 So welcome to our first interview talk. So let's say this is a virtual round table. And in this edition, we are talking about the UAVs and what's inside these ingenious flying mega-talents. And so it's all about drones and their fields of applications and their fields of areas of use. So between now and the interview hybrid event in September, we'll be keeping you up to date on this regular basis on the technologies and solutions of the geo-IT sector. And today we will talk, as I just mentioned about the UAVs. So next month, I guess it's about BIM and then in July, we'll talk about GMSS and yeah, we'll see. We'll also send you the invitation soon. So a few words about myself. I'm Denise Venzel, I'm Communication Manager at HinterExpo and Conference. And I worked for Intergeo since 2012. There the event was also held in Hannover, like this year. And you might also know me from IntergeoTV, our YouTube channel. So everybody, please take your seat and fasten your seat belts because we're going to take disguise with Philip Armon and Kai Wachwitz and Dr. Rainer Keischer. Because we want to discuss the current legal and technical developments of the UAVs and who will show you in this hour, the talk is about 50 minutes or one hour, the applications both in the research stage, but also applications which are already in use and of course about all the potentials in these flying mega talents. And at this point, I would like to say thank you very much to my editor-in-chief, Monika Reichheider, who kindly helped me with all the questions and talked to all my guests before. So thank you very much, Monika, and also for joining us today. And of course, my colleague, Juliane Janker, who's also with us in this talk today. Juliane Janker is also working in the Business Development Team for the HinterExpo and Conference. And you also, of course, know her very well from the energy events for ITER area solutions. So also, hi, Juliane, because you will take care of the chat. So if anybody has a question today, please text in the chat or raise your hand. And Juliane will take care of it. Thank you very much, Juliane. Hello. Perfect. So I would say we would like to stay with the introduction of my guests. So to my right, I don't know where he is for you, is Philipp Armand. Philipp Armand is the manager of Unmanned Laser Scanning Business Division by Riegel, Laser Management Systems. And he has been working for Riegel for over 10 years, initially entrusted with both terrestrial and mobile tasks. He has been responsible for the UAV-based product segment for several years. And he is the technical interface between sales and development. His topics are the platforms, sensor technologies and their integrations. Hello, Philipp Armand. Hello. Hi, where are you today? Where are you calling from? I'm actually in Austria in our headquarters in Horn. Oh, perfect. And your background picture is awesome. Yeah, thanks for that. Perfect. So, and then next to Philipp Armand is Dr. Rainer Keischer. He is currently working on the DivaCopter project. He studied agricultural sciences and earned his doctorate at the Justus Liebig University Institute for Agricultural Engineering in Gießen. So he has worked for the Institute of Technologies since 2006 and was appointed deputy director in 2013. His specialists and principal areas of work are steep slope mechanizations, robotics, plant protection, equipment technology, and since 2016, spray drones. Hello and welcome, Dr. Rainer Keischer. Hello, thanks for introducing myself. I just want to say the project we are talking about or we are about to talk about is DivaCopter, right? Yeah. Okay, and this is the connection to drone. Thanks again. Thank you very much. We start with that immediately, but we have a third guest today. It's Kai Wackbeitz and Kai is CEO and founder of Drone Industry Insights, Germany. And it's a market research and consulting company for commercial drones. Kai has a degree in aeronautical engineering and more than 22 years of experience in manned and unmanned aviation. Long time, you look much younger, Kai. And from which he has developed in depth knowledge and extensive network. His expertise spread over numerous international consulting assignments, and he is globally recognized as an expert in commercial drone applications and all industrial sectors. And I know Kai as well from the Interair Solutions at Intergeo. Hello, Kai. Hi, thanks for having me. So you're in Berlin, I guess, or? No, I'm calling from Hamburg. Hamburg, ah, okay. Today I choose an authentically looking bedroom as a background picture. Ah, okay, yes. You just softened your background. So great. I see about 50 attendees are with us right now and everybody who joined us just right now, please take your chance to ask questions in the chat. Juliane will take care of questions and also post these here to our experts. So we start with the first round. And the first round is about the current legal situation. And Kai, I just talked to you right now. So let's have a look at the market potentials of UAVs. And at the same time, the question of the legal basis for the use of drones and well, I just also know that Germany relies much on the EU as a regulatory body. And so when it comes to all the legislations, you say it is lacking on all fronts. Can you explain this to us and what the current status of the situation is? Yes, of course. So yeah, the German regulatory framework is not particularly permissive, which of course is a big problem for an industry that has such great and such a disruptive potential to do things completely differently, to do things much more efficiently, to save money, to save lives, to increase quality. There's a lot of things and a lot of good things that cannot be leveraged today because of these restrictions, right? The EU framework is something I think very good. It takes a long time to build, which is a bit of a problem. The EU is releasing new amendments slice by slice. It's