 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It is in an hour on Thursday, folks. Ted Rawson here in our downtown Honolulu studio, overlooking Waimanalo Beach today, Think Tech Hawaii Studios, on our show where the drone leads where we bring to our public really important and interesting topics in the evolving world of drones. And today we have, by the magic of Skype, we have standing by in Maryland. We have Phil, Admiral Phil Kennell, retired out of the Navy and out of NOAA, and heavily involved after retirement in the advocacy and the future direction development for this entire domain of drones, which is a really complicated domain, as we all know. Welcome on board, Phil. And glad to be here, Ted. And thanks for taking the time to come up with us here. We meet periodically at the conferences in various places in the country, and it's great to actually have the time to sit and talk about things that are really important outside the conference room. Anyway, Phil is involved in sort of the administrative side of things, the technical side of things, and it represents and has a point of view that looks into a lot of the particular evolving areas here. The one that's most interesting is the world of standards. So Phil, if you could for a little bit, just tell us about how the whole concept of standards works at all and how it's going to start applying itself to this relatively un-standardized business we have called drones. Yeah, well, I don't know how interesting standards is. Developing standards and making standards is kind of like watching sausage being made. You know, the end product is really what you want to get to, but it's been a very difficult time consuming to get consensus standards. And I'm the vice chair of the F-38 ASTM committee for UAS standards. And we're supporting industry consensus standards. So we're trying to get everybody on the same page so that each entity, each corporate entity, each user of drones is not following a different set of standards. They all have trying to get everybody to meet the same bar. And that's really important since the standards will enable regulations. So you will be able to specify or identify one specific standard that you can go to a civil aviation authority for for your operations and they will pretty much know what you're talking about. So instead of having, you know, entity A, B, and C all doing different things, if they follow one set of approved industry consensus standards, we think it will be better for the industry. And that's really interesting. The term consensus standards is something that's new to all of us who are really old and came from the world of aviation and aeronics and such because we never had such things as consensus standards in the past. We had FAA regulations. We had part 33 on engines. We had part 25 on airplanes, part 23 on general aviation aircraft, part 36 on noise. We had no end of prescribed regulations which were generated by well-meaning industry and engineering teams and such, but still they were regulations. They were not in the sense of a consensus. They were more of a mandatory performance aspect. They led, that led to a lot of design methods and certification methods and testing methods and such, but now we have this whole new concept of consensus standards. So tell us a little bit about how that is playing out and where is our, are there some other examples in our world of complex technical things where consensus standards exist? Well, yeah. You know, there's a little bit of difference between, there's quite a bit of difference between standards, industry consensus standards and regulations. And oftentimes a regulator will point to a standard as being a means of compliance with their regulation. So specifically, you're familiar with the work that RTCA has done over the years. And of course, what the ASTM has done with general aviation aircraft and then lights board aircraft. So, for instance, with lights board aircraft, the FAA points to our standards, the standards that we've developed at ASTM pretty much lock, stock and barrel as a means of compliance with their regulations. So, instead of the FAA doesn't really have the manpower to micromanage a look at or develop every aspect that a operator or user would need to comply with their regulations. So they usually put out, they will put out a notice of applicability for a standard NOA where if you follow these standards, you can comply with their regulations. And so that's what we're attempting to do with standards with UAS. Right now UAS is in the papers every day. Every time you open up, there's something new about unmanned aircraft systems. And there's so many different products, there's so many different uses for their operation that if you don't have everybody on the same page, there could be a little bit of mayhem and disorganization in getting into the national airspace. And really what you need to get into the national airspace safely is you need some level of airworthiness certification for the platform. You need, you know, operational procedures and trained pilots. You know, to get there, you also need some level of technology, especially with unmanned systems for fly beyond visual line of sight, let's say, or operations over people and or and detect and avoid and detect and avoid other other aircraft. So we're developing standards in F-38. We've broken down into three committees. An Airworthiness Committee, an Operations Committee, and a Personnel Training Committee. And we feel that if we develop standards to meet those categories, we can satisfy most of the requirements that a Civil Aviation Authority would require to get access to the airspace. Now, you know, that being said, it's a whole lot easier to say that than get it done because a lot of the technology isn't there to safely integrate these new emerging platforms into the airspace. And the biggest, one of the biggest hurdles we have is for operating beyond visual line of sight outside of the Mark 10 eyeball seeing things. How do you, how do