 There's the afternoon, folks. There's the noon, actually just a little bit of afternoon. Ted Rawlson here in our ThinkTech studio overlooking downtown Honolulu, where we run our weekly show Where the Drone Leads, talking about subjects of this incredible and interesting and important part of our collective future here, not only in Hawaii, but wherever we may be. And speaking of wherever we may be, we have on standby waiting to join us on this show by Skype. Mr. Gene Robinson of Waverly, Texas, deep in the heart of Texas, outside Austin, standing by, been on the show a few times, and Gene, we're going to have to get you out here and body and flesh at some point in time. And there may be an impending near-term reason for that. So Gene, in our last time interacting with you, you had just set like a world record for endurance on an incredible drone that had every kind of launch assist except JADO going on, I remember from the videos. And you've been involved in a question-based search and rescue. You've been involved in drone operations to support public safety law enforcement. And coming from an aviation background is a fixed link aviator, which I might add is an excellent place to come from. So with all that history and background, and you're not in jail, so that's a good sign. What's been going on in the last year or so as you see it coming forward, factors that are going to influence and affect this drone business in the year to come? Well, one of the things that we've been very pleased with is that since August of 2016, which I'm sure you remember that is a very auspicious date. That's when the FAA passed Part 107 and it made it easy and more accessible to anyone to get a Part 107 license and be able to fly their aircraft. One of the things that we're very excited about is the fact that public safety agencies are beginning to truly embrace the possibilities that they can incorporate drones into their protection of their constituents. And that is a very important part of being a public servant. So we have made a very concerted effort to try to get information to the public safety agencies that they can act on some very good information so that they can make the proper selection and move correctly into the area of drone use and not get into any trouble with the ACLU or any of the constituents that might have concerns with it. That's a really important piece and I'd like to sort of latch on to that and maybe we can collaborate in some way. We work here with our public safety agencies, law enforcement, the state fusion center and such and Hawaii is in a unique situation. It's only reachable by air so you have nine hours alert when there's some guy coming that you need to think about hard. So we have a different situation perhaps than you have but just the same need to get education and knowledge out to folks. Not only knowledge about the specific performance of this UAV or some other UAV set out there but also the legal aspects of the utility aspects and information that deals with privacy and public rights protection and landowners issues and such. In fact, our legislature, our city councils need that same information so they can execute laws or rules that are enforceable and are effective. And I think this year in our legislature we had like 25 bills that contained something about UAS, about eight were of the substance. Zero made it through the filtering process of legislation. So we have a really compelling need here and things you're doing we could really need to latch on to and I'll share back to you what we're doing and we'll see whether these things come together. But education, outreach, getting the word out there in this complex or simple of form is appropriate like this TV show and you're welcome to come on any time you want. We can do this thing five days a week and not have run out of things to talk about. So how are you moving forward in this world of outreach and education? How do you reach the legislature? How do you reach to the city councils and such? Well, one of the things that we've done Ted is first off we had to provide some structure lawmakers and decision makers do like structure. When we to that end we have come up with a program that is designed to educate the public safety decision maker. And it is a very structured and very regimented program because as you know, we always I'm a fireman as well. So we are used to following procedures and reading manuals and doing things by the book, if you will. So we came up with a 100 hour course that gives them not only the knowledge that they need to make the proper decisions on mission assessment but also the skills because one of the shortcomings with part 107 was is there was no requirement for proficiency. And as you recall, I flew in your fine state on the island of Maui and the island of Maui is very windy. You get up in the morning and you can fly perhaps a little bit in the morning but then after that the wind picks up and you either need to have the aircraft that will handle the wind or you're down for the day. So those are the kinds of scenarios that we have come up with and that base of experience that I've collected over the last 14 years doing this has come into play as being able to contribute to this actionable intel that public safety needs. And I got to tell you, I never expected that my storytelling would be as valuable as it is today since we started doing this. So that's great. So getting the story out there, composing it in a way that it makes it makes sense and deals with the realities of a particular situation are what you're using as your frame of reference. I want to think about that and see how we can copy that. We have here, the state of Hawaii is one of the five states now within the pan-Pacific unmanned air systems test range and we have the co-authority out of FAA through University