taking a long time now. The whole thing got a lot more complex than originally anticipated. So we are waiting for, no, initially they started five years ago to build this new framework and we are not at the end. So in the meantime, Germany could have done things differently, but Germany or the German authorities are waiting very much on this EU framework. And so they, yeah. So we waste a lot of valuable time to be on the leading end of things to leverage drone technology early in the process, to have this first mover advantage like Norway or Switzerland has. And I think that's a great opportunity that we miss out on. So don't get me wrong. There's a lot that can be done with drones today. Absolutely. The general regulatory climate, however, makes it really hard for companies, especially in the service area to access this market and to see the full potential available today. And we also mentioned when you talked to our editor team before, Otto Monica, it's kind of a Zalami tactic. Kind of that sausage tactic in the... Slice by slice, yes. It's not like that you get one big amendment from the EU saying, okay, from tomorrow, you can do all that. It's always just a little slice and then not a slice and then not a slice. So yeah, it takes a long time. Yeah, it seems similar to the pandemic situation as we're actually all in, it's also slice by slice and we wait long time in the EU for vaccination and so on there, masks or the situation. So let's have a look to Austria about the legal regulations and to Philipp Amann. And yeah, Philipp, how far has Austria progressed with the implementation of EU drone regulations, international law or are you further along in Austria than in Germany or does that have an impact of your flight, UAV flight operations as well? Definitely it has an impact. So what we can or what we currently see in the market as you know, the new regulations are out since the beginning of this year. There is now a transition zones where still old permissions are still valid and still in place, but now, especially for our self as well. The next couple of months we have to apply also for a specific group or specific category. Actually we did already. So as we operate UAVs less than 25 kilo, even more than that, we have to do quite a lot of paperwork to get them flying operation on the legal way. It's quite a lot of work if you have to do this from scratch. Actually we already have done this work for our Recopter M, so the bigger brother of our Recopter platform, which is actually, so we don't have to start at the very beginning, but it's a lot of paperwork and even if you have to start with all this work as a commercial operator, it costs you quite a lot of time and a lot of effort to put all these documentation together. So we're looking for our self and also for our customers in the future especially to get all these standard scenarios for the specific group more and more so they can easily get an approval to easier get into the air because right now, as soon as all these legal aspects are in place, you have to fill quite for our Austrian legislation quite a lot of paperwork, which of course you can fly with this approval, not only in Austria, you can fly in the complete European Union, but it's a lot of work as I said. And we are also participating in a project called AELAPS, which is a group of companies, universities in Austria, tried to get with the Austrian, with the Austrian controls, with the Austrian regulator, more and deeper in contact to get this progress and this process done in a very easy way, but that's quite a lot of effort. Thank you very much, Philipp. Reiner Keicher, yeah, you just mentioned you are here for DivaCopter for your research project. And so I guess you're also dependent on that legal framework you have to work within and how does you assess the situation and how much does this uncertainty of this unresolved legal issues affect your work? Well, let me say first, it's our second project. We started working with brain drones in 2016 and back then we did not have a problem with air law, but we're also affected by ground health law. Maybe you know there is the directive 128 from 2009, known as SUV, the Sustainable Use Directive, in which it said, 20 areas brain is forbidden. So this was until now our biggest problem and we did a lot of work with other work groups together and the JKI and so on to legalize brain drones at least in state-of-the-art winners. And I think we more or less rather succeeded this year. So we were, yeah, we hope we could spray this year, but now the air law, the 945 and the 947 are, yeah, we have to obey to them and it's not that easy. Of course, we have the easy access rules with 350 pages and we try to look where we are. And so we are on a way defining the concept of regulations and the specific operation risk assessment and so on. And but unfortunately there is no standard scenario for our work to do. So we have to do it all from scratch, right? And until now we didn't need a permission because we are authority ourselves and we could until this year say, okay, we have a SORA risk assessment and we know what we're doing. So we are allowed to fly. But now, well, it looks like, yeah, until this year we are allowed to fly, but we don't know if you are allowed to spray and now it's as versa, yeah, we are allowed to spray, but now we don't allow to fly anymore. This is a little bit complicated. Okay, so from one problem into the another. So there are a lot of uncertainties at the moment. And I would also like to ask the audience at this moment, we're about 60 people here right now. What do you want to know about the legal regulations? What are your problems with? Maybe you're also from the US or somewhere from China watching us right now, joining us here and have other things you'd like to tell us right now in this little round. So then please use the checks and yeah, the experts will also be here to talk about this and speak about their