 Welcome to Innovation Rodeo 2022. I am your host, Jason Seibel from the Air Force Security Forces Center, Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center, and we are here to Rodeo. That's right, it is Innovation Rodeo 2022, live streaming from Techport San Antonio, and we are here in the best location in the world to bring our teams from across the enterprise together to pitch their ideas to the judges. Techport Center and Arena is the heartbeat of Port San Antonio's 1900-acre technology innovation campus. It is a national hub for innovation and strategic convergence by DOD, industry, academia, community partners, and other stakeholders. Located minutes away from Air Force IMSC headquarters, Techport provides an ideal ecosystem for matching individual talent to technology for our Air Force innovators. This state-of-the-art facility shifts the needle forward for both San Antonio and the Air Force IMSC innovation mission. Now, before we meet this year's judges, let's hear from the Air Force IMSC commander, Major General John Allen. Good morning, innovators, judges, and viewers. We're coming to you live streaming from San Antonio, Texas. Welcome to our fourth annual Innovation Rodeo at the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center. This is my first as the IMSC commander, so it is particularly exciting for me to be a part of this. I'm sorry I'm not in this room. I am on the road, actually, but I'm with you in spirit. This is really, really important business for our Air Force. We have world-class innovators all over our Air Force, and the best, most important innovation in my view is the innovation that's happening closest to the problems we're trying to solve and the innovations that are brought in by the great people that have the best vantage point of those problems. So we have eight finalists downselected from 72 really great ideas that we're looking at this week. We have a million dollars waiting to help prototype, beta test, and better understand the very best of these eight innovation ideas, and hopefully to move to scaling around our Air Force if that's what our beta test and prototype says is the right thing to do. So I'm thrilled that we're doing this. I'm thrilled to be a part of it. Thank you for the time of being here and being a part of what we're doing this week. I look forward to a wonderful rest of the week. Innovate a way. Thank you, General Allen, and innovate a way indeed. I am your host, but more importantly, we've got six judges on the stage with me, and it is now my pleasure and honor to introduce them to you from Air Force IMSC, Ms. J.D. Perty. Thank you so much, Jason. Good afternoon. As you mentioned, J.D. Perty here, Chief Innovation Officer at AFIMSC. I personally am excited to be here because it's the end of the week, a culmination of the hard work for these eight individuals to showcase all of the great effort and time and things that they've learned about not only themselves, but their innovation. Can't wait to see what they've got to bring to us today. From AFIMSC, Colonel Kelly Sands. Thanks, Jason. I, too, J.D. I'm excited to be here. I'm the Vice Commander at AFIMSC, and I am just really impressed with the energy and the ideas of not only the presenters today, but the teams of Airmen and Guardians that are behind them. So let's get it on. From AFIMSC, Mr. Samuel Grave. Good afternoon. I am the Director of Installation Support at AFIMSC, and I'm a lifelong resource manager, financial manager in the Air Force and other places. So the idea of innovation as a way to reduce costs or do things smarter, faster, better, really kind of hits home to me. So I'm really looking forward to this afternoon. From the Air Force Security Forces Center, Mr. Gerard Jolivette. Good afternoon. I, too, am excited to be here. I've become familiar with a number of the pitches that we're going to receive this afternoon, and as the General said, from 72 to this small number, I'm excited, and I try to look forward to it. So, like I said, let's get it on. Let's get it on. From the Air Force Services Center, Colonel Carolyn Annings. It is great to be up here with these teammates, and I'm excited to see what the young Airmen, young, I say young, from my perspective, from the installations bringing up, so we can look at it from an enterprise level across the Air Force. So at the Services Center, as we help folks, Airmen's families, guardians globally, I'm interested in seeing how this goes forward. Super excited. Thank you. And last but certainly not least, from the Air Force Services Center, Chief Master Sergeant Edgard Castillo. Good afternoon. Super excited to be here as well, the SEL for the Services Center. Super excited to see their pitches in a tough time with all the resources, challenges that we're having. Interested to see what they have to pitch. Excellent. We're excited as well, JD. They've had a very interesting week. