 Good afternoon folks downtown Honolulu Ted Rawlson here with our show where the drone leads we have a fantastic guest on for you today We have mr. Dustin Helwig Dustin. Thanks for coming on Ted. Thanks for having me It was a it's gonna be quite a conversation and sitting in the background here is Jim Gilmore in case we need a reinforcement, right? Mr. Gerard. Yes, Mr. Gerard. Okay, right not Gilmore Gerard, right? And you are the chief technology officer of Chesapeake Technology International. Yes, sir. Tell us about CTI. We started the company almost 17 years ago back in 2000 April 1st actually which April Fool's Day kind of makes sense So 17 years in business we were founded down in southern Maryland near Patuxent Naval Air Station And now we've kind of spread across the country and we support some unique niche DoD and intelligence community customers and have some various commercial endeavors as well Yeah, that's great. And of course that discussion you just went through sounds like something that came up at the Recently conducted pay comm science and technology conference. Yes. We had a lot of interaction. Yes, and second year in a row I think we've had that kind of interaction We had Dr. Song Choi from UH on last week setting us up for the oncoming event of this week And then we had the event this week, you know I thought it was one of the better post conferences. We had more discussion more dialogue more Different kinds of people coming through. Yeah, I felt it was excellent It was really good to hear the perspectives of the enlisted panel, you know The real operators that have to use the stuff that we build and understand, you know What doesn't work sometimes? It's a simple thing that hate this button is hard to use You know, we're trying to solve hard technology problems and sometimes it's more simple than we You know, that takes me back to about six years ago One of the enlisted panels had the Marines talking about how many different batteries they have to carry and they have to change them all That 1155 at night or something's they're carrying on five pounds of batteries all different types for all the stuff We design and develop and and have them take exactly Unfortunately, I guess most of what we do is software development, which doesn't weigh very much So and that's a really interesting subject software development spectrum management and all that That that sinew that ties together systems ties together units ties together people ties together Governments and such that's what you are dealing in. Yeah, there's a there's an emerging Philosophy and it hasn't been approved yet in DoD, but of making spectrum an operational domain So today you have air land sea space They want to make spectrum a new operational domain and the key to that is understanding what what spectrum is and being able to see it and Figure out how to operate in it. So somebody can look through a telescope and see land How do we look at spectrum and operate in it? That's really interesting spectrums are really abstract term for most people So we have to break that down and carefully explain what spectrum means But I just thought of something kind of on the humorous side as you say that we have the J6s We have the J3s and the J2s is always contentioned between them. Yes now if we have another spectrum domain are we going to have a Six five or something like that that manages spectrum when there actually is so today J6 does own spectrum in the six five shop is the spectrum management community And it is a challenge getting the operational community in the three the intelligence community in the two and the Spectrum and cyber community in the six to communicate and collaborate in this operational domain. Otherwise You know, it's kind of like if my air traffic control radars weren't talking to my air traffic controllers planes wouldn't fly into each other But we do that in spectrum all the time and so that's again one of these hidden abstract things. It's under the surface It's dominant and prevalent everywhere. It makes things work It makes radios communicate and make systems and units and people interact, but we don't see it Yeah, people like their cell phones and it all operates on spectrum and spectrum is vulnerable, you know, it's easily Denied so we can interfere with spectrum use and that's really the the focus of the electronic warfare domain Which we do a lot of work in as well And you know the thing that's interesting is as much as we talk about defense things that the Pacific Command and S&T conference this week We also have the humanitarian humanitarian response and disaster operation side, which is going to be just as necessarily Attendant to the whole spectrum issue. Absolutely. In fact, we participated in an experiment called Pacific endeavor its focus was communications interoperability when a disaster happens so tsunami happens in the Philippines you have OGA's and you know third parties and other countries coming to respond and they all start using their radios which are incompatible and they Can start conflicting with each other and then even worse if you have a Bad actor if you will in that environment that's trying to intentionally interfere with the use of those systems for whatever reason Yeah, so spectrum applied to the humanitarian mission of the military and also It always flows down at the civil side the civil environments getting very complicated with the infrastructures and the complicated Situations we have totally depend on the internet other forms of communication once again spectrum drives all of that Yeah, I mean if you think in a mobile environment where you're in your car or in a tank You don't access the internet without spectrum And so the tools that we're developing we're trying to figure out how to help people see and understand spectrum and operate in that