 Brought to you afternoon folks. Ted Rolston here in downtown Honolulu Studios of Think Tech, Hawaii. You'll notice the studio is being reconstructed. You can see all the structural grids and the bars in the background, but don't worry. We're gonna bring you the show anyway regardless of the regular construction state status here in the studio. Anyway, this show is, as he said many times before, is known by the people that brings on, not by the host, and sitting next to me is Capano Keiko Wevo from National Disaster Preparedness Training Center on Honolulu, right down the street. NDPTC, the world's most unpronounceable acronym, and that could be why you guys don't get a lot of calls. That's the main reason I wear the shirts. Okay, remember the advertising. Okay, all right. So, Capano's consulting in a lot of aspects of work done down the street here at NDPTC. And we have standing by in Austin, Texas. We have Gene Robinson, who has been on the show once before. This time we have not only Gene, we have his background, and we have his airplane sitting behind him. And Gene is a man of many reputations, I might say. And we all go through your complete good side, bad side, balance list, Gene. Other than Gene, he's probably arguably the leader of Search and Rescue, UASU, so Search and Rescue. Perhaps in the world, certainly in the United States, and gaining more credibility all the time. So, once again, this show gets his credibility by the people that brings on, such as the two of you. So, we've got discussions about that very issue of Search and Rescue. You represent disaster operations. Gene represents Search and Rescue. We have the Pacific. We have the continent. Everything's sort of tied together here. And you, Capano, have been down in Indonesia recently, and have seen yet a different perspective of the topography and association of land mass and ocean and such, which is begging for long range. Guess what Gene does? Gene does long range UAS work. I think he's tied together. And there's one more piece we won't be able to add in today. That's the drone racer piece. We can talk about it. So, tell us a little bit about this video. Yeah, sure. So, I had the opportunity to travel with Dr. Carl Kim, who's a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii. He's also the executive director for NDPTC. And this was through a grant by the USAID to build capacity through training with local universities in Indonesia. And so, earlier this summer... Disaster preparedness and readiness and these things. Yes, disaster preparedness, readiness, building capacity within the communities that are being served. And to train the trainer, if you will, with the local universities. So, we spent a lot of time in the community with BNPB, which is Indonesia's version of FEMA, if you will. They're a disaster management organization. We traveled to a number of locations that are prone to hazards. This footage here is from the Perang mud volcano that's been going on for about 10 years now, where this mud volcano has just been spewing mud. You know, thousands of cubic meters. Just pumping mud up out of the earth. Yeah, just pumping mud up out of the earth. Flooding the area with mud. Flooding the area. A number of villages have been destroyed and covered by the mud. So, the footage that you see here, this is actually an example of using the small drone to do some damage assessment. And take a look at this environment that you wouldn't be able to get close to otherwise. So, we see here, it's kind of hard to see through the steam, but there's actually bubbling mud in the steam. And the steam is part of the mud too. It's hot mud. It's hot mud. So, we're able to go out to this area that's been dried and fly around this area and do an assessment. So, one of the problems with this area is they're pumping this mud into the river system. It's an ongoing issue and they are building levees and expanding levees all the time. And so, part of what we wanted to do with the drone was combine traditional on foot terrestrial investigation with some aerial views. This is a view of a relocation village. Here's a mosque that wasn't completed because you can see in the background, the mud was approaching. And they just halted completion of this particular mosque. So, the mud is actually raising the sea level, so the ground level, so to speak, is it? Yeah, so they keep building these levees and they keep raising them higher and higher. This is another part of Indonesia where they're using, they're actually doing ground wall mining here as a way to deal with the blocking of that river. And using gravel for building material. So, we spent time with local communities, officials. This was a project that really did involve the local officials. Here we're taking a look at the island that's being built. And this is a new campus, a university campus that was built, currently unoccupied. So, they wanted to see what this looked like from the air. And currently because it's not being used, it's the growth of the forest around it. People are running cows and goats in this area. An important part of this was also sitting down with community members and having them explain to us where the issues were in the local area. So, we did these mapping exercises around these neighborhoods