 Folks, Ted Rolston here in our studio downtown Honolulu think tech studios overlooking gorgeous downtown Honolulu with our show, where the drone leads when we talk about current topics and this incredibly expanding world of drones, droneism, and good things and bad things about drones. And today by the process of semaphore and cell phone, we have with us clear across the entirely across the island of Oahu. We have standing by on coconut island. We have Mr. Josh Levy, who has many affiliations with University of Hawaii, and with him is Mr. Mark Heckman, who is the director of education at HINB. Welcome on board gentlemen. Hey, Ted. Good to see you. And thanks. Okay. It's great. Again, you know, it's just kind of interesting last week, last couple of weeks, we had people on from DC by Skype and 6,000 miles and Skype had no problem. We're, we're down to cell phones and semaphores here across the island of Oahu. That's what you get when you have the koalas in the middle of you, I guess. Anyway, welcome on board again, guys. I know Josh, you've been on the show once or twice before, Mark, first timer. And you guys are involved in one of the most important aspects that anybody could ever imagine. That's education. And what you're experiencing from my knowledge is the use of unmanned air systems in the, in the expansion of understanding of our marine environment in ways we might never have ever imagined, let alone seen before. So you're kind of in the middle of this very important part of our expanding knowledge of our own environment here in Hawaii. Tell us about it a little bit and what you've been doing out there on coconut island today. I had a group coming out from the east coast, well, actually just from the mainland called Ocean Matters, their environmental group, high school students they bring out. You know, I just want to do something or learn something new while they're here. You know, I was looking at, honestly, I was looking at turtles in Coniwe Bay and the fact that turtles, suddenly we started seeing a whole lot more of the sea turtles in the south end of the bay than the north. So then that led me to the question of who's looking at this locally. And I talked to our researchers on island and then I talked to some other folks and, well, turtles are kind of hard to work with in some respects. You don't want to change their behavior, often in the process of trying to count them or look at them, like if I took the group out and snorkel around the little patch trees to look at them, we'd be altering their behavior. So then I started thinking about what are the other options and coincidentally, we had just interviewed a new faculty member who had worked with drones and humpback whales. So that set me on the drone path. So interesting, so you're thinking of using drones in a new way here to run some kind of a noninvasive survey or examination of turtle behavior in Coniwe Bay and coming up with perhaps seasonal patterns or other factors that affect how turtles behave? Somewhat. My next thing would be to actually get one of the researchers interested in it, let them go on that research end, and then I'm looking at this, I'm looking at all these drones I see around me. And to be honest, I'm not personally a drone user up to this point. I mostly looked at him as an irritation when I was out surfing or something like that and suddenly one was above me. But on the flip side of it, one of my volunteers had told me how wonderful he found drones and then I started looking at their uses in research and science and going, these things are really interesting. There's some things we can do here that we can't do any other way. It got my interest going and then I started thinking about how do we train appropriate use of these, how do we get this tool out there to get used in the ways that I would find interesting and compelling. Turtles are a magnificent start just because they're a charismatic megafauna, but then I'm just as interested in corals and they're equally applicable there. And you've got a guy right next to you who has really opened the aperture on coral examination and coral behavior to that extent. Josh? Yep. So today I gave a little bit of a talk about the previous work that I've done in terms of mapping the reefs out here in Kaniyia Bay and just trying to shed some more light on what we can see with these corals and understand more about the life cycle, the ecological dynamics between different colonies, in ways that we couldn't do using either previous in situ surveys or other remote sensing techniques. So yes, today it was kind of getting the kids involved and having them understand that they can use these drones in good actual scientific ways to just going around taking cool pictures and annoying people on the surfboard. Okay, and that's a great part of this whole discovery period here because you can infect those students now with this appreciation and with the desire to go figure out how to make it useful in their environment on the East Coast. And I'm sure there's a lot of issues that are commonly felt on the East Coast and the South Coast and out here in Hawaii, for example. Coastal erosion, it goes everywhere. Environmental issues go everywhere. Evasive species go everywhere. And coming together with sort of a national body of best practices, if you will, sensor management, the analytics that go with it, even to the point of archiving information and making it available through notification systems. All of that doesn't know any boundaries. It's useful and beneficial everywhere. Yeah, exactly. And the really cool thing is these kids