projects, their work and what they know about that. Okay, Juliana has no question at all at the moment, but maybe herself, Juliana, you're also kind of the team of the UAV drone team at Intergeo, you know, about bad legal situations. We're discussing that in round table since 2016. Yeah, what do you think about the situation and yeah? I'm a bit frustrated to be honest with you. No, I just want to hear some positive information. I mean, I think we have a lot of users here in the chat and I would like to hear what can they do if we have participants who are interested in using drones or who are interested in order drone services. What can you say to them? Is it safe to just use drone services? I'm sure it is, but when you look at the legal service, so I think we have to convince them that drones are great technology to use and we have to give them the information that it's still safe to use the technology. That's what I would like to hear. This is a really good keyword. So because it's the area of use and the applications who really deserve more credit than the reputation they have been given. Kai, in addition to the unresolved legal issues, you have suffered from a negative image a bit, but do drones deserve more credit than this reputation they have been given too much? Yeah, I know what you mean. So there are of course drones that are used in the military context and of course they have not the best reputation. On the other side, I think a lot of people kind of got past this and understand drones as the flying robots that they are. I see the potential, see the value add. And so I think I always use drones like an analogy like a smartphone, you have the hardware and you have an operating system which basically controls the drone, but the whole difference that drones make is basically the app that they are used to run on. And yes, we know drones also from a hobby perspective, but finding this app makes the big decision and makes a big difference between is it successful or is it not successful? And we see a lot of these things that are super successful. As you know, in the intergeo or inter-area context, we talk a lot about drones in mapping and in surveying. I mean, five years ago, people were happy to strap a GoPro onto a drone and create some aerial footage and look where we are now. We have fantastic cameras, we have laser scanners, we have the most advanced material flying over our heads, creating incredible footage, incredible, incredibly accurate data sets. This is something that we would have dreamed of five years ago and now this is reality. So there's a lot more credit that can be given to drones than if you only look at the bad reputation they might have from crisis areas or military conflicts. So drones in a remote sensing context add tons of value, they save time, they save costs, they increase the result quality, they increase worker safety. So there's a lot of value that they add even though they might cost more in the beginning, the direct savings in making processes much shorter, much more efficient and also the indirect savings of maybe not shutting down an entire construction site to do all the surveillance work. Like these indirect savings are so huge that the price for drone technology is in fact a little one to pay. Do you have any special examples where the use of drones was really an effort that maybe during the last year, during the pandemic or before or any kind of technological resolution you had? Yes, absolutely. So we saw a few examples on how drones were being used directly in the coronavirus context. So this could either be use drones to fly patrols, to check if all the lockdown enforcement, there has been also, we talked about the spraying earlier, there's been drones that were used to disinfect certain areas like very, very populated areas, and especially in hot regions. So there were like those direct usage of drones and also of course one very important part is the delivery part in this aspect. So we saw a lot of urgent medical supplies that have been delivered by drone and corona tests and other things. And so it really started with this healthcare aspect and now is expanding more and more into pharmaceutical goods and continue from this more and more into the retail goods. So it really opened the door here. So for example, we saw companies flying those vaccines and COVID tests flying around. Then we saw in the US, there was a trial version from a wing company and they made a one-year trial and the demand was so high that they switched from a trial version completely into a standard operation. And now they've partnered with CVS which is a pharmacy company in the US and they fly vaccines or pharmaceutical goods, not vaccines, sorry, pharmaceutical goods from the pharmacy to people store step because other people that are not vaccinated yet are afraid to go in front of the door and now they have drones to deliver these essential things. And I think these are really good examples on how drones can directly and indirectly help not just to fight the pandemic, but also really show their potential to do work for the people, which I hope is a good sign that people might overcome this perception that drones are not only used in military contexts. Thank you very much, Kai. And when we talk about areas of use, we also talk about the sensor technologies on UAVs. And right now my question goes to Philipp Amann and of course, Riegel because sensor technology is constantly evolving. You also can see that in the CHIU each year. And yeah, Riegel is an international supplier of the sensor technology, especially the laser scanners and this is driving the developments forward. And so what is your company's position on the subject of UAV, what are your areas of use? Just take us with you, describe that any more, please. So first of all, I can fully agree to Kai's comment. So all the new sensors that we'd like to get in the air, this would be a good connection point also to