in Indonesia. So, coupling indigenous knowledge, local knowledge with the community, doing surveys on foot, which we'll see here. You're kind of doing a systems engineering approach to resilience in this case. Looking at all factors, the needs of the people and the physical, as well as the cultural aspects, emotional and public health. And then tie them all together into a picture of the situation and then figure out where you can go affect it, including with UAS. You know, I didn't bring my drone with me because that's actually kind of a secondary issue. It was just a small part of this overall process. That's an important message, isn't it? We need to make sure people understand. Absolutely. So, here's Dr. Carl Kim. Actually, we're on the ground taking a look at some flooding areas. One of the issues that was expressed was, yes, this is the drone. I got some cameo shots of myself in here. But flooding is a big issue. This particular town, you see little dark pockets in the neighborhood. That's actually water. This was reclaimed ocean. So all these homes were built on top of what used to be ocean. And this is going to get worse as sea level rises. Exactly. And so one of the complaints that they had was about flooding. And we take a look at the drainage canals here. And there are perspectives of these drainage canals that you can only get with something like a drone. Perspective that you can only get with drones. That's a really important piece of message, because the locals could immediately understand the situation they're facing as well as can we. And you could have an analysis done by people around the world. You don't have to have it done right there locally. Here we see people were growing things in the drainage canals. These last couple of clips here, we were invited by the Sultan of Tadori, who was one of our partners in this effort, to come and take a look at this is an old Spanish fort that was built, colonial days. And so there are these national treasures that obviously they want to protect. And getting an aerial view of these buildings helps them understand potential threats, hazards, and what they need to do to remain resilient. This is cool. And so what we're talking about here is a emerging and a developing area that's undergoing a lot of stress, a lot of pressure economically, environmentally, and from the weather and cultural changes, all this together. The better we can illustrate that and express it in terms of the cause and effect pairs that are going to be affecting it, the better people will be able to understand their situation and take action to prepare. And these islands, as you showed, are not going to be necessarily close together. So that brings in long distance. And it all brings in unmanned air systems. And that brings in Gene Robinson. Great segue. So let's talk to Gene a little bit. Gene, having seen that, and with that unbelievable experience you had recently of pushing that UAS behind you 450 kilometers, 200 miles, as I recall, something like that. Your thoughts, sir, on taking your basis of knowledge of search and rescue and that type of disaster response action into a domain like you just saw, how do you see all that coming together? Well, it's not only the aerial perspective, but it's also the dwell time involved. Like you said, you can go up there and you can watch things unfold as they happen. And I think that's an important aspect to using that aerial view is to be able to stay up there a long time. The particular flight that occurred here this last weekend where we went the 260 miles took place over, of course, about eight hours. So you can stay in the air for eight hours. We're looking at some solar solutions as well that would essentially leave you in the air all day. If you needed an island hop, I don't know how far apart the islands are, but you can potentially island hop. You can make a trip there, make it back, you can collect the data, and you can also distribute it from the air if you needed to. So there are so many different ways that you can use the endurance and you can use the lift capacity of the airframe to aid you in that disaster mitigation. That's interesting because I hadn't thought about it, but the dwell time and observing the pattern as it evolves is certainly going to be useful. And you mentioned earlier before we began that the short battery life and the short flight times do change how you use these systems. So if you had functionality like Gene's talking about, this may once again open up another domain of how this might altogether be used. Gene, tell us a little bit about that record flight that you put on a couple of weeks ago. Or last week? Yeah, it was performed Saturday in New Zealand by Mr. Tim Benson out there. It is used in the vigilance C1 bone stock. There was nothing, no other modifications done to it other than the flaps were disabled because we wanted to save the weight. It ended up being a factor on down the road, but the only time you use the flaps is when you take off and when you land, right? And that's like one tenth of one percent of the entire flight. The aircraft was launched using lithium ion batteries, cylindrical batteries. We'll put your video up and keep talking through it. We're going to put your video up, Gene. Okay, that