 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It is noon on Thursday, folks, downtown Honolulu, Ted Raulston here, and for those who manage their life based on our show, as you know, this is the show where the drone leads on Think Tech. We bring subjects and experts and people who have questions on the show and talk about the themes, the topics, the issues that are riding high in the world of drones these days. On our show, the very progenitor of the whole idea of the show, Jay Fidel. Jay, I just want to make sure you can follow the script, right? What script? There is no script. Read the teleprompter if you need. Okay. All right. Okay. So we got Jay back on, and actually this started, you and I together probably four years ago. Yeah. This began upstairs here in the building. Yeah. Downstairs. Was it downstairs? Yeah. Well, actually, yeah. Well, it was upstairs where the panel discussion was. This is one of my favorite stories. Go ahead and do your favorite story. This program, a luncheon program with the Hawaii Venture Capital Association in the Plaza Club upstairs. That's right. Upstairs. Right. Right. And you, of course, were an aficionado in drones. We included you on the panel, and after the show was over, you and I spoke. And the idea is how could we perpetuate that discussion? How could we keep it going? How could we make drones ubiquitous in Hawaii, you know, associate drones in Hawaii together going forward? Or not. If that's appropriate. Get the right thing. Right? Yeah. And you said, you know, can we use your studio to meet? I said, of course. Come meet. Bring your friends. And you met. You didn't have a show. You just met. And then one day, a show. Why don't we do a show also? Let's do a show on drones regular. And that was like, hmm, what? Four years ago? It had to be four years ago. Yeah. By now. And you've been doing it ever since. It's been great. Well, I've really enjoyed it. It's an opportunity to bring a lot of these complex issues to bear and look at them from different perspectives. And especially right now, we're getting ready for the 2018 legislative session. We had a bunch of legislation last year that was structured, had to struggle to work its way through and then ended up hitting a brick wall in the legislature. It was enabling legislation. It was protective. It was supportive. And we got to fix that. Well, as an example, we can develop that kind of theming right here on this show because we bring people together and ask questions and talk about what we need to do to make it work in the future. Now, you probably have a question or two if I'm in history. Last time you and I were together was probably about a year ago, you know, and I had lots of questions for you then about the status of drones, both from a technological point of view and also a legal and political point of view in Hawaii. And I want to follow up on that. And in that sequence, so you have a drone on the table. I think you always carry them around like I carry my keys in my wallet. I thought it was going to be a true believer. Yeah. And it looks very high tech. My observation is the propellers seem to be a little bigger. It looks lighter, smaller, more high efficiency. And the controller, I don't know what you call this, a controller or whatever. Looks like it has a lot more functionality than the earlier ones. And so, you know, I suspect that there's been a lot of development in drones such as you and I could go to a store and buy. I don't know about the military side of things, but the general flow of technology seems to be way higher than it was even a year ago. Am I right? I think you're quite right. Things are moving fast in the half life of a new design, maybe two years in the industry, placed by something that's got superior capability. But that really brings up an interesting point. Here in Hawaii, we have a lot of interest in STEM. A lot of the kids are involved in STEM programs in the high schools and into college and such. And that's where this really has a chance to grow fast is in that when you get the young kids involved and the schools involved. And because this is a small miniaturization, you mentioned that already, the things are getting smaller and getting more reliable. This is the kind of business that could actually take root and exist in Hawaii because you don't need a big factory. You need 2,000 square feet, 5,000 square feet, something like that, and you can do a lot in that. What about the cameras? Have the cameras evolved? Well, that's another interesting question. The future of this game is not so much in what you might call the mule aspect. The thing that aviates and has props on it and carries the payload. It's the payload itself that matters. And beyond the payload, it's the analytics you can apply to which you collect the software that you can collect from the payload to get all kinds of information that we don't have today to support infrastructure, public safety, law enforcement, environment and such. And those again, sensors and payloads are really small. On this guy here, the cameras are maybe half a cubic inch in terms of total volume. That's it. And there's a little antenna to pull the video down. There's more than one. And it pulls it right down to a screen like that. More than one camera. What's that? This free on this guy. Oh, my goodness. And of course, the payloads that add another three. So the sensors are getting miniaturized and getting much more rugged and reliable. And that's, again, even smaller