 Brought afternoon folks, Ted Rawston here, downtown Honolulu. Also, part of our studio has been moved to Waimanawa, as you can see. And we're the show, We're the Drone Leads, since we do it once a week here at Think Tech O8. Our guest today, Kano Eminus, not the first time on the show, right? I think I've seen you before here, right? And you guys are here for part two of We're the Drone Leads up to Pololo, because we ran out of time last week talking about this great activity up in Pololo and you guys just ran last week. In fact, we're probably going to run out of time today too, so we're probably going to have to have you on a few more times to get to the bottom of this, right? Yeah, that's no problem, of course. Okay, and we do need to get the engineering side of this thing. I'll tell you more about that later as we go forward. I'm so happy that you're here as part of the team, because too much of our time is spent in the Lego component, where things have already been designed, we're putting them together. And what we're going to see in the future is a lot more attention to the engineering aspects, which are going to have to come in the picture here to make drones that we know of today really survive and be useful in the future. So anyway, it's great to have you here. But let's go back a little bit, Micah, to the event up at Anui Nui Immersion School in Pololo. Describe that. Yeah, so we are now officially on day two of six for a six-week program. We just finished our first video. We did everything that the students done out at Pololo. Well, if I interject, you're saying a six-day program, one day a week, is how this is structured? Yes. So it's a six-week, it's like half a semester or something like that, or a third of a semester, something like that? Similarly, yeah, about half. You get them once on Fridays? On Fridays from 12.30. So in the afternoon, right after lunch, and usually that's a perfect time for weather. Of course, we're in Hawaii, so it's wintertime, so it was for day two, this week, we got to go inside, and we're working inside using our simulators, using Free Rider, and demonstrating or showing the students how to balance props. So let's go take a look at what this demonstration last Friday looked like. So we've seen what a drone can do up in Pololo in pretty strong winds, sometimes up there, and sometimes in the rain and such, but you guys went out there and put this program together with Anui Nui. That was day one of a six-day program. That was our day one. Day one, right there. It looks pretty cool, doesn't it? All compressed into one minute, thanks to Zuri, our video editor and everything else person here at the studio. But that's just that video alone shows you an incredible new insight, and I'm sure the people in the school, I'm sure that's a view they've never seen of their own school. Can you imagine after a rainstorm or some serious type of storm, re-flying it and observing where the water is accumulating, which has got to go treat the mosquitoes, or whether it's Albezia down or something like that, mud accumulating. So just in that one quick snapshot, you see a whole new world, a whole new way to observe and express something. I interrupted your flow on how this is all going, but that was just day one. So what is day two going to hold for us, in day three, four, and five, and six? So day two, we're working on balancing props. Kainoa was able to teach the students how exactly to use balancing props, having that engineering perspective, and explaining to them what was important about the airfoil and the airflow for each aircraft that when it goes up in the air, you want to be able to handle, eliminate vibrations in the aircraft. But more importantly, it's all about operation. It's real basic, simple, finding out the ways of you to operate in a safe manner. And using the simulators, it's a lot more different, but it's cost-efficient, right? You're not going to be damaging anything or ruining props. Thank you, Tink Tech Hawaii, for letting us demonstrate our video. This is the equipment that we use, and in the long run, like we said, handling disasters or dealing with, say we have a flash flood, we'll be ready to... We will have a flash flood. It's not a question about that, right? Oh, definitely. So let's take that on for thought. We've got a flash flood. It's unreasonable for the school to expect somebody to show up with equipment, so that we really have to pre-position the equipment and the training at the school with these students or their teachers, and so that they can take care of that themselves. Now, have we thought about that? I mean, that's such a value to the school, I would think. Absolutely. That's why it was so important for us to start this program with the school. You know, they were interested in operations. These two students, Ka'uhi and Ka'ili and Ka'imi, the three students, they were interested but didn't know what exactly they're going to do with it yet. So we were like, okay, we'll show you the fundamentals, we'll show you the basics, how to operate, take off, you know, and in the long run, you have all these projects that you're going to have to do. You're going to have to figure out how to understand your ahupua'a or your land division, what happens at the top of the mountain down to the ocean, what is that water flow doing, and how is it going to involve in the ecosystem, how is it going to plant your lo'i or your ka'u or your taro, open, always thinking outside of the box is what we're always striving for. And there's another place where the engineering and the STEM aspects can come in. Once you have the video or stills or a photo mosaic, whatever it may be of the area, you can now calculate things that you otherwise have to estimate areas, for example. You could look at accumulation of water, you could look at a digital elevation model or