 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Thursday noon, folks. Seth Rolson here in our Think Tech studios downtown Honolulu with our show, Where the Drone Leads, where we bring to the public and to our trusted viewers, the current stories, breaking news and information and really critical information for them on the world of drones, dronism, and where it's all going, which is what we call Where the Drone Leads. With us on the show today, far away in Las Vegas by the magic of duct tape, cell phones and Skype, we have with us Hawaii's own Chuck DeVaney, UH graduate and UAS entrepreneur at large, currently living in Las Vegas after sampling the life in Washington, D.C. and such, which is where you go after you graduate from UH apparently. And standing next to him is Dr. Trent LeKazek, who is the president of FlightWave Aerospace and is sitting on and bursting with information for us on a release to the public of a brand new hybrid trike, copter, excellent new configuration drones. And we'll hear all about that in a minute, but you guys are standing backstage. We can see the equipment behind you at the Las Vegas Convention Center where the inter-drone is taking place. And the carts moving things around. So inter-drone's in first or second day right now for this year. Tell us what kind of moods and what kind of themes, what kind of sense are you getting from the directions that are coming for some of the discussions at inter-drone? Go ahead and take that one, Trent. I'm gonna be the human tripod. All right, hey, pleasure to meet everybody. I'm Trent LeKazek and yeah. Okay, system. And I really just think pleasure to be able to work in Hawaii before. We've been there a couple times with early, early prototypes. And the one we've got here today is one of our evolution of a lot of our operations that we've done there in Hawaii. The drone floor, the inter-drone exhibit floor today is really busy. It's full of excitement and a lot of people that are running around just trying to learn more about it. I think one of the things that's been really interesting to see is the mix of not just the individual sectors or elements in the value chain of drone, the companies that are making the tools, the components, the cameras, the software to make it work, but also there's a lot of people running around here who are looking for drone solutions because they're trying to get a small business off the ground with drones as one of their key parts. Oh, it's a really awesome mix of and really big buzz of all the people that are just trying to solve problems here. Well that's pretty cool. So you have the problem owners who come in looking for a solution and you have the people like you who are generating the components of solution. You get people like Chuck who do the analysis and this sort of thing for the data as it's pulled together by whatever sensors you might have. So the whole group is gathered. You know what's cool to me, and we talked about this on the show several times in the past, the world is starting to realize it needs to pull together requirements from a user perspective in order to drive this whole thing in the right direction. And we're starting to see that. I think at the end of the month is the NSI gathering in DC starting to pull together the technical standards and things. So the business is starting to happen like a business, isn't it? That must make you feel pretty good, Trent, having been in on this for four or five years now and having a product that is certainly at the cutting edge. Of course it got partly developed on Linai and partly developed in Kanayohi Bay so you would expect it to be on the cutting edge as it is. So tell us about FlightWave and Edge and how that's all moving forward. Sure, yeah. I started FlightWave right out of grad school. I was working on my PhD at Stanford and then my co-founder there. And right as I was wrapping stuff up I was encouraged by a couple of people including one of my mentors, Bill McGillibray. He works in the Coast Guard as Science Liaison and a good friend of course, Pets, who has encouraged me to try and get a drone for marine applications off the ground here. And so that's kind of where we started. I got into UAVs and drones way back when in 2012 or 2013 when I was part of a project, a research project that went out to Oku, American Samoa. It's a little island in the middle of the Pacific. He kept going from US to Hawaii onto Australia and stopped halfway. That's where he would find it. But we went out there with a little DIY quadcopter and tried to map coral reef with it. And that was a pretty tough experience for us. The drone could only fly for 10 minutes. It was really windy and every second of the flight of the mission I was worried about this thing accidentally landing in the water. So fast forward to today and we're trying to solve a lot of those problems and those pain points with the flight wave edge. And flight wave edge is a vertical takeoff and landing airplane. It has a unique configuration with two independently tilting propellers in the front and one very large propeller in the back for endurance and hover. And wings, very high aspect ratio wings for endurance and cruise. As an airplane, this vehicle will fly for two hours which lets you cover a really large amount of area to 100 kilometers if you flew in a straight line. So yeah, it's a beautifully molded vehicle made out of fiberglass. It has some really awesome components in it. It's extremely modular, packs down into a case and the payloads are also modular and we've made them agnostic in the sense that our nose cones are open and we have a lot of different types of sensors that we can fit in the payload into the nose cone. So yeah, I actually have a box here with the edge in it. Let's take a look. Okay, obviously we have the edges not put together here. Okay, there's the fuselage component. Yeah, you get to see it in pieces and I'll put it together. It has four camera cameras in it and it goes on the nose here and twist locks like a camera lens, like a DSLR camera lens. So that's our payload interface. So now that's the vehicle. This is a flight wave edge and I'll back up so you can see the whole thing. The vehicle, the aircraft is a 1.2 meter span. I'll take the tip, it's pretty tall. Yeah, but yeah, the parameters here, as I mentioned, they