than the system itself. And that's a perfect business orientation for Hawaii. The University of Hawaii makes micro-sats, cube-sats with small sensors on them. So we're already in that game. And somehow we have to go forward in the world of sensors, payloads and analytics software as a theme within Hawaii Aerospace. Well, cameras have to be one of the most important things. And before we get to the question of using cameras like this on video production, like we do. Such as ThinkTech? Yeah, such as ThinkTech. Because it's very relevant. Let's talk about disaster management. Let's talk about using drones to observe and see what happened after some disaster or another. Remember, you had one fellow on from UH, from the Department of Geography, a lot. Chuck DeVaney, right? Chuck DeVaney. Hello, Chuck. Shout out to Chuck. He went to, hi, Chuck. Always a good guy. And he went to the mainland, I think. But he had a lot of involvement in developing drones for disaster management. So how has that evolved? How has he evolved? Well, that's Chuck's doing very well. He's in Las Vegas at this point in time as a young child and new family and all, and working in the business as he had been here in Hawaii. And that's on our point. Places on the mainland do have some advantage because they have large aerospace manufacturing associated with them, as such as we don't have here. So we have an advantage in it, we're small, and we have capability at the university. The disadvantage we have is we don't have an ingrained aerospace culture to work with them. So we have to go develop that. And that's what Chuck has done on the mainland. In any case, the world of disaster management, disaster preparation, and that sort of thing that you're referring to has actually moved forward more in the legislative enablement side, perhaps, and in the technology side. The technology is pretty much what it has been, is cameras and analysis capability. But the question is getting that capability to collect information associated with the disaster scene in the hands of the right people to make decisions. I think we're slowly gravitating towards the perspective that the incident command system, the ICS, part of the national incident management system, NIMS, NIMS, ICS, to go together. That's the framework for how all disaster management occurs. And what we've got to do is find a way to inject this capability within that existing structure, which has legal definitions and that has protections and such from a liability perspective. And we have to operate within that framework. So in the case of UAS or drones, and by the way, this station and this program have a rule about no monologues. So if you hear anybody doing a monologue, you can shut them down by asking them. No, I'm interested. Okay, good. The monologue just got shut down. Sometimes monologues are okay. Not often, but sometimes. You heard that both, okay, from the boss. So anyway, working within the incident command system, which means having training, having qualifications, having certifications as the case may be, like anybody in disaster management is an important aspect. And understanding how information flows within the incident command system so that the right information is delivered at the right time is something we have to construct in terms of workflows. And then that leaves us something on the monologue continuation here that to me is really interesting. If we start depending on systems like this in disaster operations, say the Marco Polo Fire down here, if we start depending on these things, then they have to be robust and reliable enough. Are they? Not necessarily. To handle all the conditions that would come at them in that kind of a situation. Well, it's clear that, you know, for disaster, you don't want to put human life at risk. For example, I saw something recently about the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. And they were using drones to see the damage, using drones to try to figure out what to do. And it's actually worse than they thought because of what they found out from the sensors on the drones. You certainly don't want to use human life, put human life at risk for that. And more and more, I think, you know, we will see drones as a primary function of drones to do that. And I'm pushing aside, you know, battlefield applications, but disaster management. So it's really interesting. If I gave you, you know, a billion dollars, I'd like to do that actually, Ted, but right now I'm... How about right after lunch? I'll just work on my lunch to develop drones like that, you know, that would be robust, quote, whatever robust means in order to deal with any kind of disaster management at maybe greater distance than this can handle. What would you do? How would you use that development money? What kind of new, robust drone would you design? A program for, did you say a million or a billion? I said a billion. A billion. I thought that's what you said. It could be no... Yeah. Essentially no budget. Go for it. I think we could work that out. I would make myself the king or something like that and make you the emperor. Yeah. And we'll work... I'll put that up and down below that, but seriously, there's a structured process called Systems Engineering at the University of Hawaii. It's under the VIP or Virtual Integrated Program construct, which allows a really complex problem like you just outlined to be then decomposed down into the pieces that have to be addressed. In the case of disaster management, if you