some other way to depict the slope of the land and such and even calculate water penetration and potential for landslides and such. No end to that. One video just opens your complete, it changes everything about your perspective. It opens a whole door, as you say, out of the box like way out of the box. So I can see that video being shown to the school administration if they haven't already seen it over and over again. I can see it being shown to the parent teachers association or whatever the community support group up at Palo Lo is. And as we said last time, let's come up with a mission, a task that would value the school value or that the local neighborhood value and turn that into a project that school can prosecute and go make happen. Oh, I love that idea. And at the same time, never forget the fact that there's the engineering aspects that we need to think about that. I like the way you're thinking about the prop vibration. You could actually put a prop that has some damage on it. You could put it on it. You could actually exhibit what vibration looks like. You could have the training of engineering features right there for real. And the same thing is true for the imagery coming out of the camera and how that's treated and how the trigonometric corrections are applied and this sort of thing to take slant out of it and to get it into a rectangular representation. So many things can be done and it just takes one picture or one video to start that whole process. And instead of some of us who just talked, you guys went out there and did that. Yeah, taking action is important. Yeah, I like that. Okay, so day one was the actual field experiment. Day two was understanding some of the rudimentary aspects of what made that possible, which is you're leading the through on the engineering. What's days three, four, and five, and six have been stored for us? Day three, we give you a little... I'll be next Friday, right? Right, next week, Friday, we're striving for its energy. We're looking at power source. That's one main... We're striving to hopefully get a guest speaker on board and showing the kids how important energy is and you have this aircraft. If you look at all aircraft times, lifespan in the air, you only... Maximum is what on average is like half an hour and then you have the races is up to five minutes or you have all these types of energy that you have to deal with. That's the best time where Kainola's perspective on engineering is understanding how important it is where the power distribution is going to be set in your aircraft and as simple as a DJI to a complex drone that in the future they will build. That is really interesting. I don't know the DJI line that well but conceivably you could take one and begin measuring things like certainly got the voltage when the batteries are fresh. Yes. Got the voltage when the batteries are not fresh. That's straightforward. You got how much power has been lost. You could compute that. You could even, with the motors running at different RPMs, measure the current flow and generate RPM versus current rudimentary engineering and begin getting people to see these things are connected cause and effect. They're there and not only are they there, somebody designed them to be there and so there's a code running through somebody's head, the engineer who designed this stuff and understanding that model, that code exists and how that's used to generate systems. That is something that I would say 99% of the country does not understand but it's essential to future systems and it's essential to understanding how to make them work and you kind of introduced the life cycle aspect here how long these things are going to last in the field. You could dunk this thing in salt water, see how long it lasts. There's all kinds of things you could do that what you're doing opens up that whole door. Yeah, it's very important to understand it's all simple. Within the six weeks it's very simple as to registration, you're looking into familiarizing yourself with the controls to what are you going to do when you take off, land, how... Let's just go back to that registration thing for a minute. That's an important subject and if I can turn this, I think this is our camera over here that looks at pieces. So if we can just tip this guy up for a moment, if our camera can zero in here, maybe it can't but... Anyway, what we're talking about here is the registration number which is here on top of this phantom 2. Phantom 3. And that's a really important issue. That means that you, who's ever listed as the owner of this drone, has been registered. The ownership is known. That indication is put on here. Should there ever be something that gets away or is a problem, have a reference number and anybody can get into it. Law enforcement, should there be an issue there but you've stood tall here and stood out and taken on the action of getting it registered. We've got so many guys registered about running without that that it's a great thing to promote and to have people understand. But let's get back to how this program might go forward and we didn't talk about days 4, 5 and 6 yet. We'll catch them after the first break. Yes. Good luck and my gig is energy efficiency doing more with less. It's the most cost effective way that we in Hawaii are going to achieve 100% clean energy by the year 2045. I look forward to being with you. Aloha. And our Polono Valley drone experts are here. Michael Modus, thanks again for coming on and kind of all reminisce. And we were talking at the beginning of the show about this superb six day program. You've built up at Anui Nui School up in Polono. And once again it isn't just so everybody understands this is not just a casual type of event you've put together. You've got the administration in the school, you've got the neighbors around, you've got the teachers