of Alaska to penetrate those extreme climate situations you mentioned. We have 35 knot winds standard. We have 2,000 feet per minute updrafts and downdrafts along the co-allows. We have saltwater intrusion. We have a lot of rain and we have GPS out. We have GPS reflections. We have comms out. We have a pretty nasty environment for small low-powered systems running up against extreme topography. So we understand that and need to capitalize on it. But nevertheless, there's the underlying need to get information distributed and passed out. And to one point you made about the FAA and the 107, I thought it was, I think the FAA is the apple of the world's eye right now for having moved forward. For all the years that they were receiving, not apple of eye views and arrows and slings, they're getting a lot of credit for what they've done. But there's an underlying trick that we've, I wouldn't, maybe not quite a trick, but an interesting thing that people have to be aware of. The obligation to remove all mitigation or mitigate all risks and remove all risk is on you, the operator. So it used to be on the FAA to read all your paperwork under the COA days. Now it's on you to know all this stuff and figure out how to take all possible actions in order to generate high safety. We're experiencing a situation like that here. We have some work starting on Saturday adjacent. It's in Class G airspace adjacent to an active airport. And it's like, you know, 100 yards off the departure end of 08. And we have jump ships going up and then jumpers and jump ships coming down. We have sail planes being towed up and then sail planes and tow planes coming down. We have sometimes the National Guards in there with helicopters. We have occasional pass-through aviation. And we have UAVs now in the mix. And so really the NOTOM system isn't by itself sufficient to get the word out there. It's Class G airspace and it's, we've had the tourist helicopters in the middle of this too. So we're taking every step we possibly can to inform all the users of that airspace that we are gonna be there. And 11 pounds is not a significant weight for a rotor blade to think about or transparency on an airplane. So anyway, we're kind of in the same area you are. I'd like to know more about your course. Is that available through a university or what's the background on that course? Well, it's actually, I've kind of pivoted on you Ted. We are formed another company called Drone Pilot Incorporated. And it is myself and some other public safety career law enforcement individuals as a matter of fact that have a very strong aviation background. And we use that experience to come up with a very regimented and very structured course with complete SOPs, SOGs that can be incorporated into the public agency's own guidelines. And we think we've done a pretty good job of covering most of the basis for part 107. And then of course the main thing is for skill. The certification process is a part of the way that you assuage your city council and your commissioners because you can tell them that you have had appropriate training. You have had to go through what amounts to more flight time than what a manned aviator would have to do before they could even apply for their full scale license. So this is one of the ways that we can try to allay any fears that someone might have that it's another guy out there, it's a hobbyist out there that's trying to fly a drone around and he's gonna wreck it, he's gonna cause damage. We promote a very, very safe operating environment. As you said, we have to mitigate all those risks and for public safety, it's even more so important. So we have taken that because we feel like that our public safety operators be they fire first responders, EMS or law enforcement should adhere to a higher standard. As far as we're concerned, the only passing grade that is acceptable is 100%. That's interesting. You're kind of talking about standards and you're talking about an implied form of the justification or accreditation associated with the standards. And 107 is a form of standard. Even though you might not do, even if you're doing work under a COA, you might not use 107 per se, but the 107 provides a substantiation for your piloting knowledge to operate under the COA. So there's a tie there. And the use of having law enforcement people or public safety people have a 107 would do the same thing. It would give their leadership and the legislature and the people who care about liability, that would be the State Attorney General and such, the confidence that there's a base level of knowledge going on here. And that leads to the subject that took place just two weeks ago, tomorrow in DC, where ANSI gathered all the 70 or 75 different elements within the industry and began to pull together standards and began to find out who's doing work and what on standards, not just the technical things like structure or radio or propulsion, but also the operating standards for building damage assessment after a disaster of some kind. So the work you're doing is would help them move forward a long way. Have you engaged with that bunch yet? That's Charles Warner and not a Virginia and such? No, we haven't, but I will say that we were involved back in the early days, 2006, 2005, with the ASTM subcommittee 208. And that was part of the standards, this ostensibly gonna be part of the standards that we were gonna use for the drone industry. And that one languished for approximately 10 years and we really didn't get a document out of it that was usable, but aside from that, we went to NIST, which is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And we began working on standards there and I found it very interesting in your slideshow there that you put up the NIMS org chart and we addressed that very thing on whether we were on the