you ensure that a unmanned aircraft is not going to get away with any other traffic in the in the NAS? And that's one of the challenges that we're having. That's one of the areas that we're working on as well as standards for detect and avoid. But that whole process of consensus building in the standards and generating the standards in the first place is in itself a social engineering event of immense value, it seems to me, because you're bringing people together from all different perspectives, manufacturers, users, scientists, materials producers and such, and getting them trying to get them on the same page. And in fact, I am actually in your F-38 committee, as you know. And I've been personally struggling in some cases when some of the material comes across to take a vote on, it's, it can be pretty complex. And I just asked myself, how is anybody ever going to figure out how to comply with this? And so what I see going on here is the comply, the nature of consensus standards means also how we're going to comply with them becomes a consensus as well. And so we may write a standard and then have to revise it in a year or two if there's a materials change or technology change or something that comes along or if it's not working. So the cool thing about the consensus is that it is that, a consensus. And it's never set in concrete, unlike a federal aviation regulation, which is a law. The consensus are best efforts, best practices, principles, going back to basic principles in an applied sense. And there's flexibility in there. And there's opportunity for ideas to percolate and to move through the system and produce better standards as time goes on. Yeah, and these, we look at the standards as ever evolving and as that technology evolves and the use cases for UAS evolve, then we've got to evolve the standards. So a few years ago, the standards that we had in place when the technology in this space was very immature, they're not suitable for the technology today and what everybody wants to do with them. So when F-38 started in about 13, 14 years ago, it was a very immature commercial market at that time. And now that the commercial market is maturing much more, they want to do much more with these platforms. Everything from package delivery, emergency response, critical infrastructure inspection, building inspection, search and rescue, that it requires a different set of techniques, a different set of standards, new and improved standards to meet all these requirements. So yes, it's a living document, ever evolving. What we have in place today may not be good for tomorrow. And a perfect example of this is when we take a look at unmanned aircraft systems, they're completely unmanned, all right? They're for the name. But in the future when we get to urban mobility and air taxis, unmanned air taxis that a lot of folks are looking at, well, it's going to require a different set of standards. Right now, we're really not worried about crash worthiness when an aircraft crashes. There's nobody on it, all right? Much lower standard for that. When you start moving people around in an unmanned aircraft, well, maybe you got to look at crash worthiness at that time. We don't have any standards for crash worthiness for unmanned aircraft. But I can see in the future as we get all these, you know, urban mobility, air taxis, that's another standard that's going to have to be developed into an air worthiness standard. So yeah, ever evolving, the market is always changing. Everybody's coming up with a different concept of operations, a new use case. So standards have to keep up with that as well. And again, that just keeps the ball rolling in terms of people coming together and sharing ideas and helping move things forward. Since you've been doing the standards for all this time, or at least F-30 has been doing it all this time, that's a relatively long time in the life of unmanned air systems as you know them today. Certainly, it isn't a long life in the world of drones going back to the 19, 10, 19, 20 period, but in the modern instantiation coming from electric propulsion, coming from full on board autonomy in terms of flight management systems and such, it's only been the last 10 or 15 years. In seeing the changes that have taken place during that period of time, Phil, what do you see in the next 10 or 15 years as perhaps a major theme or two that will characterize what we see, what we hold, what we buy? Well, without a doubt, autonomy. And the autonomy that we, and you can define that several different ways we actually have a working group looking at different definitions and terminology under autonomy. But as autonomy becomes more prevalent, not just in unmanned systems, but in manned systems, you're going to see a crossover between what goes into an unmanned aircraft as opposed to a manned aircraft. So when we look at autonomy, you can't just think of an unmanned aircraft anymore. You have to break down what a manned aircraft is doing as well and how much of those elements in a manned aircraft are beginning to become more autonomous. I mean, self-driving cars, perfect case. You got a guy in there, he's driving it. I can see, for the most part, a lot of manned aircraft are now self-flying for the most part. But as more and more of that workload is shed off to autonomous operations, you're going to see manned and unmanned aircraft, at least the requirements and the standards crossover between the categories. We're also doing that between our general aviation committees and our light-sport aircraft committees as well as we're looking at how does autonomy feed into each one of these types of platforms. That's just an example. That's a really interesting one, probably the most compelling one of all to think about. But autonomy, we think of automation a lot. A lot of our systems are automated today. They track a bunch of waypoints and they maybe do an automatic landing. That's basically automatic operation. And maybe supervised if somebody can shut it off if it's part way along and