arena whether it's changing frequency to avoid interference or Physically maneuvering to get to an area where they will likely have a better signal and then even putting that capability into Autonomous systems like drones so that they can be more successful when spectrum is cluttered I thank you for saying drones because this show is called for the drone leads and if you read on on the Teleprompter that says you have to say drones at least once during the show Man, you got that one right. That's totally cool But but that is on a serious nature serious note the whole world of drones has to pay attention to the spectrum issue in a big way Yeah, yeah that whether you're doing sense and avoid technology to keep drones or aircraft from running into each other or whether it's the data link That's the control link to that UAV or the communications links between UAVs when you're trying to create the swarm or have UAVs cooperate You have to take that into account Amen, and then you have to have the quality of that service into account as well because there's going to be if there's interruptions and disruptions in the signal The sometimes the automatic play control systems will disconnect or will return to home or take some Protective action if there's a quality loss in the signal absolutely And sometimes we want to cause that to happen Especially if somebody's flying a drone over the White House for example But certainly we want to preserve it for our own so they continue to operate even when they're being interfered with But what you know what also and we talked about this at the show as well as even before this show What's intriguing to me is it spectrum management spectrum modeling spectrum testing all these things are something that Hawaii could pay a big role in Certainly, and we're trying to move Spectrum managers into spectrum operators so that we have a sense of being in the fight instead of just being managers before the fight But to that end We're communicating with University of Hawaii Dr. Iskender I think I pronounced that right who is focused on RF propagation modeling algorithms And we'd like to combine some of the technologies we've developed Where maybe we can map the 3d structure of an urban area and then feed that into an RF propagation algorithm So that I can understand how the signals will propagate through the urban Canyon and then using that to autonomously Provide that quality of service for drones that might be flying through those concrete jungles so it'd be some system underlying the the dashboard so to speak where that calculation is going on full-time and Frequencies the waveforms Connection systems would be being automatically determined that are most optimum for that communication for that Vehicle that person that drone whatever it might be with some destinations trying to talk to exactly have an ongoing Kind of like a the way animals work way people work finding the optimum path Yeah, we kind of we've related it to bats before if you look at how bats echo geolocate and you know avoid They avoid each other and find bugs so that you know because they're trying to eat of course Drones don't need to eat, but they want to survive and not crash into buildings So we also have auto routing algorithms that you could potentially run in the drone itself That would enable it to physically maneuver to attain that quality of service That's that's that's interesting what you're suggesting is the drone can maneuver and manipulate in order to improve the quality of Service of its own communication exactly and that would also lead to the mission being done by the drone because the That you could that is you could manage the The return from the target or whatever it might be that you're looking at or the quality of the signal or the determination of the volcanic smoke Whatever it might be you could optimize on that absolutely and that that's one of the challenges a lot of people are focusing on Optimizing swarm movement. So how do I make UAVs that are trying to work together? Move coherently what we're focusing on is how do I make them perform some function? Coherently or together so someone else is working the problem. How do I make the swarms fly? We're working on the problem of how do I make the swarm do something useful? So how do you optimize on the mission and that at least a mission self-determination on board or Redirecting of the mission or adjusting as members of the of the fleet fall out run out of fuel or simply aren't available Yes, it has to be dynamic. I mean today we do pre-mission planning that you know is inflexible in mission But we need to make it more flexible and dynamic based on real-time what we have in in that sense is that we have basically a Open-loop scheduling is how we operate today as opposed to closed-loop optimization Absolutely. Yeah, this is this conversation is great because I'll tell you that doctor Dilmarat Esmoth is probably not watching. He's not running a proposal right now writing one But we've got some R&D going into NSF It passes phase one that is dealing with the the way the command and control system the TGNC targeting guidance navigation control Should work in order to match the kind of mission operations You're talking about because the sensors set coming in is is is maybe unstructured and unpredictable You could have losses in the sensors. You could have sensors that you didn't that you didn't plan for so unstructured sensor collection common filtering and such to take out the bogus signals and get just the fact and then turning that into a Command and control system with enough precision to complete the mission or to go to a safe spot if you can't complete the mission Absolutely and an interesting part of that is you have to do it in a way That's performant enough to run within these very small potentially small drones