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of went on the last few days? Statuses, and they came together on Monday with some professional trainers to teach them, and one individual said, essentially lost or decided not to do how Air Force greets anymore and need to learn to really do how to pitch. So they spent a lot of time really not only perfecting their pitch abilities, the perfecting and working on some of the pieces and parts of their pitch and whether it's scalable, who their stakeholders might be, so really digging into what they're about to share with us to perfect it to make it as good as it can be for this really large audience. So that's been a week-long effort culminating here this afternoon. I'm excited to hear their pitches. I know you all are excited to hear their pitches. Now that we've heard a little bit about how this week went, we actually had cameras follow them around from earlier this week, so Tets take a look on the screen and see exactly what they went through building up to Innovation Rodeo 2022. The really interesting thing is that the training is really designed to make the airmen feel comfortable and to remove those insecurities and any barriers ahead of making that final pitch. As a sport team, we're here to make the contestants feel much more comfortable and really make them feel at ease when they're presenting. There are a number of functional experts here and subject matter experts to help the innovators develop their ideas and their pitches ahead of the big day on Friday. You know, we get innovations pushed through our career field every day as security forces. Everybody's trying to make things better, so it's really a great opportunity to help push things through that can make a big difference for our career field. Or if you need to see where the TCP and the ECP's entry control point is. Stepping out of your comfort zone, you know, you want to be able to talk to people. If you're not very comfortable with that, you want to be able to be, stand up in front of people, be articulate and be able to voice what you're trying to sell and get it out there in a fashionable manner. Personal goal is really, for me personally, is to highlight the team, their effort, this project that we're working at Eglin, but also to show that it can be replicated across other bases, centers, and even match comms and Air Force level requirements. Step forward, just put your idea forward and just push it as far and as hard as you can. And if it fails, it fails, but you learn from it and it'll open up another door as well. All right, we are backstage here at Techport Center and Arena in Port San Antonio, live streaming from backstage. So we've got the dressing rooms all set up here for our contestants, our eight contestants who are getting ready to pitch to these judges. Before they do, though, we want to just kind of peek in and see what they're thinking. So let's go in here and check out the first set of contestants that are up. Hey, and they are up and ready to go for us. Hey, guys, we got Brandon Harris and we got Chaplain PJ Werner here. Brandon, how are you feeling? Fine. Well, you are kicking it off. Indeed, Innovation Rodeo 2022. You're the first member up. Do you feel prepared after this week of coaching and training to give your pitch? I do. I do. I do feel prepared. I'm a little bit worried about the Q&A for the judges, but I think I got the handle as well. Okay. Well, I was just up there with them. They're all very nice. I assure you. So they'll go easy. Chaplain Werner, PJ here. How are you feeling? So good. Absolutely outstanding. Okay, excellent. And are you ready to give your pitch? You got the butterflies a little bit? Just a little bit. I've been praying them down the whole day. Amen to that, PJ. All right. Thanks so much. Brandon, you're actually the first one up. So let's get you out there and pitch to the judges. Do it. All right. Similar to this image of the Hubble telescope your left-hand side, when we look at contracting data, we see hundreds of data points throughout the acquisition life cycle. To manage all of those data points, we're required to fill out a workload tracker every day. But this means that we won't be spending as much time visiting the construction site or we won't be spending as much time developing the body armor requirements. Instead, we're spending our time manually filling out a workload tracker even though this information is found in an acquisition system. Well, what if there was an automated solution? A solution that will take all of these data points combine them into one website accessible not just to contracting but also to our mission partners. Similar to this image of the Hubble telescope, a solution that will zoom in on these data points and allow contracting and our mission partners the ability to get a better insight into their acquisition. Acquisition visibility or ACVIS is that solution. Next slide. ACVIS removes the time that contracting personnel spend manually filling out a workload tracker by creating a consolidated database. It's going to combine seven legacy systems. It's going to eliminate the need for manual inputs. And it's going to repurpose contracting efforts back to the things that matter the most. You'll see here this is an example of what an ACVIS dashboard would look like. The column on the left hand side, those are the common reports we look at when we're tracking the acquisition throughout its life cycle. Next slide. The need is there. I surveyed hundreds of contracting personnel. 