you want to get out of there. But true autonomy is like a whole dimension different than that. True autonomy is making mission decisions on the fly, on board, and maybe checking back with home base every now and then to see if you still have a home base. But it's something hard to get your hands around. In fact, autonomy in automobiles will be, you brought up the self-driving cars. That doesn't necessarily mean you're going to plan the mission from here to Philadelphia and drive the whole thing in one stop, including the gas stops and the comfort stops. It's more or less in the next quarter mile, I would think. It's kind of a constrained autonomy. But that brings up another interesting question. Within ASTM, there must be some place where the standards are being developed for self-driving cars. That would be a great source of information to feed into the F-38 and other aspects of UAV. Oh yeah, absolutely. So that's what we're doing. We're looking at all the standards committees within ASTM to see how that we can leverage each other's work. So nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. And it comes to unmanned aircraft system standards right now. There's a lot of organizations trying to develop standards both within the United States and overseas as well. So we actually have working common now with the European Union, their standards coordination group. And in the United States, we have a standards coordination group being head by ANSI. So there is a lot of work in reducing the duplication of effort. And that's what everybody wants to see. But some of the key areas that we've got to look at is is really to fully utilize the full potential of unmanned aircraft systems. We've got to develop standards and technology to be able to fly these things beyond visual line of sight. And I'm not talking about the large global Hawk Predators type aircraft that do that routinely. I'm talking about the ones that are going to be used for commercial applications, the smaller platforms. And when I say smaller, I don't just mean under 55 pounds, which is the standard small US and the small UAS in the USA. I'm talking about platforms that can weigh several hundred pounds, two, three, four, 500 pounds. We got to start looking at how to operate those safely beyond visual line of sight. There's a tremendous amount of capability in these platforms and the full utility is only going to be able to be fully realized when we can start flying them more than two, three miles away from the operator. So those are some of the things that we're looking at, some of the use cases. And part of that goes in hand-in-hand is going to go to be a good Detect and Avoid technology as well, or good Detect and Avoid standards. So we're working on those with MITRE as well, putting together a Detect and Avoid group for those operations at a lower level, small UAS, and when I say small UAS, I mean couple hundred pounds as opposed to the very big ones. So these are some of the challenges that we're going to have in the next 12, 24 months. And they're coming at us right now through the FAA's initiative with the FAA UAS Integration Pilot Program, which is a great step forward in that direction and it's going to certainly expose a lot of these issues that you're just speaking of. Well, the way we put it here, you being a surfer, you end up in Paya Maui from time to time and test the waves, but sometime we'll get you over here on Oahu to take a look at our situation here and what we call the Honolulu Corner. But we just imagine if we have one drone flying for the power company or something, that's one thing. Okay, we can figure that out. If there's maybe two, maybe they can figure that out. If there's five, well who owns the other three? Where are they coming from? What's going on here? How are these things coordinated? What if we had 500 and where are we going to put them? And whose error are they going to go in and over whose property are they going to fly? So there's a lot of property and social issues that go along with the technical issues of how we're going to actually technically operate them. Is that something that's under consideration in ASTM as well? That is how we're going to handle all the handoffs between property owners and such and getting all the social work in place? Yeah, a lot of that is human factors and education of not only the operators but the community is as well. So, and I think, for example, AUVSI has done a good job with the FAA of know before you fly. But that's for, that was pretty much for the, I want to say the hobbyist operator, drone operator, to educate those folks on what they can and can't do safely with the drone that they just got for Christmas or Father's Day or their birthday. But when you get into the commercialization of these things where people are going to start monetizing them and using them for industrial purposes, then yes, we're looking at how to do that. And a lot of the main focus of the way we're going to do that is looking at specific use cases for some of these. So, scenario-based operations, whether it's package delivery, whether it's one-air inspection, critical infrastructure inspection or emergency response, we have to develop good standards and operating procedures for each one of those. And that's one of the ways we're breaking down the ANSI collaborative as well. And as you know, the FAA's integrated pilot program has targeted several of those use cases as well as areas that they see commercial activity and the need for operational procedures to get those things done. So, what you've suggested is that AUVSI is taking on the human factors, the humanitarian aspects, the behavior aspects and the value-stated aspects of this whole emerging standards and requirements domain. So, ASTM is doing the technical work, AUVSI is doing some of the behavioral work? No, not really. What they've done is that my reference to AUVSI was that they teamed up with the FAA to ensure that in the early years to ensure that people who got drones knew what they were