So, you know like we were talking earlier spectrum can be easily denied I may not have persistent command and control with that swarm So I have to put enough autonomy in the swarm or in the drones themselves So that they can make those kinds of decisions on their own without having to go back to a high-performance Platform amen, so you have a persistence issue of some kind that has to be addressed here and the persistence could be you could imagine it to be Assuming or you want a one-minute drop in service or a loss in quality of service a five-minute ten minute Whatever it might be and the more you have to think of quality of service under that denied Asset, it's going to be a more complicated solution. Yeah, we actually have a new small business innovative research program with Special operations command to focus on exactly that problem. How do I make a disadvantaged intermittent low bandwidth deal? They call it sensor synchronized to and from a cloud environment so that I can get data in and out of the enterprise in my day The business deal stood for disconnected intermittent and limited regarding communication. So what you're that's interesting So since I have also pickle what's that? What the pickle meant pull the handle and the bomb goes off so the Deal tell me again what dole means in this in today's disadvantage Intermittent and low bandwidth so very constrained communication disadvantage disadvantage intermittent and low bandwidth. That's interesting because it used to be Disconnected intermittent and limited so it's been up acronyms deal has been upgraded up. Maybe so Now I'm gonna have to go to some military spec and look at the three pages of acronyms that are in the front three The front is in the front part and relearn what all the acronyms are because they've moved since I last saw them Yeah, the worst part is when they put acronyms in acronyms. Yeah, no kidding. Right. It does happen Yeah, okay Well, anyway back to the nature of our discussion this this form of optimization in a complex dynamic environment Which you may not have precise knowledge of this almost comes back to Simulation being a big part here in some way Yeah, I think to tune or train the algorithms up front to make sure that they're gonna behave in a manner that is Not necessarily predictable, but is not dangerous, of course M&S becomes very important modeling and simulation because we have to run those algorithms in a more controlled environment where we can vary all the Parameters and we have to have a visualization environment that allows us to see that in the model modeled environment Because humans don't like to trust numbers on a spreadsheet. They like to see things This is fascinating because you have to have a broad plateau type solution rather than a peak solution and it has to be damaged Tolerant or issue tolerance so that it can keep functioning even under degraded inputs Yeah, we've actually looked at there's a technology that Netflix developed called Chaos Monkeys and open source project Yeah, you go to the commercial side where the people have sure if they don't get movies that come through you're not gonna make money Exactly, let's pick that whole issue up after our first break here the whole issue of reliability and resilience in the system I like that. Thanks Hello This is Gordon the tech star here at a Yubachi talk I want to thank you guys for joining us every week from one o'clock in the afternoon to 130 Hawaii time where we talk about tech but this year we're kind of branching out and we're talking about all other interesting kinds of facts and figures and Andrew my security guy will will be joining us as he always is giving us a Weekly security tip and we will also then have Angus giving us some gadgets and some things It's really starting to irritate his okole. So we're gonna have him coming out as well. Anyway, Drew. Do you have anything you want to say? I had to be here man. Happy to help Here we go. Thanks again. He bought you talk. We'll see you soon Aloha kako. I'm Marcia Joyner and I'm inviting you to navigate the journey We are discussing the end-of-life options and we would really love to have you every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m Right here Friday afternoon folks second part of our show where the drone leads Ted Ralston here in our downtown Honolulu studios I think tech and with me is Dustin Helwig Dustin again. Thanks for coming on board first time Thanks for having me, you know the way this show works once you come on once you got to come on again Oh, I guess I'm bound in now We can trap you by Skype for weekend and you can send Jim in if you want and I'll have to do that Okay, so anyway Dustin and Jim who's sitting behind the scenes here telling Dustin what to say are from Chesapeake Technology International and you're actually in East Coast Yeah, so our headquarters is near Pax River Naval Air Station We have an office near Dulles one in Denver and two in California. Okay, so you're a virtual operation and then you're Coupled you're out here in Hawaii right now. Yeah, we're out here visiting You know, we'd really like to look at setting up a persistent presence on Island Wait, wait, let's catch that. Can you say that again? We'd really like to look at setting up a persistent presence Persistence has two terms that has the QoS It also has let's be a business that's persisting has a has continuity of purpose and continuity of operation Exactly and to that end we last year we sponsored a STEM scholarship with the University of Hawaii Did you yes, and we'd like to you know build on that relationship so that we can find a Recruiting presence here to at least find the you know top engineers that might be interested in our field here Maybe even do some seminars at the University so that we can help Electrical engineers software developers