tactical side or the logistic side. And as far as we're concerned from a standard standpoint, we're on the tactical side. And we wrote procedures and I wrote procedures for insertion into the incident command. So, we have worked with other standards authorities, but we have not done anything with ANSI as of yet. We are still working with NIST. As a matter of fact, part of our proficiency flight test standards have been approved by NIST. So we are using those standards. It's an accepted by that agency and we can prove to our pilots that they can at least pass some minimum flight safety standards with that. So very important and it needs to continue. But yes, we would love to be involved in this. Practical applications, after we take a one minute break here. Okay. Is Steven Phillip Katz on a licensed marriage and family therapist? And I'm the host of Shrink RAP Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever wanna get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Thursday, folks. Thursday afternoon. Ted Ralston here at downtown Honolulu Think Tech Studios where the drone leads the second part of our show. We're having a reminiscence and looking forward to great future issues as referenced off that reminiscence with Mr. Gene Robinson of RF of late technologies and the other affiliations in the great state of Texas. Gene, welcome back on board again for us. Thank you, sir. Ted. And you know, the discussion we're having about education, about promulgation of information and working with a law enforcement folks, we have an opportunity, if you will, coming up in Hawaii in October that I wanted to put on the table and chat with you about. It is with a private operation but it's got every aspect of law enforcement and public safety built into it. But rather than the public safety law enforcement people being at the lead, the private enterprise is at the lead. It happens to be a triathlon event and therefore there's a lot of many issues in something as complicated as that. But the nice thing is it's got full support of the law enforcement and public safety folks but the lead is the commercial entity itself. So they have a business reason to make this successful and a business reason therefore to use UAV to the greatest advantage and even a business reason to keep UAVs that are unauthorized from being in the game. I just came from a discussion this morning on the counter drone side of the game with some folks on it, the IEEE conference here in town. But I wanted to toss that idea your way from all the experience you've had in search and rescue and fire safety and fire tracking and such in terms of an event, a triathlon. Typically they involve a water event, two and a half mile swim, something like that in a 50 mile bike ride and a 25 mile foot race distributed over a lot of territory strung out participants and then clustered and also strung out observers. Many chances and opportunities for individuals to become injured, as well as people to disrupt something if that was their interest. How would you see that kind of a lay down influence in a positive way by fixed wing, rotorcraft, hybrids whatever they may be from your experience? Well, situational awareness obviously is what we strive for and many incidents. So that situational awareness would be perfect for the organizers as well because they would be able to see things occur as they occurred. Of course they would need people who are experienced to be able to read the feeds and to see what's going on and to be able to interpret things from the air. Little bit of a specialized skill but not much of a stretch. But I think one of the more important things of it in interestingly enough, we were approached by the PGA to give them a security scenario. And one of the things that we discussed with them obviously drone countermeasures is a big deal. And there are some very many really interesting electronics that are coming out to sort of geofence and to deny entry to drones that are not registered with it. And I think that's probably one of the more prominent and promising technologies out there. And you can look at it, it's a department 13, it's called the Mesmer. And you can actually whitelist drones and that allows any drone that is authorized to fly in the area and it will deny entry to any road drone such as a lucky loo or someone who's just trying to get a better view on the race. It keeps them from interfering. And I think one of the more important aspects of that is visual observers. Your visual observers have to be out there and they have to keep an eye on the sky and they have to know which ones are authorized and they have to assess threats. And unfortunately in the world we live in today, we have to look at each one that is not an identifiable friend as a potential for a threat and it's unfortunate. So the ability to be able to identify those and look at the payload package and determine is it a camera, is it a tube, is it a square, is it something that looks different than what you would normally expect to see so that you can act on it and potentially prevent injury to not only onlookers but the racers themselves. So it is very much an air boss situation that requires some coordination with the observers and good communication but it can be done. We've done a couple on a smaller scale like that. And one of the things that you can do to allow the folks who want to get pictures and they will cooperate with the organizers is to give them a place to fly. Allow them an area that is a prime spot. If they want to go flying, you can park right there on the point and you can fly your aircraft and just keep it within so many hundreds of yards or whatever and you can get a nice turn on the race. And then anybody else that is not in that area or flying outside that area can be considered rogue. That's interesting. That's