supposed to do with them. So, they don't go flying near airports. They don't go flying them over your neighbor's house. They don't fly them above 400 feet. So, they put some best practices together and they were putting each drone that's sold in the United States. That information is there. So, people know what they do. And I think it's been a really good program. So, it's socialized, made drones a little bit more acceptable. I know you remember like four years ago, every time you heard drone thought of peeping Tom, they're, we don't want them, they're gonna be, they have a camera. Well, I think it's become much more pervasive and acceptable now. And part of that was the education program that the FAA did with AVSI, educated the consumer. Now, the industrial user or the commercial user is a little bit different. I think there's a little bit more professionalism involved. For the most part, now they're looking at very, very technical uses for these platforms. When you start putting a drone, looking at a, let's say a petroleum plant or an offshore platform, you have very well highly trained people who know what the rules are. A lot of these are former aviators or ex-military, purple personnel use drones. So, there's a little bit higher standard for their operation. So, I think those are, those things go hand in hand, but I didn't want to infer that, that AVSI was taking over standards development or even the human factors, although they're very involved with determining, what are the human factors that go involved with using a drone? So, one big question is, right now, one drone operator just operating one drone or many drones, well, what are the factors that go into that? And we see a future where an operator can handle multiple drones doing work at the same time. I don't know exactly how that's gonna happen yet, but people are talking about it and it's been demonstrated on a few occasions as well. It's one area that we'll have to look for for commercialization in the future. Right now, I don't know if too many commercial entities are actually doing that. So, that's cool. So, that the behavioral aspects are coming out at us and maybe in an organized sense from the professional organizations that are starting at the manned aviator mindset and working down into the unmanned domain. So, we'll learn a lot from them because that behavior they've learned over their careers will be applied to the UAS domain. So, for example, in life-saving, there was a video floating around last week about I think in Australia, somebody dropped a life-saving tube and water outside some beach and saved a couple of swimmers who were stuck out there. Life-saving is a really interesting example. It's unreasonable to expect the lifeguard to be also a drone pilot. And so, if we can get the guy a good, competent drone system that can take care of taking a life-saving device out at sea or something like that, how do we actually operate it? The lifeguard has to determine what am I going to do? Jumping the water and swim like I should do or am I going to sit back here and play with this drone? Exactly how is that going to work? So, taking that as a use case, how would you see the various organizations applying their knowledge to that problem so we can figure out how do we handle that? It's either it's fully autonomous and the lifeguard just gives a clap of the hand or some other signal or has to become trained or somewhere in the middle. Yeah, I don't have a good answer to that. All I know is that we're actually looking at a capability that will go out and be able to target a, let's say, a man overboard on a ship or somebody out in the water. So, there is software, there are packages that can find people out in the wilderness. They'll target them and identify them. And we do that for marine mammals, for marine life, or for some environmental observations. We started looking at the same technology for looking for people search and rescue at sea. And so, I think in the future, you may find a time when the lifeguard hit a button, it'll fly out there, it'll have software on there and a package that can find a person in the water and then make the right decisions. I think the individuals in Australia who did that, I think they were trained in using the UAS because from what I heard, it just been delivered to them. So, it was pretty much an opportune moment. And it was a great example of what you can do with an unmanned system. So, the level of training, I don't know how high it was for those folks, but I do see it at a time when the lifeguard will hit a button, fly out to the person in distress, drop the package to them, and you have a rescue. Great news story. These are the good news stories that you hear about drones every once in a while. We're so used to hearing about them using in war zones, which have its merit as well. While we're working at NOAA, we like to watch whales with drones, out marine mammals, look at penguins in the Antarctic, do environmental research, all good news stories. There's a lot of good that can come out of drones. And so that, actually, that lifeguard story does go back to the very top of the conversation when you suggested that autonomy is gonna be a major theme of the future here because what you just described is an extremely autonomous operation, not an automatic operation, but an autonomous operation which has decision-making and rerouting and such internal to its own processing. Yep, yep, all stuff, marine learning, artificial intelligence, and may not be in our lifetime, Ted, but in the future, it's gonna be the Jetsons all over again. And then quantum computing comes into the picture as a way to support all of that, I suspect, and a thimble-sized raspberry pi of some kind, it's a Q raspberry pi, because we're gonna have to get a lot of computational power or some means of doing strategic optimization in order to make good strategic decisions and check them left, check them right, check six, and make sure we're still in the same game we started in. So there's