and RF engineers at the University understand what it is that we do in electronic warfare and spectrum And after that fascinating conversation we had in the first part of the show I wanted to take what you just said one step further the interesting thing to me about spectrum is it doesn't require a big Aerospace factory nearby where you make spars and ribs and wings and fuselages in order to have an aerospace presence and So Hawaii doesn't have that large manufacturing capability with no natural resources. We have sunshine and fresh water or salt water, but So Hawaii taking on spectrum management spectrum operations spectrum futures modeling a simulation Quantum computing and that in what influence that's going to have on spectrum all these things could be done here Yeah, and there are natural resources you do have I think that are eminently lever Leverageable one is humans with brains and intelligence Another is you have some very good range facilities here that have very broad spectrum clearance It's very hard sometimes on the continental us to do spectrum related testing and evaluation Because we interfere with you know nearby cities and people cell phones and they don't like that very much Okay, so we have that and the other thing we have is a probably unique the United States a really tight connection between the Pacific Command Which is our warfight joint command our National Guard and our state and local and federal law enforcement and public safety agencies in fact the National Guard has officers on duty in Pagam leadership and we Pagam has officers over in national guard. So the two are Everybody's tied together and we're all trying to solve problems and the I think the model people have here Is that hey, we aren't connected to someplace else. You can't drive from here to Nebraska or something like that so everybody the problems have to be solved here and so there's a Problem-solving attitude and there's also quite an interesting Homogenation of cultural thought which I think something we haven't even talked about yet But language and perception have an influence on how you solve problems. Yes, so we have all the right pieces We have the leadership the thought leadership in you and your peers and folks at the University to put something together That could become part of the industry structure here Yeah, you also have very broad international engagement out here and spectrum is interesting in that it crosses boundaries You know electrons don't just stop because of a country's boundary. So we unintentionally cause interference all the time with others And so that that international presence here is useful as well because you can engage with other countries and build plans for you know How to mitigate that especially in HADR types and environments and with you know with the Pagam structure I think the Pacific Command has about the largest geographical responsibility in all of all the country and We hit more countries through the Pacific Command and then the other of the joint command and yet the It's persistence and quality of life and those things that really matter at the end of the day So we can tie those into spectrum actually matter of fact, they do tie into spectrum Absolutely, we should think about that in the context of the sea level rise and the global warming going on because populations are affected on the Western Pacific Islands that are gonna have to change what they do because their lands are gone and So that put stresses on populations and that leads to the kind of issues that require a lot of communication And reliable communication in order to get through yeah, and from from the work Our company does all you need is a good computer and a smart person and you can write software So, you know, it's a potential career path for people that are in remote locations like this Plus because of the unique time zone nature of Pacific Command. It's useful to have people local And that's also true in the sense of business We're kind of in between the east and the west in terms of the business time cycles You can catch them both in the same shorter period of time in the day So, how do we how do we if you had if you had a checkbook that's unlimited and you could write the script of the world How would you create a this kind of us a rich spectrum-based business in Hawaii? Well, if I had an unlimited checkbook, I probably wouldn't be here today Okay, so that I'm glad you don't have one that we just saw that so Jim. Can you fix that problem? He hasn't got an unlimited checkbook Okay, he's gonna work on that problem. So You know, I think the STEM scholarships a good start We got to get interests generated in our field in our domain with the young engineers and the faculty at the university and build up A knowledge base that can be applied I think some of the national intelligence presences here are helping with that as well because they work in similar boundaries Whether you're sensing spectrum or using it to communicate or doing other things, you know, there's parallel paths there I also think that You know broadening the STEM programs with Organizations like FCO, which is the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association With NDIA who sponsored the post conference this week and with AOC the Association of Old Crows Which is the electronic warfare organization, you know expanding those programs would be helpful as well Okay, and then the other thing that I go through my mind all the time STEM science technology engineering and math is a Sort of a subject the object is quality of life or sustainability Resilient something like that. So the more we can tie together that subject and the result it generates and Validate or verify or show how spectrum management is the thing that's going to tie it together Yeah, I mean our domain is reacted to a certain