are not making our livings doing this and a lot of us would do this with our last dying breath if we had to that choice and that's what I love to talk to people about I hope you enjoy watching it and I hope you get inspired because there's an artist inside you to join us on Center Stage at 2 o'clock on Wednesdays bye hi I'm Keely Akina president of the grassroots Institute I'd love you to join us every week Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. for a Hanukkah co let's work together we report every week on the good things going on in our state as well as the better things that can go on in the future we have guests covering everything from the economy the government and society see you Mondays on a Hanukkah co at 2 o'clock p.m. until then I'm Keely Akina Aloha go right on time complying if you will without schedule we're with the drone leads and we're talking about a new level of commercial business through drones very important with Stuart Randolph who joins us by Skype from Fort Lauderdale Florida and he is the president of Smart C2 which has written some really interesting software that helps drone businesses comply with rule 107 and many many other rules that apply to drones and of course the host of this show is Ted Ralston and he joins us from the Big Island by Skype audio so let's go to some more charts and then Ted you can have some some you know queries you want to put to Stuart let's let's go on the screen you don't mind let me just lead off a little bit of comment here the discussion we had in the first part of the show was all about the various terms and factors in risk management what we're really talking about in regard to this new technology that is coming at us and how we can think about risk management in the way of mitigating pre mitigating and preventing so we have a strong durable business content associated with it as it turns out Stuart's been doing this the last couple of years and I'll tell you sometime maybe even under show how that actually started but as it so happens the FAA and putting together the one of the rule 107 actually mandates in it a thought process that is about exactly the same as what Stuart's put together into this particular software and if you study for the 107 exam and look at what's called the aviation decision-making or the risk management that is subordinate to that or the crew resource management which is subordinate to that there's a nice structure of how you think about risk management as the top level and how you address all the factors that could affect risk and then put them in their place right down the line and then we're ready to go and is it I was just astounded when I came across that because it almost is like the FAA was reading Stuart Rudolph's playbook anyway I think we have that playbook up here on the screen in four or five charts and if you can describe them just do he can highlight the points that are within that risk case to still we got a slide that says virtual air boss competitive advantages it begins with sophisticatedly simple comprehensive built in on a patented software preconfigured templates users own their own data and SOA based architecture can you describe what that means yeah well first of all for the as we're talking about the new generation of pilots out there you need to make it simple for them pilots have been flying for years know that they have to spend as much time or if not more filling out paperwork as they do a flying in today's generation of pilots they really just want to press the button and they want to go fly one flight after another and what you need to do is make it easy for them to do all the important logging and everything that we talked about in the first help them with that risk management help them when they do click that button to fly that you're doing all of their logbooks for them all of that is being done organically and that's what we do we've taken in distilled aviation best practices and again the business the compliant business processes and we distilled that to a click of a button for them so they can do the business of flying and that's what we do now as Ted was talking about we have a comprehensive solution we're not solving one problem of a corporation we're solving from one end to the other including securely managing all the information allowing them to do cost control allowing them to understand what needs to happen and when they capture the data capturing all that metadata so they have that information so years later they can go back I we built this thing because my team myself have years of experience working in both corporate government agencies and understanding what needs to happen and order for people to do their job and be able to research and find things in the past you're flying for one or two reasons either you're going to deliver a package or you're going to actually image something and you need to have all sorts of sensors and so forth and we started patenting this technology for its use in other areas way back first patent goes back to 1999 my late partner had an idea and we've taken this rapid application configurable software infrastructure and we built this out based on my work with Ted several years ago and dealing with high disaster aid relief and humanitarian aid situations and noticing how drones were going to play a very effective role in helping people identify situations and being able to bring the right people in and the right material in to do that and that's how we started working so what a virtual air boss is taken out of the rule so if I look at the rule I can build virtual air board I can build my own version of virtual air why don't I do that you have competition is there somebody else doing exactly the same thing driving off the rule there there are well we we did this before the rules came out because we understand what the rules would be necessary part of the business there are other people who try to do and do sections of what we do but nobody brings together a comprehensive end-to-end solution and nobody has patents on the on that way that process is to get that done and we're an open architecture like we're working with NASA and building out the next generation of UTM we've partnered with air environment for doing beyond visual line of sight so we're always on the edge we're using our architecture which is future-proof software