Riegel, but let me give you a brief history. So we at Riegel, we are a laser manufacturer actually, since a couple of years, actually now five years, we started with our own third key solution. So with the picture you see behind me, the recopter putting a laser scanner on a UAV with at that time been the first company that had the platform, the sensor as well as the software ready, providing a full Turkey solution to the anti-client. And since the last couple of years, we have seen quite the demand and increase of inquiries, not only for laser, but also for the additional accessories. So all what you need about the cameras. So we got requests about using thermal cameras, hyperspectral cameras, multi-spectral cameras. We delivered completely integrated systems on our platforms, but also on customer platforms where we integrated the laser scanner together with all these different kinds of cameras together, that all these time stamping and technical issues have been resolved. And with regards to all the post-processing, so we can provide a full solution. And this was not available a couple of years ago. Actually, what we have seen right now is that the sensors get smaller on the one side. So if you look for thermal cameras, even RGB sensors, it's quite limited with regards to industry-grade cameras, because actually operating sensors on a UAV, you do not actually need the full battery and the display. So we are looking for new solutions in this direction. But on the other side, we have seen quite an increase, of course, in the platforms as well. So it's not about multi-rotor systems or not only multi-rotor systems anymore. We see quite a little shift in direction of VTOL UAVs, especially by opening regulations, hopefully sooner than later. You would get the possibility to fly, even for longer ranges. And then of course, flying VTOL, you can start wherever you like. And you can go beyond the 501 kilometer radius, and you can capture much more data, especially if you're looking for applications like power line survey, corridor mapping applications. So especially with regards to the UAV platforms, we could see a request in especially high-redundant systems because as Kai already mentioned, you do not put only a GoPro on the UAVs anymore. The sensors itself is like the most important factor. The UAV platform is not, we should not disregard it, but at least the sensors and the end result deliverable counts for the end customer. And the platform is just like the second choice. So we've seen quite a lot that customers are looking for high-redundant systems to enable really more safety for this high, quite costly sensors. And it doesn't matter in which direction, if it goes in multi-rotor or VTOL helicopter, it should be more redundant with regards to flight controls, with regards to power supply, a backup power supply, to really enable that the UAV platform is safely operating the air and the sensors itself are safe as well. So the technology, your sensor technology is mainly used is the forestry, the traffic, or monitoring of power line routes, or yeah, what's the main area of the use of your applications? You can only say it's one direction. It's really depending a little bit on the sensors, because we do have sensors that you can only operate of like 50, 80 or 100 meters above ground, but we have also sensors that can operate both. You can fly it on UAV as well as on manned platforms, depending of course on the project. If you have like a smaller project, which is just like a couple of hectares, a couple of hundred hectares, but there is a factor and of course, this needs to be calculated by the customer itself, where it's not cost efficient anymore to go for UAV and then you would switch to the manned operational part. So you can take the same equipment, you can put it on a manned aircraft and you can make the same project in less time. Of course, the operational cost itself will be higher at the very beginning, but on the long term, you would get a much better return. And then from the application point of view, just to complete this here, as I mentioned, corridor mapping applications. Yes, this is one, I would say main task, power line mapping, but for topographic, open pit mining, agriculture, archeology, cultural heritage. So the applications are quite a lot. Thank you very much, Philip, for taking us with you in the world of application of riddle copters. Reiner Keiser, let's talk about diva copter. What defined area is this application working? So what exactly is it doing for diva copter? Well, okay, first I have to explain diva copter is an acronym for digitization in vineyards and agriculture utilizing copters. So it's not a copter itself, but it's sort of a research project. And well, in agriculture, we have different tasks with multi copters, already more or less established, let's say you are spreading Paris city wasps, perhaps in corn, you know, this is a task that's been done for many years. And they are also struggling with the new air long, they don't know if they are allowed to continue or not. We make images with several sensors for spot spraying, for instance, we make multi spectral images to detect water stress or irrigation control. Well, we try to detect physiological anomalies and a very popular task as well is the role of your form detection. So we look for forms in the middle before we move outside and move, right? And our special issue is viticulture. So we try of course to look for the plant health and for water stress and we do things like yield prediction and we also have several problems. For instance, the national action plan says we have to reduce the plant protection products with about 30% until 2023, which is quite ambitious because it's almost 21, right? And the fertilization ordinance, premier for autumn when Germany says we have to reduce the nitrogen fertilizer, especially in vineyards, it's a problem also. And so one task would be to increase the efficiency