sort of a geofencing of a different form in an administrative way. But discuss that company you referred to or the product, Mesmer, is it? It's Department 13 and these guys have some really big brains and I've been speaking with them for several months and they have a product called the Mesmer. And it identifies drones via their RF signature and their ID and it can either prevent them from moving forward into the zone or it can allow the white listed drones to operate freely without any cause at all, any problems at all. And one of the more important things where this is as public safety, we've heard all sorts of wild countermeasures where you can shoot them down or you can throw a net over them and so on and so forth. The problem with that is once you do that, that aircraft becomes yours and all the liability of it falling from the sky is on your shoulders. And unfortunately, that's just the way the law works. So with Mesmer, what you can do is you can just have the aircraft land in place wherever it is when it reaches that fence, it will just land in place and it's a secured area and you can retrieve the aircraft and it's, nobody is hurt. And it's the safest alternative that I've seen so far to shooting down, net capturing or anything else that I've seen on the market. That's pretty interesting. And does it require the knowledge of the identification on the communications line or does it determine that from what it sees in their RF spectrum? How does it actually work? Well, if I knew how it actually worked out, I would probably be under all sorts of ideas and wouldn't be able to speak about it anyway. But it's a very smart system, I do know that. And they haven't given me the exact algorithm as to how it identifies and will segregate frame versus foe. But it has been effective and I've seen demonstrations of it and I've been pretty impressed. Well, that's interesting. And obviously as time goes on, this problem becomes so widespread. I mean, every positive use of a drone is gonna need this kind of coverage to make sure they're not being shadowed by somebody. Even something as what you might call it as innocuous is a graduate student in coastal geology doing work on beach erosion. If he's known to be a guy who's good at getting grants and he's out flying his drone over the North Shore getting imagery on the beach erosion, somebody else who wants to steal his grant would know exactly what he's doing, put his drone up and try and beat him at that game. Even something as innocuous as that or certainly our power company here using drones on the power lines would like to know, they got four up, they'd like to know who that fifth one is, exactly what's he doing and he goes on from there. So I'll hook you up with, if that's okay with you, with Charles Warren and the guys who were sort of leading the charge on this current ANSI activity and your work would accelerate them, I think, nicely down the curve. The other thing that's interesting for us to think about here in Honolulu, you know, it's a fairly compact city with, if we think of drones as one drone, one operator, one mission, we think of maybe three or four at the same time if we had that empowerment area you're speaking of where you can go off and enjoy yourself. But if we had a delivery service going or something like that in Honolulu and we had 500 going or worse than that, 5,000 going, exactly, I really boggled my mind, I can't quite see through how we're gonna get to that point. Certainly technology will get us there but are we gonna run these things over the roadways, over the power lines? We got so many boundary issues to think about and with a lot of them up, we're gonna have a lot of issues with wind, crops and performance, for example. Wind blows strong, can't get back on the way point when you do. So, Eugene, your thoughts on complex urban environments and how we're gonna make this all work. Well, once you get past the GPS issues, because when you get in the urban environment with reflectance and the concrete canyons, you lose GPS but in a perfect world, I'm gonna use the ugly initials, A, D, S, B. I think that's gonna be a key component to all of the scenarios that you just brought up with the de-confliction, determining the safest path. I think that there's probably gonna be another industry that opens up that is going to actually lay out flight paths and corridors for drones to fly that it had the least risk to property on the ground, to general aviation in the air and to other drones and those corridors will probably be very tightly controlled and there will be some that are set aside for deliveries, for Amazon, for whoever else, the drug store that needs to get out there, they will have access to those airways and the smaller, the hobbyists will be denied those areas and it'll happen, it's gonna come but we'll have a Jetson style sort of situation where there'll be a lot of different things flying around up there. So we're gonna have the situation, we're just like Department of Commerce auctions off the radio spectrum, we're gonna have Department of Somebody else auctioning off airspace and air spectrum to the high zero. I think you're right and it's all gonna be a risk-based sort of situation and there are gonna be some primary ways that'll go for big money. Okay, so big money, big commerce, risk mitigation, risk identification, all these factors are gonna form this future and you'll be part of it and we're gonna watch very carefully and learn as much as we can from you in this. Let me do hook you up with Charles Warren and with our own triathlon activities and we'll keep this going and keep learning from you. So Dean, Robinson, thanks a lot for coming on again and we'll see you again as soon as you are interested in coming back on. Thanks for having me, sir, it's my pleasure. We'll see you next Thursday.