designed for the future and being able to bring things today and allowing you to grow into that software so nobody has that scalable battle tested software has been used in many government agencies been used around the world for doing a variety of different things and nobody's actually done that and to the level that we have what is future-proof Stuart I mean the future is an unknown unknowable how can you make something future-proof well if you have smart people thinking ahead you're designing the platform on a ability of an architecture that allows you to grow and add on components and keep changing and that's what we've done and that's part of our patents on our technology and not part of how we built out this system to allow that to be able to be comprehensive and easily add on new technologies as it grows you know let's head on this very point that we're talking about the future you know one thing you mentioned very early in this program is the fact that the industry that the use of drones is changing that the industry is changing we are in a huge dynamic and Stuart's you know enterprise represents and comports with fairly dramatic changes but can you guys Ted can you help me understand what those changes are right now what maybe it's the rule of seven one oh seven maybe it's the test you took the license you're getting what is changing that we need to get a handle on sure the one oh seven is gonna basically open the door to a lot of experiences and because it enables commercial operations without an exemption I had also introduced to some some I wouldn't call them difficulties but additional tasks of the type that Stuart solves in order to operate within the proximity of an airport there's some understandings that have to be created in some licenses in effect to be generated so there's that sort of discovery that will go on here we together industry agency university and the FAA will all learn where the hard points are the high rocks in the river are so to speak over the next period of time and then from that we can begin to see where the changes have to occur in the technology and in the operations in order to proceed one of the areas that's going to be a big change is that of the communications framework between a ground station and the drone or between the ground station and the air traffic control people right now we're using what's called in general using what's called unlicensed radio frequencies or spectrum which is what everybody uses the garage door openers and the Wi-Fi and all that sort of thing uses the same frame of reference that the drones do to communicate that's not very durable not very survivable and isn't going to last so there's going to be major changes in the way that the software waveforms are defined and the frequencies are allocated and maybe even in the way the receiver and transmitter conduct business between each other so that's a major change coming and that will produce a yet another dimension of the type of thing Stuart deals with which is how does your radio spectrum and the use of that spectrum survive under and like an urban canyon situation where you have a lot of reflections off buildings and such we have a lot of the electronic electromagnetic noise being generated we're going to have to work through how to do all that and in order to make sure you're safe in that environment testing and certification and design principles will occur and it is that sort of thing that Stuart system will track to make sure that as the requirements change your system complies you know what one of the things that I think is relevant going forward on drones as it is on automobiles is a technology around automated cars and therefore also automated drones and some of them are already automated to a large degree but you know this past week Singapore installed the first or allowed the first group of automated cars to run on its highways and in that regard it's probably ahead of the US and I surmise that one of the changes in the industry is or will soon be drones that are completely automated that don't require a pilot during their flight that the whole flight plan is you know is set by software do you include that in one of the changes that you have to address absolutely in our system and that's the future proof in our system will help move from the human element to the totally automated element and there's no difference on what you're going to need to know there's no difference about the transparency and accountability you just might take out the human and plug in something that will allow that to happen but as those things those new technologies come our SOA based architecture allows us to communicate with them interact with them and that's kind of the things that we're doing with the air environment and UTM and we're automating that whole process to fly beyond the line of sight so you know where you're going you know if there are any obstacles for you to be in there and then as things change in the industry and they try to bring on new technology you'll have awareness of what else is going on and the and the computers the aircraft themselves so the other things around them will have that sense and sense and avoid to make that happen so you're at the front end you're at the frontier this must be very exciting for you I mean I'm envious of your situation in the technology let me let me interject the comment if I can say that's a really great point and I will say also that the question you asked Stuart before Stuart answered with one word absolutely that is the shortest answer to a question Stuart has ever generated except once when I heard him say no which was shorter what the point that follows I can give you a short answer Ted we're out of time we've had a wonderful discussion with you and Stuart we're out of time and I'm sorry about that I hope you guys can set up another show we can go further because I think we've only touched the surface and I think we have a moving target anyway which we should follow through so Ted thank you so much for setting this up that's Ted Ralston our host who joins us by Skype Audio from the Big Island and Stuart Rudolph who is the president of Smart C2 making great software called Virtual Air Boss and he's joining us from Skype Video from Fort Lauderdale thank you so much gentlemen I'm sorry we went a time but I sure appreciate the conversation Aloha