as well of the pesticides as the fertilizers. And yeah, in viticulture we use already fertilizer with nitrogen sensors, meaning we try to apply demand oriented less fertilizer and only where it's needed. And while protection products, we are working on in a first step, calculating the need for volume and applying appropriate. That means if you have less leaves, perhaps in a variety with a thinner root wall, you apply less plant protection products. And if you have more leaves, you apply more. The second step in our research project is to try to detect specific diseases. It's down in Mylou, for instance, and treat, yeah, also appropriate. Well, you have a disease, you spray and we're not at all. And therefore, of course, we need a lot of sensors and we also need artificial intelligence because you can't say a leaf looks like this and this is healthy and it looks like that and then it's not healthy or ill because you have almost changing stages of disease, like conditions, plant growth, et cetera. Everything is changing. So you have to use all the sensors that are available on the market. And of course, we were about to buy a helicopter, but unfortunately we couldn't afford it. So we have to look for our own solution. Well, another task that agriculture would be, that agriculture would be perhaps sports spraying herbicides, right? Sports spraying means you fly with a drone over your field and you look where you have some weeds. You need to spray and then you come to the drone and just flying to the single spots where the weeds are and spray there and you don't have to, yeah, drive with a big tractor over the whole field. Just then fly to these spots. That would mean a lot of saving time, diesel and of course herbicides as well. So there are several tasks we could do with the drones in agriculture. Yeah, that's great because these are, this is a really good example of how environmental protection really works well with the technology on the drones, the artificial intelligence you just mentioned and the sensor technology. But of course it's also behind all that. It's also the drone technologies. You can detect just the diseases you just mentioned and yeah, I think it's a perfect example of the use of drones in the environmental protection. Are there any questions in the chat, Juliane? I just see a red bubble, but actually I cannot open the chat. Do you have any questions to our experts about these applications of drones we just talked about? Yes, there is one question to Philip Ammann because he provided us with information for their solutions. And there is a question, can the lasers gonna go through vegetation, different levels? Okay, should I, I would like to address it. Yes, so this is exactly what the laser scanner was built for if you would compare it, for example, to photogrammetry. So the laser scanner is the perfect tool to go through the vegetation. So what we actually are not able to scan through, of course, but the laser shot itself, the emitted laser pulse will partly touch the leaves, will give you a return signal, it will continue further, it will give you another return, it will continue further. So we're able to capture up to 15 targets per laser shot by using the sensors. And this is where you can, you will get the top of the crown, like if you take now looking for forestry, but you also get points in between, you get, I'll talk about later about that, about the center itself, but by looking not nadier directly into the forest and looking a little bit to the front and to the back or even to the side, you can even get the trunk of the tree, which is not possible by conventional airborne laser scanning, and you can get the ground and you have all possibilities by using this data, by filtering, by removing all the vegetation, which is above a certain level, and are just able to extract the digital terrain models. I mean, that's fascinating, that's much more compared to what we've talked about five years ago or so. So there you see the massive changes and the massive developments in this field, right? It's exactly what we have seen is the combination. So we do not disregard photogrammetry, not at all. So we, I would say 90% of our systems are always solved with a camera. So the camera has its advantage and the laser scanner has its advantage. And if you compare the laser scanner, the scanner is very good in the surface. The camera is very good at some very narrow points when you're looking really for points and features in the point cloud, but if you have the possibility and you have the right tool and the right platform to carry both, then definitely make use of it to get it not double the results, but you have all possibilities combining data with LiDAR and photogrammetry. That's interesting. And then we have another question back to the first topic, to the legal framework. I mean, we've talked about the situation in Germany, we've talked about the situation in Austria, but here is a question in chat and Kai answered it already, but I don't know if everybody is in the chat and can read it. For the question again, what are the positive experience in other countries? Can we learn from them? Or what are your experiences? What can you tell us about that? Right, so again, not everything is bad in Germany. Maybe I'm a bit too pessimistic when I, we look at the global landscape and we see how other countries just go frusty mad while it feels a bit more like a standstill here, but it's not the full truth. So in the European comparison, I would say that France and Poland are really having a decent framework, very progressive, really good. Other countries in the European Union are rather similar to Germany, maybe even less permissive. When we look at countries like Norway and Switzerland, which are not part of the EU, but geographically yes, then we see that they actually used their ability to make their own framework pretty early in the process and now are able to leverage this. So as