involved. So this is not an assertion you've put in here or an insertion. This is an inclusive program that correlates with other programs going on at Anui Nui. Yes. And so it is well thought through, well done. And that's how programs should be done and I'll compliment you on that. But again, we talked about flying day one which is a day in the air. Day two today was a day in the lab. Yes. And day three, four, five, and six. Day three, real simple. Everything that we're teaching, well honestly it has to be simple because we're translating everything in Hawaiian. And if you make it real complicated, it's going to be like new Hawaiian words coming in just like Ka'ui when he announced Miki'ni Ho'olele Pa'ivikio was on Man Aircraft Systems. It was like a... That was on this show, wasn't it? That was in the show. It was about three weeks ago. On this show, right here. So keeping it simple enough for the students to translate and in the long run, you know, more leading to an advanced class. But the six-day program, yeah, it's real simple. The first day is this registration, familiarizing yourself with the aircraft. Second day, you're doing the lab. You're just doing simulators. You're understanding how to balance a prop. The third day is you're going to understand the energy, the power source, the power distribution on the aircraft. And probably safety of lipo batteries. That's going to be important factor here as well. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Right. So another one would be for the fourth day, we're looking at you have all recreational pilots that are going to be joining AMA or, you know, it's free for the youth. We're showing them how to register and then showing them the benefits of drone racing. So introducing them to FPV. By the fourth day, they'll be more comfortable at flying where they'll be able to operate, especially flying manually and, you know, flying like a Cadillac on GPS mode. Just by the way, we have a request from our audience here to explain what FPV means. I think he may have made the transition to engineering or he speaks in algorithmic terms or acronyms as opposed to English. So tell us. FPV simply enough, it just means first person view. And that's exactly what we were doing today in the lab is, you know, using a simulator and it's very similar to FPV or first person view. And by the fourth day, we're going to be using real life, you know, drones and using FPV for recreational purposes, giving them a nice obstacle course with poo noodles. I mean, for the fifth and sixth day, it's just repetition. It's always getting them down with the whole entire program. Like I said, it's real simple, basic, and they can lead into them for STEM, lead into all these projects that they want to acquire and conquer and it will just open more programs, more resources. And that's the best thing about the drone community, I must say, is our resources, our engineers, our politically, you know, or even all the entities, how we can, it's funny how we can all work together to push for community effort to solving issues in, right now, in Nanakuli in Palolo, which I remember for Waikiki, the outcome, right? We talked about it last week, this outcome of us working together for enhancing our future, you know, challenging the status quo, and this is a great way for us to find out the issues, you know, you help. And a perfect example, the video you showed at the beginning of the show, that alone opens up so many aspects of opportunity, observation, questions, problems in some people's minds, I'm sure, that the discovery of what that outside the box is starts to occur when you show that. Without that experience, without that video that you showed, it would be impossible to describe that to people. Let me go back to the question from our audience on what FPD means. Again, what you're referring to is the camera on board sends a video signal to the ground, shows up on the ground controller with a picture that looks out the front or the side of the vehicle, just as a pilot might see it. So in days gone by, we would have called that a pilot's view, but in today's arcane world of word creation, we call it a person view, as if the pilot is just a first person, it's not really a pilot, it's simply the first person, the first receptor in the stream. And it's an important issue because certainly in piloting in aircraft, you're sensitive to the G forces and the noise, the vibration to control fields and noises of the propeller as the circumstances change, vibration of the aircraft when you're in a buffeting condition and such. And those things are all absent in the drone world. So we're really working in an area where the perceptions that have built the entire understanding of the engineering community and the design community and the regulation community are absent in the domain of FVV. So we'll have to discover what that is and how do we replace that sensation that's evident to a pilot in the one dimension removed aspect of first person view. We don't have first person vibration, we don't have first person sound. They all would be required to combine together to create the picture in the mind of the operator to put it into a pilot perspective. So that's the engineering challenge here. In fact, a very important engineering challenge is to find how we can improve that connection between the guy on the ground with a ground controller and the bird flying. It would be great to ask the kids, why was it pressed last week? They took something that I spent a lot of time getting good at. They got good at it in 10 seconds. They both stated that it was easy to fly. Right, and you guys were close behind that. But anyway, if you asked them, what would you guys want as a way to operate this so that you don't have to stand there at a control station but you could somehow say, drone, give me a map of