don't necessarily want to pursue professions and education specifically in the environmental or the marine science realm. But even just telling them a couple of the examples that we went through today kind of opened their eyes in terms of other ways that they can use it, maybe in the terrestrial realm or other coastal examples. So now they have their minds full of all these different ideas that they can use these drones for. That's great. So a little bit of exposure goes a long way. We just had an experience yesterday. We had about 80 people together covering the range of public safety, law enforcement, environmental protection and such in Honolulu. And I think for the first time, a lot of those folks were exposed in the same way to these value statements that are perhaps not evident until someone has showed you. In fact, Josh, you gave an excellent report yesterday on your use in the coral analysis area and how that could expand into traffic situations, public safety, even site construction for that matter. And so once a little bit of inspiration gets put out there, people will take it and we'll start using it, modifying it and suggesting ways forward that are broader than we might have thought of ourselves in the first place. So it's great to see you doing that same thing to the students. Now there's another piece here. As you know from our discussion many times, including yesterday, there are now several national best practices if you will collection affairs going on where organizations that are either 501s or part of the government are attempting to collect in-state user needs for drones to be used in positive ways. And the more that we can collectively define what that use case is and feed that to the manufacturing side of the business, the sooner we'll get the kind of systems that are useful and more useful to what we need them to do. And so I would encourage, in fact I think we should make an assignment, Josh, while you're there and Mark, we need to have a sort of an HIMB imprint on what the functionality and the utility should be for in this case managing turtle behavior understanding or managing whale behavior understanding. Marine animals in general, coastal erosion, the things that deal with the marine environment, what a great thing to do to have HIMB be the suggestor of requirements, operationally as well as technical requirements, that would make drones most useful in your domain. Yeah, that's a great idea. And yeah, hopefully when this new faculty member comes in and starts to really establish using UAS within HIMB more so than what I did, I think that we can really start to get going and get people excited and try to figure out the various needs of people on island. Yeah, just to match that, when is that new faculty member showing up, by the way? Honest, I don't know. We're under construction right now and it's a bit crazy out here to find everybody's space. So I've got to admit, I almost purposely, you've been trying not to pay attention to all that. Okay. The reason I ask, is it up on the UH Manoa, we'll be putting on somebody on the staff on Tuesday who is sort of a light mind. And so we'll have a very strong power center in Manoa in this range and if you've got it on the island, we can tie them together. Yeah, yeah, it'll be great. I'm really looking forward to it. And then my side of it is tying some of the education pieces together with the researchers to support their research, get the research out to the public and get the public involved in kind of citizen science aspects of it, where and how it's appropriate once we work all these details out. You know, today that was part of what we were doing. I told these high school students that they were my guinea pigs. We had a very rough game plan. We let them go in and try some things and then give us some evaluation back. We had some little drones. We had them flying in the classroom, which was pretty hilarious. And then we took them out in the field and we put some deep boys out in the water and we had a flyover and then we had the students swim over to see the difference in the whole thing. So it was a good, successful first shot and then we'll go from here. And that's great. And once again, there's no reason we can't include educational needs in this summary of requirements that I think we have a continually higher obligation to take action on and pull together and generate a Hawaii input to this national collection of user needs. The kinds of things we're talking about here are some very simple things. How much wind tolerance do you need? That is, do we need to operate in 30-knot winds, 40-knot winds, or is 10 knots going to be adequate? How about operating in a marine environment with extended period of operation? Typically, if we think of this one-day operation, pretty much everything will last for one day. What if we think of 30-days continuous use away from home, where there's no maintenance possible and you've got salt water on your hands and there's a lot of salt air? Those kind of things are extremely important to pull together and articulate in a way that relates to your HIMB mission. And there's no other way to get that information into the manufacturing side of the house than stand tall and make those comments known. Along those lines, another issue that we came across today was that kids want as much hands-on experiences as they possibly can. So we had them flying the drones inside in the classroom to kind of minimize the risk of various injuries to them and to the drones themselves. But what would really be ideal is having these kids go out and flying over the water