an example, you see companies like MatterNet flying in Switzerland from one hospital to another back and forth, something that just simply cannot be done here in Germany. We tried it with the project MediFly here in Hamburg and it was really frustrating because it was not possible to fly beyond visual language side above the city. We also here in Hamburg have a big control zone in the city. So you need to have permission from the authorities to fly in the control zone. So there's a lot of open ends and a lot of problems that we face here compared to other countries. And if you see it in Norway, Norway, I think two or three years ago, they started a big program, a two billion euro program to facilitate drone deliveries and drone technology in general. And now they want to start supplying their 400 drilling islands in front of the coast with drone technology and they made a few initial flights already and this is really looking super promising. So from that point, sometimes I'm a bit sad that we are lurking behind here in Germany when you look into the very close European neighborhood. Yeah, thank you for that. I mean, yeah, but I think the positive view into the future is, I think that's essential so for the whole market. So it's good that you say that's not everything bad but we have to be patient and we have to be strong and have to be, see the positive effects of the technology. So here are some other questions. Does artificial intelligence support the work in the project DeepCopter? This is to you, Professor Kayser. Oh, thanks a lot, but not professor. Oh, I thought so. Yeah, actually it does not yet but it will, we're using hyperspectral sensors for searching for these special bands in which you can see the physiological anomalies and then we're building a multispectral camera, 16 channels to fly over the vineyard and detect these anomalies. And then we feed deep learning approach to, yeah, more or less see every anomaly in every vineyard, in every stage of growth and so on. So it will in the end be used but we're still working on it. It's not used already, okay? Deep learning is the first step into artificial intelligence. For your first deep learning machine learning but then you go into direct science then it's the next step to use artificial intelligence. So these are the steps that you have to use. Yeah. First step, okay. Yeah, okay. Thank you for that. Next question to Philip Amon. What's about vertical structures like walls and houses? Can you detect them, measure them, map them? Vertical structures. A good question. Actually, it was not as easy as in, or it's now easier as in the past. It's really depending a little bit on the center in use. So if we take a look on like the latest sensor we have on the UV market, it's quite, I personally call it a game changer on the market, the books 120 because it's so lightweight that you can almost put it on any UV with around two kilo but the path of the tissue rate and especially what the sensor makes quite unique that you have also a forward and backward looking capability as well as linear, of course. So you would have not three channels how you would might call it. It's like the mirror was adapted in a very special way that we can be able to look in three different directions and this makes it quite suitable for yes, houses of walls that you take a look on the vertical facades if you fly forward, take a look back on forward. So you get the full 3D picture if you think about sitting modeling in this direction but not only for houses and walls it would be also for power lines if you compare it to like traditional UV sensors where you only have the nadier look and now having the possibility to take a look 10 degrees forward as well as 10 degree backward you can get the front of the power or power line pole as well as the back as well as the points nadier in addition and in all kind of applications what I mentioned before, forest mapping we've been or we're participating in Austria with a couple of projects and with companies are looking for forest inventory and really looking for sensors that are able to fly efficiently but you get as much as possible from the data point of view so you get really the trunk of the tree you're looking for details and it's always a combination between flight altitude, laser setting, the point density you will get out at the end and with the new RUX 120 sensor I think we can cover all of this and actually we started to deliver the first ones in this week or next week so now it's getting ruled out on market and we'll see how this develops Sounds great Thank you for your answer Yeah, sounds great and what is an important topic for the future what we do with our wood so it's good to hear that we can use the technology for this one as well so the next one is a question we raised already but it's again, it's a long-term question What is about the social acceptance of UAVs? So, will the social acceptance of UAVs increase? If UAVs are used in the sense of sustainability so the SDGs of the UN as described by Raina Keicher or in local disaster situations like e.g. early detection of forest fires so is it the point why the acceptance will rise? Yeah, yes, maybe I can go ahead and answer this question So, yeah, short answer is absolutely yes The, if you put yourself into the situation that you, I don't know, live in a busy neighborhood and somebody will order a pizza via drone and is happy to receive that but another hundred people will be exposed to the look and the sound of this platform and will be probably very annoyed by this So, that as a contrast if you take it the other way and you have a drone that is zipping over your head and there are some blue flashing lights and you know that's a rescue drone flying a blood donation from one hospital to another and probably right now, saving a life the public acceptance is completely different We see this in Rwanda where the company called Ziblane is now connecting every