wanted to have full robustness, full reliability and full trust in the system, now we first, perhaps, look at the weather conditions under which we're going to operate. In Hawaii, we're looking at, say, 40-knot winds, a lot of turbulence, and we're looking at rain and salt water, and we're looking at thick, moist air. So we have a bunch of things that the environment makes us deal with. Have to write those down. Okay. How are we going to handle the winds? Well, we're going to handle winds by a lot of performance margins, which means we're going to have to have a lot of radar climb or other extra performance available in order to compensate for the wind turbulence. It means we're going to have to have a rapid response command and control system to keep this thing stable during turbulent conditions. Yeah, this reminds me of a video I saw just a few days ago, maybe of the MIT newsletter, about not drones, but robots, the new models of robots, they're smaller, they're much more compact, they're stronger, they're faster, they're more agile, and that they're walking along, I use the word walking, I think, visibly, and you push them like that. They get right back up, and this is the same kind of thing with the drones, so a gust comes and pushes it all across the field, and it knows enough to get back where it was and stay there, and this is the kind of resilience I think you're talking about when you use the word robust. Yeah, I think so, because if the fire department starts depending on these, you can't say, well, I can't fly it today because it's too turbulent or too windy, or in downtown Honolulu, where you have a lot of what they call signal bounce on the GPS signal and such, and I don't have a good GPS signal, I can't fly it because I haven't got a good GPS, well, we've got to get around that, we have to have a DGPS or some other means of replacing that function. How about range? Range, that's range and endurance kind of go together in this game, and that requires user input from what the user's perspective might be in terms of what's needed in the open range. Well, I mean maximum range, I mean, we're not talking about a situation where the FAA says, and I think that's going to be old anyway, since you have to have a line of sight. You must be able to see it. That's got to go away, that's ridiculous. We're talking about disaster management, which could be 10 miles away, where this drone has to fly longer distances and stay in the air for a long time to do any real payload. And I guess the question I put to you is, is the direction going that we go out 10 miles, we survey the area, we send the signal, the data back, and it's interpreted back home on one of these, maybe, or a computer that draws the signal from this controller, and then we let the drone fail. We let it drop or explode or whatever it wants to do, drop in the water, because we don't care, it's disposable, right? Or do we want to build it so robust that it can go to 10 miles, send the data back, and then return to base? Which one is going to prevail? And that's, there's probably going to be both answers, because at the very low end where you can afford to throw it away at $500 or $1,000 a pop, perhaps that's acceptable. Once it hits, say, $10,000 or $20,000 in terms of value, it's going to be something you're going to have to get back, because at that point in time, you're truly depending on it, and you can't not perform the mission. But let's talk about how we might take your, the challenge you raised here, how are we going to define, from a Hawaii perspective, the robustness, the reliability, the performance, the range, how we would think about that, as an exercise for all of us here in Honolulu. Let's take that on after we get back from our first break. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. We have this crazy thing going on today. I was just walking by and all these DJs and producers are set up all around the city. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. I do musical talent and then sat down and kind of... And for our faithful viewers, we're back here on the eighth floor of the Pioneer Plaza building downtown Honolulu Think Tech Studios. Ted Rolston here with our show, Where the Drone Leads. And the very originator of this show, the person we can hold accountable for all of us in the last four years, J. Fidel. The power of accountability. So we were talking before the break about how to take, how to think about requirements in the first place. And I hadn't finished that piece of the monologue. And then the question you brought up over the break was, how do we think about this as it applies to Hawaii? How are disasters in Hawaii? So let's try the two of them. Back on the issue of systems engineering and the VIP process. We have to take all the issues you mentioned, whether endurance, reliability, sensor analysis, sensor, weight and payload. Those are each individual items that contribute to the mission at the end of the day. What we have to do is determine the connectivity between that and the transfer function between that little piece of the game and the mission. And the more critical and the more important from a timeliness perspective have to work on them first. You work on the things that are hard first and you work on the things that are easy or gonna be coming to you anyway in time. You decompose the problem into the individual pieces, generate the solutions and then start composing the solution up the chain. You're not using a pronoun, who does