extent exactly our domain is highly technical You know, it's you know, even though we hire predominantly Software engineers it really helps if they have a physics background a doubly background a mathematics background Because a lot of what we do is heavily algorithmic and it also helps if they're excited about it So we like to hire former operators and people that you know use and and attack spectrum for a living and help them Get our engineers excited about what they do one nice thing about what we do You know, so many people always want to go for the kinetic response in warfare, you know Shoot a gun or shoot a missile or do with spectrum You can have deliberate effects that are quite extensive without firing a physical shot So people don't generally die And you can you know really have a prohibitive effect without Launching a missile and that's also actually also transferred well to the business community business community doesn't shoot people or kill people It promotes people and promotes health and it promotes life and it promotes quality and promotes education and the same basic Concepts apply in that environment as they do in the combat environment is a tie there You know, the other thing I was going to take you back to is these complex systems as they interact quality of service Handling faults and this sort of thing or unknowns that might occur two thoughts come into the picture some of the advanced math like Neural Nats or well that that's certainly intelligence. Yeah, those those general subjects, but I'm thinking of The chain modeling If I could but when I get younger, I'll be able to name it a rush Anyway, there's a chain modeling looks at how chains affect each other how a Problem creates starts and either it expands and becomes catastrophic or you collapse it by controlling it and Markov chain modeling Oh, okay, there's a whole ranch of mathematics that needs to start getting The drums beating real hard on in order to understand these things and be able to manipulate and design in these areas the other side that comes into the picture is linguistics and Language is kind of the mechanism by how we think and things have value or low higher or low value depending on Adjectives and adverbs and things like that and verbs nouns all have different ways in constructing our thoughts the sooner we can get our Spectrum management to think that way and to have that as a framework for how it operates the better we're going to be there is a branch called Linguistic geometry that is somewhat useful in and what love to introduce you to the guys where networks You have somebody in Colorado, right? Oh, yeah myself and what city in Colorado? I live in Colorado Springs. Okay, that makes sense not far from you in at the University of Colorado is The stillman brothers and they operate stillman advanced technologies and they are these guys who are behind the linguistic geometry Domain, I think you and they would I love good introduction. Oh, it totally hits. Yeah, it's abstract things But it takes it to a very practical level. Absolutely You know, we talked a little bit earlier about counter-drone whether you're doing it for a facility protection or for some other means I think More advances need to be done in Figuring out ways to control them in an urban environment, especially where they won't cause damage potentially or interfere with human activities While keeping things protected. Oh amen that then that's sort of the the track identify track and detect aspect or make it detect and identify aspect of counter-drone as opposed to the kinetic takedown or the command or the Command takeover and this sort of thing, but there's absolutely no question that we're gonna have to do that We have license plates on cars so we can identify who they are. We have roads They go on so they don't go where the roads aren't we don't have any of that to manage drones We're supposed to register them. I've been spec that 90% of the people don't yeah And we're supposed to respect and they use these generally Commercial RF links that are very similar to each other. They don't have a unique signature That's easy to exploit necessarily right and in fact the some of them can't even carry the bandwidth A lot of video down is going to swap the system and we're not going to get there But if you're a Hollywood production and you're making a movie out here in Hawaii and using a drone You sure don't want some other drone snooping on top of that Yeah sticking your movie out on the internet that night exactly and if you're when a whole school You don't want to have eolani come over and observe your football practice Yeah, so very very easy to understand models as to how we have to understand what's there But if you're the power company our power company uses drones to manage the power grid If they have six we'll say and they're operating with six and two more show up that they don't know where they came from Yeah, how come there's two more? What's going on here? Well, I think an important part of that is situational understanding So having a the sensors to identify and track and all that but be having that visual Representation so that humans can monitor and see it and we certainly work in that area as well So three-dimensional a common operating picture driven by spectrum Spectrum that's unreal. Well said, you know our show used to be 45 minutes. We had to make it half hour We are at this point Extremely excited in our discussion, but we are running into the time. Okay. So I really appreciate you having me I mean, this is cool We got to get some business going here and some work with the university work with it with the civil agencies and paycom Let's do it. Thanks, Ted. Dustin Helwig from TCP technology international. Thanks so much for coming on and thanks for doing a good job Jim keeping us on track here