aircraft used cylindrical batteries, the lithium ions. They weren't lithium polymers, which was a little bit of a departure. They tend to hold their peak charge longer and the discharge ramp drops off very quickly. But it was a set of hours and approximately 50 minutes of flight time running about a two kilometer lap, if you will. Obviously we couldn't go the full 260 miles across New Zealand. It's a little bit bumpy in New Zealand. So Tim set it up, so it was very near the shore, a very nice open area. And given that it was in a turn, it was pretty much the entire time that it was flying, probably because we used a few more kilometers out of it if we would have been on level flight. So it was pretty exciting for us to get to the 300 kilometer mark. And then of course Gene was sending us the updates after that because he had already used our vigilant beam, which is the foam version of that aircraft, and gone 300 kilometers. Is this a homegrown aircraft that you designed yourself? My partner, John Smith, designed this aircraft. And we've had a batch of them manufactured in both foam and composite materials. The one that you see behind me is composite and made out of very lightweight carbon keblar honeycomb material. And that's the one that was used for the 425 kilometer run. It's got a lot of room in it. You can put a lot of stuff in there. Batteries and cutter loose. And it was a very important research flight for us because we're looking to go solar and we needed to know just exactly how efficient the airframe would be once it got in the air. Let's think about this and talk about this after our first break. We do have a break in this show. A half hour total and we'll take a break in a second here. But if we get back, we'll talk about how the particular territorial domain that you were in recently and knowledge of what we have here in Hawaii in the long distance or the long orbit time that Gene's talking about, how they might come together from the perspective of the user requirements. We'll come back and talk about that after our first break. I'm Stan Energyman and I want you to be here every Friday. Noonthinktechhawaii.com. Watch the show. Be there. I pity the full Hawaii. Thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii. My name is Justine Espiritu and I host the Hawaii Food and Farmer series with my co-host Matthew Johnson of Iwaku Fresh. Every week we bring on farmers as well as all the other individuals and organizations that help support a thriving sustainable food system. In fact, it's interesting to learn what others are doing so you don't have to be a Hawaii resident or producing food on Hawaii to be featured on the show. Like today's guest, Wyatt Bryson of Jewels of the Forest and Michaelab Solutions. Aloha. Thank you. It's been a pleasure being on the show. I love seeing what you guys do and I really support your mission. And it's really nice being back in Hawaii and thank you again. It's an honor. So you can see guests like Wyatt every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Thank you. Live again here, folks, second half of our show where the drone leaves. Ted Rawlston in our studios in downtown Hulu. We're joining at the studio, Kepano Kekueva. And in Austin, Texas, we have Gene Robinson. Just showed us a great film clip of a world record electric-powered unmanned air system staying aloft for eight hours which translates into about 260 or maybe longer than that. Linear miles if it were on a straight course. But that flight that Gene showed us really opens the door to a whole different way of thinking. And Kepano and I were talking at break, Gene, about how three of those could orbit a disaster situation continuously. If you had three of them, you had two sitting down doing battery charging and then launch them in sequence. So providing communications, providing surveillance. And Kepano mentions, of course, that any kind of payload we add on is going to degrade the emission time unless you have solar as a replacement or soaring management or some other weather optimization to manage. But those are all coming, aren't they? Now, those are going to happen. Yeah, they really are. You've already got thermal detectors in airplanes. They're very small. You can put them in there. You've already got autopilot that have embedded processing in them so that if they do detect the thermal, they can take advantage of it. Line the altitude. Conserve power. Use the solar to store back into the batteries. And we're really hoping that we can reduce the battery load with thermal management and that sort of thing. And especially in the islands, you get a lot of trades. You get a lot of rich lift. You can go into the rich lift and get a lot of altitude. Your communications are restored. There's so many different options that we can look to. That's exactly right. I don't know if you've been here to Oahu, to our island, Gene, but the updrafts on the windward side of the coals are about 2,000 feet per minute. So you can actually pick the speed up. You can do a lot of nose down and still retain altitude. Of course, once you get away from the mountains, you'll lose that. And on the other side, on the leeward side, it's quite a different story. But certainly topographical and thermal management would lead 