this? Oh, there's teams at UH that are really good at this. The UH has again a good program called VIP under water guys involved, Zach Trumbull, Wayne Charoma and that bunch and got a lot of students who are really good at this because we too much focus on one thing, electrical or mechanical or ceramic or something but they all have to come together and play in the solution. So it's a solution that matters not so much the individual pieces. Well, what you're talking about is if it was an academic experiment in the engineering school, but I should be able to go out and buy a drone. I should be able to go out and buy a drone, get a license, we haven't talked about that yet and I should be able to fly it up alongside the Marco Polo during the fire, after the fire, survey what's happening, what has happened, what is happening right now today and get a snapshot without a helicopter at $1,500 an hour and it will and I should be able to do that, I suppose as a government, a government certainly should be able to do that, the fire department, the city, the state, anyone, emergency management guys and for that matter, and I put this question to you, why can't I just do that myself? Say for the press, say for the media, say for ThinkTech. Why can't I do that? Why can't I go down to a shop or image or wherever I go and buy one of these guys? I mean, somebody is selling them and be confident enough that it will work even in the back draft of a fire. Okay, and that's the situation that we face today and there's many aspects of what you just brought up in terms of what the problem statement is. The things you can buy today were designed to somebody's specification of what the needs were. In general, is to generate commercial sales or something like that. And it may not have considered the back draft, it may not have considered the high turbulence, it may not have considered the fact that there's a lot of smoke in the air or that we have salt water wet hands when we change batteries. So there's certain designs might have considered that and that's what you would have to search out to find them. Unlikely to find all that in an existing solution today, which is why we go back to the point of having a set of requirements written for something that's gonna work every day, come hell or high water and... In the rain. In the rain, right. And in the case of the Marco Polo or any other structure fire we have around here, there's other things that have to be addressed as well, obviously. Well, there's people's rights of privacy which can be suspended under certain times, but still there's issues of privacy. People down below who are at risk if the thing falls out of the sky. Well, there's that risk which you have to mitigate. All risks have to be identified and then mitigated. That's the way this thing works. So in the case of the people on the ground protecting them, the rules are clear, you gotta be, you can't fly over people. And what that means is whatever failure modes this thing might have, how it might come apart, how it might fail, wherever it might distribute itself under a fault or a set of faults. That perimeter, nobody can be inside because if it did, if those events did occur you would actually hurt them. Now you've had a number of guests on this show in the past year who are in the business. They find places to buy them. And I went to the National Association of Broadcasters program as I did last year in April of this year and I saw incredible offerings for the broadcast industry of drones this size and smaller and bigger and all the sizes in between doing all kinds of things but especially camera work. And I say to myself, industry is really putting some money into this. But the guests you brought in, the young fellows who are entrepreneurs here in Hawaii who are trying to actually make a living renting or using drones to take video whether it be after a disaster or just for making movies or something else. I would expect that crowd, that industry crowd. Now you talk about the School of Engineering but I would expect that crowd to be working with the School of Engineering and determining all the parameters that you're talking about so that this is regular, this is de rigueur that it happens automatically in every case and we always consider these risks and problems and operational issues and so forth but it doesn't sound like we've gotten there yet. Well I think that we have a really robust business community here. We have Mike Elliott and drone services in Hawaii. We have Greg O'Olufua coming up with his systems which are more at the enterprise level and we've got very strong roots in the ground that are growing in that direction. All of them are tied with the current manufactured systems and in terms of serving our more stringent requirements we still have a ways to go to get that but we're actually doing that. Last like two weeks ago we had a gathering of 80 people from the public service sector in the UH Stadium and had a session on that very subject. How do we generate requirements from the police to fire the environmental people? How do we pull those requirements together? And it's a slow process because you don't think about, you don't think about requirements for your car. You don't think about requirements in a technical sense and we both buy things. We go to whatever Costco or Best Buy hasn't buy it but the intelligent buyer who creates his structured needs and then gets some serve, that's kind of how the military operates. So we have a