89% hate their current workload tracker. People are spending four hours on average every week filling these things out. 91% want an automated tracker. In fact, one of the comments I got back from the survey was filling out manual trackers is similar to rabbits multiplying. We're creating trackers just to track other trackers. The momentum is there as well. 87% say my idea is a viable option. Probably the biggest concern was they think it's too complex. But if you can fill out a spreadsheet, you know how to do charts and graphs, then you can use ACVIS. It's at the unit level. We are currently implementing ACVIS at the 50th contracting squadron. And it's a proven concept. One of the seven systems is already live right now. You can go out there to the website and see this data for yourself. My idea is to scale this up. Take all seven of these acquisition systems, combine them into one database, and then publish it for everyone. Next slide. As far as stakeholders are concerned, ACVIS aligns with AFICC and AFICC Business Intelligence Team's initiative to optimize our workload trackers. Also, AFIMSC Innovation Team also sees the value added in implementing ACVIS. But the main stakeholders are any unit out there that use contracting for their purchasing. Next slide. I'm asking for two to six weeks for startup, test, and launch of ACVIS. I'm also asking for access to all contracting unit data. Now, I personally have access to all these seven systems, but I just have it for my unit alone. So I would need to get access to all the contracting unit data just so we can make it one consolidated database. And I'm asking for $349,000, $182,000 the first year, and $167,000 post year one. You're going to hear seven other amazing ideas today. With ACVIS, each one of them can become a reality faster because you're going to be giving that time back to the contracting officers, allowing them to do what they do best. Thank you. Do you have any questions for me? Thanks for breaking down the numbers, what you're asking for in that level of detail. As somebody who's probably going to help be responsible for a winner and the sustainment tail, judges and I have already talked about this. When you say post year one, that $187,000 per year, or is that one and done? Talk to me a little bit about that. Yes ma'am, think of post year one as sustainment. So first year 181, 182, and then 167 every year afterwards. I get a feeling that if we're going to go the first year, it would be good to have a second year available as well. Thanks for thinking about that. That was one of the major conversations we had as judges. Anybody else like to ask any questions, Sabrina? I have a question from it. So as you gain all the other units in, let's say we get 87 units, will that tail in increase the year on after? So the first year you'll have two or three units. Let's say the second year you'll have 40 units. Will that tail in support costs go up? Or is just 187 all the way? It's 187 the first year chief, and then it'll be 167 every year in the outdoors. I have a question as well. Brandon, is there a concern, a security concern, aggregating all that data together from a department perspective? From a department perspective, I'm going off of what the one system is already doing. It's already been out there. There's been no security concerns when I talked to the developers of that one system that's already published with the similarity to ActVis. If there's any concern, then that would actually be able to be controlled by us. Say for instance, if there's contractors you don't want to see that data, we can easily shut down access to those specific groups if we want to. Yes ma'am? Brandon, I'm up next. Are you familiar with the ATO, authority to operate process, and how does it apply here? The complexity of gaining that authority? Yes, so I have talked to AFICC about the ATO process, and in our discussions, because the servers that I want to use are already ATO approved, there is no ATO issue with this. Tell me a little bit about the team that's supporting you. I have, my champion is Colonel Karen Landell. I think she was on the stage in 2019, so she's been very helpful. And she's been a great supporter of this. I have the AFICC Roger Westermeyer, who's also been a big supporter of this. And I have Peter Herman from the AFICC business intelligence team, who is also, we've talked a lot about the concept and the idea behind this, ActVis. So if it's implemented, how would you take the databases and then proliferate them across the Air Force? It sounds a little bit like you have the knowledge. Just walk me through that a little bit. So I spent a year building the algorithm in the background. Every one of these seven systems are siloed. So my idea is to download them. Part of the money will go towards a contractor, and the contractor who understands how the database works, download it, take my algorithm, combine it into one, and then upload it for everybody to see. So in the beginning, yes, phase one would be, okay, we have to go in twice a day because we want the most current data. We'll have to go in twice a day to download it and then upload it. In the future, we are looking at maybe, let's do a bot. Let's automatically do that. But for right now, yes. You said you've implemented it for one system. Yes, sir. Tested it. What would you learn from that test for that implementation phase? I just talked to the developers the other day about this. I learned that that one system right now has on average 1,500 users. 