25% to 50% to a higher level of optimization of the mission. And I hadn't really thought about that. And Gene brings up a really good point. The sensors and the processors improve over time and get smaller, draw less power. I mean, we're continuing to benefit from Moore's law, if you will. The payloads get lighter, so we can do more with less. And the amount that the technology has progressed, at least in the consumer drone space, the Phantom 4 that I flew into Indonesia, is incredible. Over two years, I hesitated buying one because I knew that I would be jumping into it and wouldn't necessarily have a lot of time to train on it. The Phantom 4 practically flies itself compared to the previous generations of small quadcopters. And so they're getting easier to use. They're more accessible. The one I picked up actually bought at the Apple Store. Take a haul of them all. The capabilities are improving. They're becoming easier to use. So, like I said, the technology piece of it is becoming less of the issue. I think the more interesting conversation these days is, how do we integrate it into the jobs that we're trying to do? Bingo. How do we get the users, the end-state users, the people who best understand the needs to define to us the total mission and the total operational needs and the sensor needs and this sort of thing? Or they may not be able to describe them in the terms we use, but they can describe them from what they want as a takeaway and we could then filter that down to what the sensor needs to be. Gene, in your work, you are at the absolute cutting edge of this. You must see that same situation, that it's very difficult for the users to have a clear articulation of what their real needs are. So collectively, how do we push forward and get them to define that? Really, it is an education process that you have to go through. And a lot of times you have to do the research for them so that they understand what they can derive or what benefit can be derived from either imagery or video or ortho-mosaics or that sort of thing. Volumetric, I'm thinking in my head GIS, volumetric measurements of the workflows would probably be a real benefit for those of us to know just how much is coming, where it's going, and that sort of thing. And as the sensors get better and better, that's going to be getting closer and closer to real-time and the processing downstream will take care of it so that you can get that information out in a timely fashion. And that's really a disaster. That's the key is to get it out in a timely fashion. So then we're talking about the timely fashion as a really important piece. That implies communication, that implies analysis, that implies expression of result and making it in such a way that a decision-maker an incident commander can understand it and make the correct decision. So there's a whole dimension here, which is all the analysis and the expression layer that doesn't show up in the UAS itself. You know, I'm just thinking about something. IAEM is having its annual meeting in about a month in Georgia. And Mike Brown, a colleague, is presenting there and he wanted to present almost the same case. He wants to take to the IAEM the message that the rapid evolution of droneism could be considered a disruptive factor in how IAEM thinks. And he wants to express some of these issues and push them out there and disturb the system and get them to start paying attention to the fact that defining these would be really useful to all of us. So Gene, let's collaborate on that. I'd like to take your video and some of the thoughts you've even suggested here and write up a couple of charts that we can all agree on and push them out to IAEM in a month. How would that be? I think it's a great idea and the amount of data that we can collect and push is disruptive. Unfortunately, that's kind of one of the drawbacks of a new technology. You can't drink as much water as you'd like to drink out of that fire hose. Well, that's exactly right. In fact, we probably need to think about that in regard to NDPTC as well. Gene, I want to kind of circle back on something that Gene touched on, which is education and training. And that's the T right in the logo, right? And part of the reason we went to Indonesia was to actually explore the use of a small drone in an educational environment. We were working with the universities there and developing capacity for the universities in seeing how this technology could be used and folded into that. I think most people are probably familiar with what drones can do, but bringing that into a training environment, into an educational system, proving it out is an important part of this process. And I think we can use the professional organizations like IAEM and such to start taking the ownership of the requirements at the fringe. Gene, we had a similar discussion with the NFPA, National Fire Prevention Association, back in, I think it was in May at their conference, and they got the same message that, hey, we need to ask the firefighters at the frontier, at the front, where the stuff burns what their real needs are and get those articulated written down to bring back to avoid the situation we have where it's the manufacturers driving the end solution rather than the user generating a