single hospital with medical supplies So, Rwanda has, I think, 12 and a half million citizens and now all of those citizens have access to urgent medication, to urgent blood donations to other things that have a life-saving impact and they do all that with only 16 drones one six, that's nothing and that alone I think is, you know proof enough that you can not just use drones to leapfrog the infrastructure like in Rwanda where you have no roads or maybe not roads that are not year-round accessible but even in Western Europe I see massive potential going forward there are tons of solutions that nobody knows about there are firefighting drones they can fly up a water hose up to 30 meters and the signature fire in a high-rise building where it takes forever for firefighters to get to there are millions of, you know sustainable or, you know applications that have a direct positive impact on the people living there and I think it would be very great to have, you know those cases promoted in a larger way Yeah, and I think Philip, do you just we just spoke about the wood I mean, this is again, this isn't a SDG topic so, right? Philip, how do you see this? So, can you? Yeah, definitely so what Kai mentioned, I fully agree that I was not aware that it's already going that far and it's ruled out in the public anymore already so definitely, yeah, with regards to forestry of course, as an example now we do have customers that really flying a lot they're flying hundreds of hectares per day by UAV of course, if you think about forestry of course, this is not in the city center, I would say so the acceptance there there is more or less no population in this area you have small villages there but as I mentioned, on the UAV side we can fly on the maximum altitude already which is legal to be operated on like the 120 meters and you will not even, there are drones out in the markets where you, especially for the VTOL and fixed wind area you do not hear them anymore so if you fly 120 meters and you fly over the area and you fly quite fast, so with a multi-rotor system of course, yeah, six to 10 meters per second but with these VTOLs you fly really, really fast and you do not hear them and if you would see them, the UAV is already gone so this is of course, yeah it will change the market a bit and we will see how this develops all this started or is it about to start? Yeah, great, Juliane, maybe we continue with the last round because we have about 10 more, eight more minutes and then we will close this first interview talk so yeah, gentlemen, we all have gentlemen and no ladies in this talk, but Juliane, Juliane, you're also an expert I really see you have so many knowledge about drones that's great, okay so we start with the potential of the drones we'll finish this talk because we said the drones are our ingenious, flying mega-talents we heard a lot of examples, we heard about new technologies we heard about the areas of use but also problems of the legal regulations in Europe or Germany so maybe we start with Dr. Keischer what's the potential you see for DivaCopter concretely or especially when do you think it will be in use? Well, okay, this is a rather optimistic side of things I would say, if you take a look at the ministry draw draft that was rejected by Federal Council two weeks ago I'm afraid in Berlin they don't see it so optimistic and we struggle with more or less problems with tourists in the region maybe because we're spraying plant protection products I don't know, but we'll see how it will develop of course we have the potential to environmental protection that means reduce the use of plant protection products and reduce the use of fertilizers this is our goal in this project and of course we want to establish drone technology in agriculture and in viticulture and not only our spraying drone but also with our drone control system we are developing in cooperation with the GFU with the goal to connect to their air traffic control and of course we also do things to provide the internet if you don't have 5G because we are in equilateral fields and we don't have 5G of course we don't, we even cannot use our telephone on one or another place so we are using satellite communication systems and that means we do something for the communication outside in the equilateral fields we do something for aviation security we do something for environmental protection and I hope this will have a positive effect on the discussion we hope so too because I guess there is a huge need for that thank you very much Reiner Keicher Philipp Ammann so what potential do you currently see with these flying mega-talents? I mean you already mentioned so much potential for it but maybe perhaps also through new technology developments from Riegel yeah I mentioned a few already so what I mentioned before the new game-changing market the VUX 120 I think this will be quite in the spotlight in the next couple of months especially as it's quite lightweight for the UV sensors doesn't matter which platform but to be more general Riegel is a really good group we will of course continue this development of new lightweight, highly efficient laser sensor systems, platform integrations and platforms we are looking forward for more VTOL operations so I see this person becoming quite fast so you would not be you can cover small areas with one UVV as well as Corridor mapping project with one UVV so it would be multi-purpose use on the UVV side on the center point of view we're looking for what we have already and what will be of course in the next couple of months available as well that there will be systems out that you can use for UVV applications as well as airborne applications as well as even for mobile applications on a car or on the boat so we try to provide solutions for of course the end customer but that he has not the or he does not have to make the decision in which direction it goes if it goes for manned operations, unmanned