artificial intelligence when you get down to it. Excuse me, what was that? Sagan? I didn't hear you last time. I said, ultimately, it becomes AI, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, augmented reality, something like that. It's gonna be where that expressed layer is so you can see what's going on. And a human who's not trained can interact with the thing and get meaningful results out of it. So, yeah, like really 100% on that. So we have a confluence here of technology at the miniaturization and high reliability level and with standards that are starting to wrap around it, a autonomous functionality which affects automatic car driving, automatic airplane flying. In fact, you're a pilot and you know the old story, right? The crew of the future is gonna be a dog and a pilot. The pilot's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to bite the pilot if he tries to mess around with anything in the cockpit. So. Yeah, well, I have a similar story to that but we used to call him the flight engineer, so. Okay, I will keep that one. I think I heard equivalence to that and also the first officer, his function in life. But so we have these things converging and then the artificial intelligence and the computing capability, computing power, get about four vectors that are coming together that they're gonna define this future. So the future we see or that we'll experience probably doesn't look quite like what we have today in terms of the operation and the means by which we operate. We have one guy on one drone and a radio communication link between them and we're gonna see something different. We can't describe what it is yet but it won't necessarily have a lot of that with it. Oh yeah, no, I do see the day when one person will be able to handle multiple platforms, doing multiple different jobs and, you know, but right now, I'm not sure we're there yet in the commercial activities but it's gonna be coming in the future as Moore's law, computing power getting stronger, you know, more powerful every year. So we're gonna get to that point pretty soon. What's most incredible to me having been in this for several years myself, I came out of man aviation basically, but the fact that there are people paying attention to this at the standards level, whether it's standards coordination like ANSI's doing or standards that RTCA's doing or standards that ASTM is developing or international collaboration, the fact that there are people thinking about that is probably the most satisfying measure out there of all because we know that it isn't being done randomly, the development work is gonna have some constraints on it and some order to it and some sharing and some expectations that the user can now rely upon because that's what at the end of the day it's reliability, reliance on the system and reliance that it won't work wrong for you. So hats off to the folks who are doing that and they're probably behind the scenes. I mean this magazine, ASTM magazine, nobody probably knows about it but I was struck by this, just one comment here, this just came yesterday, the monthly review, great article about reliability in terms of putting it in fairly understandable terms, it's something that we say but we don't quite know what it means and the things that are being looked at from a standards point of view are just incredible and they're all over the place, even to the point of the turf on the NFL football fields is being re-standardized to avoid impact, to lessen impact damage on players and such. So how do we make a salute to the standards people of the country that are sitting out there doing this stuff and not getting any recognition but they get these ballots from ASTM every now and then and have to scratch their heads and work their way through them? How do we give them some kind of recognition or some kind of appreciation? Yeah, that's a good question. A lot of it is the folks who work on standards of firm industry and the benefit that they do get even though they may not get a thank you for it, we try to thank all of our folks for supporting it. They're not paid, they do it on their own time, their companies pay for them to support it and what it does is having a set of standards of interesting consensus standards makes the guesswork out for industry. They know what they have to do to commercialize their product to get approvals for their project and I think that's worth its weight in gold. It's a big benefit to industry and it's a big benefit to the buyer. Standardized production procedures, standardized design and construction, standardized platforms, makes it more cost effective for industry to produce and it makes it more cost effective for the commercial entities, the operators to purchase these platforms, especially when they know what they have to do. So it kind of gives them standards, gives you a playbook on how to operate and that's why everybody participates. They don't want to keep guessing on what they have to do every time they go to a civil aviation authority. That's a very mature attitude and we thank the standards people who are getting no recognition or on a world for what they do and anything we can do to help make their life easier would be great. And especially you, Phil, for coming on the show and telling us about this and for your leadership in ASTMF 38 and at AUVSI and other locations you've been in and NOAA and Navy and such. So thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks for helping us locally here a couple of weeks ago. Very, very effective and very well received. So we're at this point gonna end the show. We've had our half hour of discussion and it goes by pretty fast. I didn't get a chance to talk about half the stuff we wanted to talk about, I'm sure. What, Phil Kennell in Bethesda, Maryland, are you? Is it? Yeah, work at Silver Spring, Maryland. Silver Spring, okay. Bethesda. And okay, and thanks very much for coming on the show and we'll see you next at the next logical conference, I'm sure. Thanks for coming on, Phil.