demand. So NFPA saw that picture. They'd like very much to do that. We can take that story to IAEM, and I'll send this video tonight when it shows up to a colleague in Georgia, Dr. Michael Brown, who'll be making that pitch, and this will get him all spun up big time. So this will be good. We'll have some fun with this one and try to stimulate these professional organizations to push beyond what they know and help generate these requirements. Gene, you must run into this all the time in terms of, especially with, I mean, I just can't believe it, you know, 30 miles, eight hours of duration. Nobody thinks in terms of those parameters, unless you're in the military or you're thinking of it in a, you know, at 150,000 bucks a pop for an airplane. But in this scale we're dealing with here. It's just a, it's like a whole state change in terms of capability. It is. And unfortunately we're going to get back into the perspective of data on this. Yes. Eight hours of data is a lot of data. The more data you can collect and the more you have to interpret and, again, what Capano was leading up to is important. Whoever your audience is, whoever's looking at it, their perspective is going to be different, whether it's an economist or an engineer or a firefighter. They need to look at the same picture and they'll derive, you know, three or four other different perspectives that you as the operator never thought about. And it's so important to get that input so that we as manufacturers and operators of the system can supply them with the data that they find useful. Well, you know, there's an allegory here a couple of years ago. We went up in the mountains here with the local fire department and equipped with thermal infrared thinking that's what they wanted to find, the fires that were burning in the low-level mulch and such in very, very difficult terrain. It turns out that even though the thermal infrared could find the hotspots, that wasn't what they wanted. They wanted smoke. Smoke is what they use as the identifier of where to take the firefighters. They drop firefighters in the black next to the smoke. That's how it works. So we re-equipped with smoke and that was okay. But then came the issue that, okay, the Latin long and geo terms don't fit the picture of the grids that are used in the topographical maps. So we don't have a connection between what we can sense and what is useful to the commander. Then the third thing you come up with is that, okay, who's actually going to stand there and look at this thing? It's not me and the battalion commander. I don't have anybody who can spend, who's not assigned to go do something. So it all comes back to the issue as Jean was saying, more data requires more analysis. We really have to get into the world of autonomous analysis and extraction in some way that we haven't gotten to yet. So maybe what we can do is take IAEM's needs and NFPA's needs and start aiming them in that direction of automatic analysis and feature extraction and such that would be really what they would pay attention to. Totally agree. Okay. Let's give me your word for you. Let me just throw one more thing on the table here and in the remaining minutes we've got, I was going to show it on the show. We don't have enough time for it, but drone racing, which is a term I wouldn't normally use. Normally I would have disciplined myself for using that term is really incredible. Drone racing, I will restate it as multiple strings of incoming information, maybe five deep, recorded in 1D or 2D, but converted in your mind into 3D, making decisions in a really dynamic situation, tight tolerance to obstacles in order to get around a course quickly. That's what drone racing is. It's really about seeing a void in a surrogate environment, which is one step away from detecting a void, which is the kind of automation we need to get into. And secondly on the drone racing there's so much performance margin, just like Gene has endurance margin in his system, the drone racers have incredible performance margin for rapid and high rate motions. If you look at the spectrum, Gene's high endurance, the quad that I was using, he's in the middle, and then you've got these really tiny drone racers that are really fast in their nimble, but their batteries last in minutes. But for a task team going forward, search and rescue team or even a fire team going forward, 500 meter radius around them is kind of interesting. That's the day's job. And you can get that covered in two minutes right at the nap of the year. So really close in and you can get into tight spots you can't otherwise get into. You can get by with very inexpensive optics because you don't need a lot of, you don't have a lot of R squared hurt in you. So we want to bring that into the equation, Gene, sometime either on a show like this or when you come out here and we'll do it for real face to face. You bet, that stuff is way cool. All right, man, and we really appreciate you coming on from Austin, Texas, that water cooler behind you to keep you hydrated. And thanks again Gene for coming on and Cappano, thanks for coming on first time, first time running a show and there's no last time but we'll get all that, right? Thanks for having me Ted. All right man, see you guys all next Friday.