tilt independently tilt and that's how we do hovering and that's how we control it and yaw. And that's also how we get it set up to fly as a forward flight vehicle. So as an airplane, these two colors tilt forward, flies as an airplane like that. That is a pretty incredible piece of equipment you're holding in your hands there. You have all the free worlds aspect ratio locked up in that one vehicle. So nobody else can claim aspect ratio like you can which is gonna be performance and it's gonna be performance margin. It's gonna be thrust margin as such associated with that nice wing you've got there. And this has come a long way since those days at Kuhuku with the first instantiations and that was something in itself and then of course over on I as well. And it's really interesting that you arrived at this from your own practical experience and your own attempts to solve an environmental problem. So basically extremely personal user needs have been built and baked into this design. And you've got marine orientation and I think I might have heard somewhere in the past maybe a 40 knot wind criteria built into this. So there's just about nothing mother nature can throw at you that you can't deal with. That's right, we designed it to be weather tough, weather hardened, the environment, the marine environment as I'm sure you all know is a really tough place to operate. And when we set out, we tried to pick a technology that would be stress hardened in the marine that if we could handle anything over the water we could handle it anywhere. That's where we came from. Yeah, Ted is mentioning the old prototype. So this thing used to be a foamy flying wing with hot glue and popsicle sticks essentially. And there might have been some duct tape in there here and there too. Yeah, exactly, duct tape. But we've, this vehicle now is much more refined of after-created as Ted mentioned is really important. It's, I have an aerospace background. I studied aerospace engineering in graduate school and that's one of the places where we drew from. We knew that the wing translates to high endurance. And just the big trick though when you get to make a vehicle like this with the highest penetration rate is how do you make the structure strong enough but light enough. Really light. So that's really great. And you could just even think of embedded sensors in the wings and other things like that to take care of interference between antennas and such. And there's a long future for this kind of a configuration. Yeah, radios, the radios. And we actually do have some sensors in the wing like a compass, magnetometers in the wing. So it gets it way out of the way from all the interference of the motors. And it snaps together like Legos. Like Legos. Yeah, that's cool. And then let's switch over to Chuck for a moment. Chuck is kind of a master in my mind of the world of sensor analysis and the software applications that are used to make sense out of what drones and UASs collect. Chuck, how would you see that world evolving especially when you see something like what Trent has developed here and how those two come together? Well, it's really nice to see an aircraft with the type of capability to be able to take off and land from the deck of a ship and be able to go out and do a survey or do a location mission, sort of the con-ops that this particular aircraft was sort of built around. What I'm, my company's moving more towards is advanced video analytics where we're able to take this computer vision and be able to seek out those objects or colors in the water and a control center, the location of that object, survivor and the like. And that's pretty much stemmed from a lot of the video analytics that our company already does in the gaming industry, using computer vision for facial recognition, counting chips on a table, so on and so forth. So in terms of taking advantage of what Trent's done here, you would need a sensor package that supports a computer vision analysis routine and that could be looking at the video stream, it could be looking at stills, it could be doing color, it could be doing blob, it could be doing polygon extraction, there's all kinds of extractions you can create once you have the imagery in your hand. And that needs to be delivered in such a way that somebody could easily exploit the information and disseminate it to those stakeholders that need to act upon it. So it's quickly, rapidly deploying an aircraft and instantly getting actionable information that is invaluable in multiple verticals and applications. So you guys need to go to a bar and on a napkin, write down what the payload looks like that would provide that information that can fit into Trent's aircraft. And then we need to get it out here, out in Hawaii, where we have needs building every day. And we also would like to get our hands on a few of these elements and products and start running them through functional and reliability testing in our fairly extreme and challenging environment out here. We have the high winds, the high vertical shears, we have the saltwater intrusion. So the very things that Trent's designed for, we ought to put them to test out here as soon as we can get our hands on one Trent. Well, it can really fast to do that for you, man. It's funny you mentioned a bar, we got all these drink tickets that we got in here. Okay, so what happened there? So the napkin and the bar will do well. Let's get back to that in a minute after our break here. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, and power and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. And we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. This is the second half of our show, Where the Drone Leads. Thursday afternoon here in Honolulu. And a little bit later, Thursday in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Chuck Devaney, our Hawaii expatriate, and Trent Lekezic, who is the president and CEO and founder of FlightWave Aerospace, are standing by. And we're going to take a look at some of the things that we've done here at Sister Power. So we're going to take a look at some of the things that are standing by. And they're at the Las Vegas Convention Center. They're apparently not in the slot machine area, because you don't hear that traditional noise going on. And they're apparently not on the show floor, because there's exposed pipes in the background. So exactly where are you in the convention center? Looks like the loading dock, Ted. A loading dock, OK. Well, that's kind of interesting, because a loading dock is what you need when you're shipping product. And that's about what you're getting ready to do, shipping product. So we were talking before the break about how what the two of you do can come together nicely in a sort of a full service solution for those who are running around the very convention center looking for solutions. Yeah, and there's definitely a lot of people showing up with a lot of different products to address just that, the all-encompassing, all-in-one solution. And I think more and more people are realizing how hard of a task that actually is to have an all-encompassing, all-in-one aircraft that's able to fly in multiple environments, whether it's wind, saltwater, heat, potential rain, and the like. And I think what we have here, Ted, is as close as you're going to get to what that solution is, especially in terms of the acquisition component. So if somebody wants to get one of these trends, what do we do? Who do we tell them to go see? Sure, yeah, we have a website. We have it listed there and available for a pre-sale campaign, lightwave.aero, like an aero plane, lightwave.aero. And you'll find the edge, a lightwave edge listed for a $1,000 deposit on a $7,500 airplane. The airplane itself, which is a whole kit, includes the box that it comes in, a nice hard-carrying case with film inserts, as well as the airframe, wings, the tellers, two batteries, charging stations, a controller, actually, a controller with an integrated tablet in it, and you'll have to pilot it. And then on top of that, you customize it with the tailors. There's lots of different tailors that you can do from there. So go and check out the website at lightwave.aero and you can pre-order, pre-order your drone there. Okay, so that's good. And for a measly $7,500, you get the capability that would probably cost $70,000 to $100,000 even four or five years ago. Sure. And how about the software? Yeah, but a lot of work to make it like that. How about the analytics of the software and the pieces that follow from the collection of the data? Sure, yeah, this drone is meant as a starting point for all of that. We do our best to integrate the data that comes down and plug it into the next step of the value chain, meaning our data gets conditioned with the pictures that you get, for example, if you're doing a mapping mission, the pictures get to be located. And you're able to pass that on to your analytics solution after that, whether it be X4D, if you're making a map or other kind of solutions that you might be working with. Obviously something that we're always interested in learning more about and integrating to new analytics solutions. And this is maybe one of the reasons also where we're working with UH and trying to figure out how to do some really awesome projects on that topic. And that's the piece that's gonna go on for a long time and keep developing. That's the whole side of the analytics side of this game. And that's, again, what Chuck represents. So having the two of you guys meeting and talking together is probably gonna generate something that those of us who can just be amazed at what you do are gonna produce something for us in the next six months. Yeah, I have to agree, Ted, I have to agree. And there's no better time than the present. And that's actually something that we're working towards right now. We've got a really well-established, well-educated team of developers on board ready to tackle the issue. Okay, and the issues are interesting. They're not just the issues associated with collecting information and doing something with it. We also have the traffic management issues, the sense and avoid or see and avoid. And we have the issue called counter drone that we all have to think about. So it'd be really interesting to see how those two products you've got here, Chuck on your on the left side and Trent on the hardware side, how they play in that future role. I just, we just challenge people all the time. Take Honolulu, Chuck knows it very well, Trent knows it very well. Imagine two drones over Honolulu today. No big deal, you can find the NOTAM, you can probably figure out who they are. 10 drones over Honolulu. Well, this is getting kinda complicated, especially if you're the power company and you own eight of them and the other two aren't yours. Or we had a reefing, a grounding situation on the reef here a couple of, some time ago. A, the reef was being looked at prior to and after the vessel was removed because you gotta go pay someone to repair the reef. And a drone operator was hired to go do that work. A second drone operator, not hired to do the work, but copying the first one was in there, collecting the same exact imagery with the idea of undercutting the other guy. So business in its often twisted forms is starting to show up. But imagine if we had 500 drones over Honolulu. Exactly how are we gonna manage them in a traffic management sense when some are in delivery, some are collecting information, some are just out for a recreational ride. So thinking that whole complex adaptive system and how that's all gonna be affected by the sensors and the capabilities of the aircraft. In fact, Trent, this is cool because I do believe that I read somewhere that one of the issues we've faced in the unmanned traffic management area is inadequate performance to recover from missed waypoints or from a sudden emergence of a strong wind or a penetration into the flight area by some unknown bogey. So having a lot of cross-range performance and a lot of performance margin, such as what you've got, is maybe gonna be one of the key factors that enables unmanned traffic management in the future. Yeah, it's funny you bring it up because I was sitting on a panel yesterday about sense and avoid. And we were talking a lot about UTM and unmanned traffic management and ACAS, which is airborne, including an avoidance systems. So there's a lot of things going on, obviously with our vehicles that can fly a long way and we'd like to be able to fly at the on-line of flight. And that's maybe one of the reasons that we got into the marine space as well is because over the ocean you get