the campus so that you can take care of whatever your duties are. And the thing goes off and runs the mission by itself and then the software downloads and yeah, he's gone already. But that's what we have to get the kids thinking about. What are those future requirements and how would they play a role in making that happen? But it starts with defining what that requirement is. And you know, that's, here I am talking all the time, but that's evident all over the place. We're working with the California Office of Emergency Services. They're thinking of police and fire and public safety and this sort of thing, and they have the same question. What do we really want the system to do and how do we write that down and how do we get the manufacturers to address it? And the very issue of how do you control the thing? Do you have to have a specialist with a box or can you have a generalist who simply opens the case and it flies out by itself? Your video showed that. It kind of implied that a little bit, right? The drone is sitting on the hard case and suddenly just elevates. What we don't see is that there's somebody out there running a control system to make it happen. So anyway, we got to get the kids thinking about, ask them, what would you guys want this to do for you and how simple would you want to make it? It would be interesting to see what they think. I love that question. And I see you brought yourself up. You brought a serious camera at the table here. Yeah. The reason for this camera was this demonstrating that this is how simple our equipment are when it comes to doing video footage that you folks seen earlier. And we just use a cannon and a phantom and pretty expensive equipment. I'm not going to lie, but it's real simple to use. Easier said than done. And all the students, right, all the students, the two students were able to use it and videotape and now it's just moving into a bigger question, right? And what exactly do you want to do with this? And their minds kind of, I was saying, maybe you can elaborate on Ka'uhi. One of those students told me Ka'uhi was stating that why not build a drone that can fly and not only fly but do other things as well, like land and turn into an RC truck, for example, and then fly off or even dive into the ocean and turn into a miniature submarine and take pictures over there, you know what I mean? So he's already got his mind going thinking all kinds of things. So he's thinking in terms of the utility and the mission that the system's going to achieve and that immediately goes beyond what we can do today. He's way outside the box in that thinking. But it would be cool to get him to think what the plan would be as a structured path. How would we get there? How would we start on that path? That's what we need to know in order to make the first step. Obviously, we don't want to go put this in the ocean. We know what's going to happen to it. So the whole issue of saltwater intrusion becomes an immediate task. But that's exactly the thinking that needs to happen because if we don't have that thinking, we're going to be stuck with what we've got today. Yeah, exactly. And I'm just thinking the size of that SLR you've got there, that's probably what, two pounds, maybe something like that? Yeah, no. This thing, I know a lot of quadrotors that would carry this just fine. This one won't, I don't think. But that brings up another point, sensors and the software that analyzes the sensors. That's a real forecastably durable part of this business. That is, outlasting the drones and everything else is going to be the analysis of the information. Just with UH today and on a program they've got going and what a camera is today, a digital camera, it generates a cloud or a box, a whole bunch of pixels, and the pixels are colored green or blue. So it isn't a picture until our brain looks at it and turns it into something we recognize or the software that the kids are going to come up with looks at those pixels and decides something. Puts it together. Yeah, in fact, what we should do is have the UH guys talk to your guys. That would be cool. We'll get a connection going between Anui Noe and UH. Because what we looked at today was they're taking the pixel set of a picture and saying, hey, it's not a picture, it's just 24,000, 24 million pixels. If there's a high affinity of the same color in an area that becomes a blob, or maybe something common about that collection of pixels, what if there's edges in there defined as green and no green or something like that? What if there's a sudden appearance of a definable shape? What if that edge closes on itself? Wow, we've got a polygon. We've got a baseball home plate. We've got something. What if the shape was curved but closed on itself? We have a person. Right. So image extraction from the collected imagery is a big deal. We'll do that. We'll get the UH guys to visit your guys and do a handshake and show the kids what they're doing. Week five and six would be the ideal day that we bring in more guest speakers. The goal was to have at least operating some type of aircraft each day that is different. If you notice, you're going to operate a DJI or a different product, a different design. They're all used for recreational because of educational purposes. And we've got so much more to talk about. We don't have to have you guys back because the show only runs half an hour. Or we're going to have to get the boss to buy us for another half an hour and make an hour out of this show and get all this talked about. Let's continue talking. Let's look at this every week of your process and see what's coming out of it and what kind of things that kids are coming up with that you have already identified to them. Sounds great. Micah, thanks for coming out again. Thank you, Ted. Kind of. Until we're back at the end of the month. Look forward to it.