or whatever your subject is in real time. But because we're limited to this only two-hour time span where these kids are getting exposed to these drones, we really have to make sure that we can try and develop a platform that is extremely easy to use, very hard to break, and possibly cheap enough that even if it does break, it's not the end of the world. So that's another one of those standards we've got to put in there. That's it. And the hardest thing is creating requirements and creating standards. The easiest thing to do is use what somebody else has built and find a workaround that makes it get the job done. But coming up with those requirements and articulating them from a zero basis is really, really tough. So, but you're onto something there, Josh. And what we should do is let's sort of take that on seriously and talk about... We have one minute to think about it during our break here. And we come back after the break and talk about how we're actually gonna collect those requirements and push them forward after this one-minute break. My friend, mother, what big eyes you have. She said, all the better to see you with my dear. That's so old. What are you doing? Okay, cool. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Push. And this is over. You're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child, every parent, every day. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. We are back, folks. Ted Rawson here, downtown Honolulu Studios of Think Tech, Hawaii. And in our show, we're the drone leads on board with us today. At 30 miles across the island of Oahu over the Koalaoza in the Kaneohe Bay, is Josh Levy. And I believe Mark Heckman is there with you. Okay, and welcome back on, guys. First time for Mark and several times for Josh. And again, telling the folks here that the reason you don't see two people at the podium here or somebody on Skype is we've elected today to work by semaphore and by cell phone. So thank God we have some backup communication schemes here, but there's Josh's picture, so you all know what he looks like. And I don't think we have one of Mark. We'll have to fix that. Anyway, you guys are working with some students that are from a completely different environment out here in Hawaii. Learning what our view of marine sciences is all about and you're exposing them to the needs to have sort of a structured thought process to understand how to extract information and need for the environment. And that turned into the use of drones. And we were speaking before the break about that kind of experience that you've got. Just that one right there could turn into some very well thought through and useful requirements that drones must possess in order to be completely useful in this environment. And you spoke Josh before the break of simplicity of operation. So if we take that for a moment and think of the experience level of 16 year olds who are raised on cell phones, raised on video games, and not raised on semaphores, which we're using here, with that level of background that they've got, how would you think that we could pull out of that experience what a user requirement might be for the operation of the very drones you had today in terms of safe and effective command of a flight from the preparation to the execution to the handling of any kind of faults that might show up? If you just, you know, you had one minute to think about us, you should have a really well thought through answer here. But really that's what we have to do. So let's just discuss that for a moment. What would you take from that experience into a writing down requirements for how we make these systems very easy to operate and therefore useful? Yeah, so we have two systems that we were using today. It was the Parrot mini drone. Yeah, the Parrot mini drone. And then there's this other yellow one that almost looks like an FPV race, right? I forgot the exact naked model. But honestly, we could combine both of them together. It would have been the pretty much ideal platform because the Parrot drone is extremely easy to use. So, you know, it can hold altitude, hold position very easily, the remote control, and then kind of move around extremely simply. The other one was a little bit harder to maintain altitude. It was a little bit more squirrely. But that one had a forward facing camera which you could then use with the FPV screen. And it also had a physical remote control which makes it a lot easier to handle than it is just using stuff on an iPad. So, kind of merging those two systems together but then also taking into account that, as you were saying, these kids have been raised on technology that makes using joysticks that kind of stuff pretty intuitive for them. So it really only takes them a couple of tries to really get something down to be able to fly these platforms pretty well. So all you would need is really a couple of spare parts. That's the majority of the issue. But I think the forward facing camera and the FPV really gives them, you know, that's step forward and being able to transition to some of the more professional systems quite easily. And then also being able to, well, it also depends on the question that you have to answer, right? Do you want them to learn how to map things? Do you want them to learn how to do special cinematography stuff? So, and that all depends on, and so that'll make the actual camera on the system vary a little bit too. So you just have to make these things really as robust as possible, but also expect them to be getting off the ground and flying quite quickly and quite easily after a couple of bumps