to do, it's a lot more safe to fly on our way because there's less things to run into. Definitely with the endurance and the range that we can do, we're really interested in how we can make this vehicle fit in the airspace and fit in safely. It's gonna be an interesting problem because we don't have, it's a small vehicle and we don't want to have to add a lot of sensors on top of it to make it play well in the airspace. So I think it's gonna involve a lot of participation in terms of a centralized system that knows where all the aircraft are. But we'll see how that works out. And that's a really interesting situation. We don't think we have that today anywhere near that in the manned aircraft world because we operate by separation and by assignment, which is not necessarily the best way to handle the UAVs. But I like your idea, start over the ocean where the risks are low and the ranges are long and get something to work there when it's kind of a crawl, walk, run approach and then bring it ashore, kind of like man, right? We emerge out of the ocean and slew it ashore at some point in time and then grew legs. And so they're copying in that same exact direction. Definitely, yeah, good model. And so Chuck, but this goes back to you also. The whole world of unmanned traffic management needs desperately needs the analytical component in order to make it function. And all the things Trent's talking about, the setbacks and the holdout zones and all the things that are gonna be required to prevent things from running into each other. Even maybe some synthesis where you don't have sensors. I hadn't really thought about that, but that also leads to modeling and simulation as a way to characterize what's happening from a trend perspective. So Trent, we have trends to worry about. Absolutely, and there's a lot of work going on. Obviously, Trent was on a panel today and I unfortunately wasn't unable to attend that, but there's other center components that could still be useful. For example, there's a group called Planar Monolithics in Maryland who are working on a radar system for collision avoidance. And as you know, radar really doesn't discriminate in terms of its capability. It can see in the dark, it can see in the rain. It only really gets affected primarily by temperature, I believe. Yeah, yeah, well Trent knows more, but we have a ways to go, I think, is what I'm getting at before we're actually there. But I've been really impressed how small the radars have gotten in the last two years. In fact, when we first started this, we were doing a little background research on what we could get our hands on and definitely was thinking this was gonna be along the horizon. What used to be like a five or 10 pound system is now down to 600 grams in some cases. Still not small enough for us, but it's getting really close and honestly there's some vehicles where 600 grams makes a lot of sense, especially for the bigger ones. Once we get our hands on a few, we can start seeing what we've got out here from sensor payload systems that might assist. We have colleagues in the UH and also research areas in the UH that are dealing with very small radars down in the 50 gram domain, such that instead of making them articulated, just put multiple units on there to get the right coverage. So this is all developing in that direction, as you say, and of course the algorithms that read the radar and decide what to do with it are interesting in combining acoustic and radar and visual and thinking of the algorithms that do all that. That's where Chuck comes in again. We have the algorithms which doesn't weigh anything. It weighs as much as the Raspberry Pi perhaps, but keep adding it on. So capability can keep growing as they begin putting the analytic layers on top of the sensor sets. And the future is just like wide open, especially for students, especially for kids who wanna see things move fast from an idea to its inception as opposed to the normal pace of the aerospace industry. I mean you mentioned your self-trend. Three or four years in this game and you've gone from some foam and fabric and taped to a really nifty composite, well-designed system with again, all the free world's aspect ratio locked up and nobody else can get it. And that's a very short time. You could never do that in the full-size aerospace environment. So there's a lot of rapid reward. There's a lot of rapid learning. There's almost a scrum approach towards life in this domain. So and that's where Chuck and his guys come in because the software work is gonna be certainly in that same timeliness of six week type responses to problems. So what a great future is in front of a lot of us and especially for the kids that are coming up in high schools and in colleges. And we will absolutely be encouraging our kids when we get our hands on our first two edges out here in a very short time and put that into the middle of our NASA work and put it into the middle of our environmental work and even probably our public safety and law enforcement work. So we're looking forward to that and can't not also cheer up the side just gonna take care of all the analytics for us. And so with Chuck, we'll depend on you for that. And I'll depend on my team. There you go, your team. And another collaboration, getting all the stuff to work, unless we all collaborate and share ideas, the situation will kind of bog down into proprietary solutions as such. So I think you guys are great at the front edge of that, pushing in the direction for collaborative and shared solutions with open architecture and such. Anyway, we are approaching the very end of our show. Trent, first timer on the show. Thanks so much, Trent Lechazek, the president of the founder and originator and great thinker in the world of really clever solutions to complex problems. Really appreciate what you've done there. And of course, Chuck Devaney, master and entrepreneur of UAV operations and missions and analytics. Thanks very much for joining us from the Las Vegas Convention, the back room at the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Intergrown show for this year. And we'll see you guys again on the show. And once again, thanks very much for being with us today. Really appreciate being on. Thanks so much for having me. I'm glad I was part of it. You bet. Okay, see you guys.