operations or other laser dedicated operation work so in this case we can provide sensors or sensor systems that enables you for all market segments or almost all market segments and you can participate in tenders and projects and delivery and the end results the customers would expect Thank you very much, Philippe Kai, last question also to you yeah, we're talking about digitalization for years in Germany we had so many expert rounds roundtables, deep bates and so on but right now with the coronavirus and the economy is really going to take off with the digitalization and so what seemed unthinkable before the pandemic is suddenly come in place like digitalization in school and yeah, all that but what do you think needs to happen for the potential of drones to be leveraged like that? Yeah, that's a good question let's maybe start with what we are doing here right now I mean, Zoom calls and these kind of things were pretty new a year back so but people did not change or digitalized their processes because they wanted to they did this because they had to so the whole paradigm changed in which we do our work and so people had to change and I think that especially one of those elements of the new normal is what we call remoteization this can of course be home office but that's just one aspect it's more about decentralizing tasks where jobs where you use people in the fields are now maybe done by a drone for example, acquiring data sending it back home to home office not headquarter anymore it's now home office so and I think that's a great analogy to the whole teams and a Zoom thing that we have here doing things on remote only helps the whole drone ecosystem because it's a fantastic tool to do work on remote you get people out of harm's way you have drones that can fly huge distances and acquire data from far away and send them back home so I think that remoteization is a really big thing and we see currently the whole thing developing into two directions so the one direction is that big companies that had drones on their agenda for a while as some sort of innovation project completely stopped it and now focus only on their main business because it's a crisis situation you have to get your hold your money together on the other side, there are people that say this is now our chance to really move and to really make the next step and to change our business model towards a more digital centric business model and embrace drone technology and really go for it it really started with software companies so we saw massive traction in the software space where companies are evaluating data Philip you already mentioned it like you have vast amounts of data and you somehow need to make sense out of this and we saw a lot of those companies really leveraging this and we also saw other big companies that really made a big change by using drone technology in the last year so it's the same for drones for data acquisition but the same also with the whole delivery thing that I just mentioned so if you yeah if you look back five years we had this that you five years you policy making there are still a lot of operational constraints but leveraging drone technology is still hard if you let me give you an analogy imagine you have a washing machine which is basically a very simple robot a drone is maybe a bit more complex robot but both are basically robots you program them and they do something for you so now you have a washing machine but you can only run it at 100 rotations per minute only at daytime and only with a visual observer in front of it monitoring it constantly and always having one hand on the off switch and this basically or in parts represents the world that we live in so we really don't have trust in these robots to do their job on their own they are totally capable of doing it but it's aviation you have aeronautic laws you have to make sure that safety is always paramount so you still have those limitations and still people go for it and find ways to leverage it because flying a daytime and flying within your visual line of sight still gives you a lot of potential you can inspect wind turbines, bridges, you name it there's tons of opportunity out there so to leverage drone tech you've got to give them the ability to do what they can do best fly the on visual line of sight fly standard routes without constant human supervision fly day, fly night, fly over people one way to do this is waiting for maybe another year for some new EASA amendments or my favorite would be like a nationwide blanket exemption for SORA evaluated standard missions so if you have SORA as a special operation risk assessment and if you follow this SORA process you can fly complex missions now these complex missions, for example in Germany it's really hard to get approval for so sometimes it really depends on the person working on your case if your case gets accepted or not and that of course is really slowing things down so let me wrap it up really quick my point is because our time is ticking Kai we are over an hour right now sorry but my bottom line is that let's go with Juliana let's see the positive aspects of it of course there's always more possible but these things will come maybe not tomorrow but soon thank you very much first of all I'd like to say thank you very much to all my guests to Kai Wackwitz, to Philippe Armon and Dr. Rainer Keicher this was very interesting thank you very much for taking us with you in these matters that we right now know much more about the situation and thank you for talking about drones and what talents these ingenious flying talents all have so this was our first talk our next one will be in May, the 12th of May it's then about BIM and digital construction and yeah, this was InterGTV for the first InterGTV talk if you liked it, say it to your colleagues and join us at the next time thank you very much and stay healthy, stay safe and bye-bye for now thank you, have a great day thank you, bye-bye