military perspective which generates extremely expensive systems that are very competent and we have the commercial electronics industry which deals with a broader base of less. And not necessarily so robust. Right, because they're dealing with a whole different. Well people are not gonna put that much money into it. So we did that. It's a toy for them, yeah. What's that? It's a toy. So a lot of people go down to shop or image what have you or right away to Amazon. So the question is? This is not professional stuff, it's a toy. The question is where's that break point between what's a toy, what's an entertainment, or something you can depend on for business. We could talk about that at some point in time. Now I know we don't have a few minutes left here but you mentioned earlier. Yes, we do have rules on this show. We have a hard start and stop time and monologues and all that stuff. He's doing pretty well I think. Monologues, right. No, you can do high marks. Anyway, and for the whole show it's a great show. But one of the side effects of the show is that you actually consider legislation, bills and policies and you advance them in the state legislature. Absolutely. And for that matter a city council. So I just, you made a comment before about how you were developing a legislative agenda. And I think before we shut the show down here you should say what it is, what you hope to achieve and why and what kind of bills will be pending. Sure, we'd like to do three things. I think and I'm speaking for myself now but I would say this to anybody who wanted to hear it. We've got to get a very straightforward and simple to understand enabling legislation so to speak that allows the police and the fire and the public safety to use with proper controls these systems going forward but also prevents against nuisance or malicious effects that could harm them. For example in a Marco Polo if they're flying down there and somebody shows up with his own drone someone's got to give, you can't have both. So we have to have a control mechanism for those who are uninformed or unlicensed. You know the last week an airliner on the mainland was brought down because of a drone. I did not know that. They had to make an emergency landing because the drone was in the way they were concerned that it would bust up the engine. It's really horrible and there needs to be regulation and sanctions for anybody who does that. And that's part of the confusion. That's coming at the federal level. So we don't want to have any state preemption of emerging federal rules. The federal rules are forever changing and not there yet. So it's like a standoff. Then we have to have state orientation in terms of privacy protection and landowner issues and such. And then we probably need a professional component in here as well. If you're gonna be a surveyor or you're gonna be a disaster management guy you probably have to obey some stipulated set of capabilities. So we have like three different levels of enabling legislation. Some of the legislation some is not. This is not the first time either. You've been doing this as a pattern for the last few years. So I don't mean to take any credit for this myself. We're just gonna try to stabilize it. Who's the champion in this particular area in the legislation? There's probably half a dozen I think. They're right. Good champion. And getting them together beforehand if we can do that without getting a violation of the Sunshine Law and that sort of thing was what we have to go do. So we'll take that on. So the last question I would put to you when we're running out of time. We are over time. We are over time. You know the guy who runs this place? What? Can you make a deal with the guy who runs this place? Yeah, I'll talk to him. You'll talk to him. I'll talk to him right now. So the big thing is developing an industry here. And I know there were companies making fixed wing drones back a few years ago. Williams Aerospace comes to mind that went out of business. And I wonder if we, and we have a special dispensation from the FAA we're allied in a special region with Alaska, as I recall. That's correct. So my question to you is how are we doing in that? Are we really advancing on that initiative? Are we taking advantage of that opportunity? Are we developing an industry? Absolutely, you're referring to the hookup between Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, now including Kansas and Mississippi called the Penn Pacific Unmanned Air Systems Test Range which is managed out of the Applied Research Lab at UH on behalf of D-Bed. And that structure is moving forward in terms of integrating across the university the capabilities to use that, the test range. We've got arrangements with the university's own properties as well as the Isle of Ani, for example, as test ranges. And we've got three customers lined up that are wanting to use the range for testing. So it's moving not as fast as it might, but it's moving. Well, let me say that this show is really important in it. And I was never so convinced as when the United States Federal District Court asked you to come down and do a panel program on drones to educate the federal judges. That was something. And that really puts you on the map. I really enjoyed that. And we'll do it again anytime. And please make sure they don't cut the last three minutes off the show. You know the guy who cuts here, so. Yeah, I'll say something. You can talk to him. Okay, Jay Fidel, thanks so much for coming on. Okay, see ya.