in the road. You know, that brings back a thought. If I can interject a thought here for a moment. About 10 years ago, daughter Bonnie, who was a art director at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, caused my wife, Margie and I to come out to New York to visit a show she had put together. And it was all about, and here is it, this is the Museum of Modern Art. You wouldn't think to see a lot of technology in there, but they had technology examples and the point was how well the user interface to use a technical term is defined and executed has a lot to do with how much utility you will get out of a technical product. And they had many, many examples all the way from the security system in the New York Stock Exchange to housing for homeless, to medicines and everything, shown here's the same common function, well-designed and poorly-designed, and the well-designed always had a much better operational record than the poorly-designed even though the technical function was the same. And an example they gave was, again, very striking for the Museum of Modern Art, they had a mine detector used in the military. And the mine detector had a electromagnetic sensor on one end and some batteries and control systems as such and a soldier would take it and figure out where mines were and walk through them or between them. A standard military issue thing looks like a military issue thing and what a well-designed, articulated, cool-looking thing like it came out of a motorcycle shop with the same exact internal functionality had a much better success rate of use and a much expanded use and was pushed to its limits by the users because it was fun to use and it looked cool. So there's something about what you just said and it makes me think we could sort of maybe engage maybe the art department at UH or the creative media department at UH, something like that where creativity, more so than just technical functionality, is the order of the day. And it would be based on your experience with the kids. It makes me think if we could create a program, I'm imagining here now, but a program where we bring kids through the university or the community colleges and such, in a place where we have a test range that's an indoors test range and you get to put all the variations out there, low light, high light, strong sunlight, obliterating the screen, bulky systems versus good systems and let the kids have that experience and find out from that hands-on type of involvement. Are there some patterns here? Are there some vectors here? Are there some strong themes we could pull on that answer the question that you've raised? Well, Ted, it's somewhat of what we, our approach we use actually. We use these two platforms that we picked up quickly that were quite different as Josh mentioned, and we let them experiment with them. And the Mini, the Parrot Mini drone has two eyes, so to speak, and it has a, quote, cannon that shoots little beads and stuff. Very engaging, runs off the iPad. And the other one, as he mentioned, was much tougher to use, but it had a point of view camera. And after it was done, I was talking to him and I'd asked them from the very beginning if they'd be very honest about this project. And I said, so it sounds like if we're gonna use this for classroom, we'd use just the Mini Parrot one and they, and they said no. They said, actually the one that they looked the least successful with, that I should have that as well. We need both levels. It's almost like you need one that has like a sport driving and a casual driving button in your car, right? Where you can go, okay, this is the dumb level. We'll basically fly it up. This next button takes me to that next level where it's gonna get a little more squirrely and this next one takes me to the button where it's totally on my command and I'm gonna have to be really good to run. And we noticed, of course, as they tried to run them into each other. Classic, you know, student behavior. But then that brings up that whole thing of, and as we're looking at designing, and it's gotta look cool. You're exactly right. I used to do exhibit design, but I've got that in mind too. But then the safety issues and some things like that, watching how natural uses progress. It's fine to say that, you know, this drone of dangers don't get close to it. And in a classroom setting, you go that other way. What happens when you run this into somebody's head? Which is exactly what the students started to try to do. I had already tested these drones by putting more in my nature, isn't it? Hey, I might have to step out in a little bit if I do. I just wanna thank you in advance, by the way. Well, your timing is perfect. Timing is perfect, Mark, and your comments are right on. And it's something we should think about at the university level and the community college level as part of our outreach. We ought to have a back reach also that pulls this kind of information in so we can use it with the people who are collecting requirements at the national level. So let me take that, let's assume we can do that, and not quite sure how. And we'll make that connection with them. And at this point, I think we are actually running into the end of our show period as well as your time. And I wanted to thank Mark Heckman, first time around the show. We'll get you on for real sometime, Mark. And Josh, of course, you'll be on the show a lot, I think. And stand by and look for good action on this coming Tuesday when we get you back. And anyway, folks, thanks so much for being on. And we'll see you all again next Thursday on Where the Drone Leads.