1,500 users to 2,000 users every day are already using one system. So that tells me that there is a demand out there, that people like what this product is doing. It's easy for them to use. So I'm just thinking, wait till we get all seven in there. And have you aggregated, when we talk about four hours per person per week? Yes, sir. I didn't see on the charts like, as I estimate the 167K per year, what's the savings, what's the projected savings? Let's say you get to the X number of base level, contracting squadrons, or whatever it may be. Have you done any of that aggregation yet? Yes, sir. Well, in savings, it's about 1.3 million, because when we looked at, we did some assumptions about how many hours, four hours expands, it's about 20,000 hours a year. And then when we looked at a GS12 and we expand that out, it's about 1.3 million in savings. And when I say savings, it's not that this is money going back to the Air Force. We're repurposing those hours. We're repurposing 20,000 hours back to the contracting officers and the contracting specialists, so they can do their job. One other thing for me, I'm obviously interested, I naturally thought, hey, aren't there contractors that do this? And you mentioned, hey, part of this would be toward a contractor to support. Is this sort of, I don't want to say dashboarding, but the accumulation of data systems into something that's a more manageable process, is that something that's proliferating outside of your organization, the DOD, where you could just import it? Yes, sir. So it is proliferating. And I looked at other systems out there. And I guess the takeaway for mine is mine's agile. Because these other systems, they're looking for, oh, they don't have all seven of these systems right now. None of the systems have these that I looked at. And they're looking, instead of weeks, they're looking at months to years to add these. So I'm trying to get this out faster, quicker. And if you have, oh, I have an eighth system. I can bring that in in weeks, where then they have to go through all the process, paperwork, approval for those different types of systems. Brandon. Can I ask one last? Yes, Chief. Sure, Chief. For, so it's obviously going to save time for the COs and the CSs, right? What about the customer? Will it give me an option to go in as a customer that's doing a purchase or to go in and see what the status is? Yes, absolutely, Chief. So I look at the end users, like acquisition are the end users for us, the contracting specialist, but then it's the visibility. That is for you as the leader. If there's taskers that come down, you can easily go to this database. And there's already training out there about how to develop dashboards or everything. The idea would be also to give you a standardized template and say, okay, these are the, these are the, how we want this to look. Do you like this? No, okay, build your own. You can build your own if you want, so that you as the end user could see that the real time tracking of your acquisitions. Thank you. Thank you so much for the time and effort that it took you on your own to build us, bring us to us, the passion that brought you to the stage today, and then all the time and effort that you put in this week as well. Thank you so much. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. You guys, what a stark to Innovation Rodeo 2022. I mean, I know that was the first pitch, but I'm all in like business intelligence, software, that's the quantum leap forward with that the service needs, right, JD? I mean, that's what we're looking for, for Innovation Rodeo. What did you think of that? So, we've had a chance to get to know Brandon over the last couple of days and talking about this system and the question comes up, why aren't we doing this already? So, super proud of Brandon for identifying this need, having the smarts to go after it as well, right organically within his team. So, I think this is just a great example of organic innovation rising up to the rodeo. Super excited about that. Absolutely. He had his numbers down. I mean, all of his answers to your guys' questions were right on point. Mr. Grable, you kind of had a pretty good conversation there. What did you think of that, Dej? Well, I liked it. I mean, we see these kinds of things in industry, the idea of bringing it into the Air Force, and particularly in the contracting, it makes a lot of sense. And I personally liked the idea of using, we know it's cost avoidance. You're basically moving from hours used to do something you can automate, and the idea of using those hours to do better things for customers, for war fighters, if you will, certainly resonates with me. Well, we love to say work smart or not hard, right? And I think business intelligence software, that's the direction to go. Here's the good news. That's pitch one. We got seven more awesome pitches to hear for Innovation Rodeo 2022. Our next pitcher is Chaplain PJ Werner. He is back there. He's ready to go. JD, you ready to hear it? Let's bring on PJ. All right, let's do it. Here comes PJ Werner. I got the call that every Chaplain fears. There's been a suicide. Over the weeks that followed, I got to know the Airman's family and friends. And through them, I got a full picture of a young man who was loved, appreciated, but he was hiding his emotional pain, silently suffering to the point where he felt like he had no choices. When you feel like you have no choices, you feel hopeless. I'm Chaplain Werner, and today, you have the opportunity to give better choices to our Airman. Next slide, please. The DOD Suicide Event Report has shown consistently that in the months leading up to a suicidal event, there's usually a relationship, workplace, or legal stressor. Our current suicide prevention has been amazing at normalizing our ability to talk about suicide. It is, however, by definition reactive and requires an outside party to see the depressive symptoms and get the person to a helping agency. Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania has been unlocking strength-based tools for the past 30 years, and the Harvard Business Review has been saying for the past 10 years that what our young people and leaders such as yourself needs is emotional intelligence. We have the knowledge that proactively addresses Airman's problems. What we can do now is package them in a way that Airman can internalize. That is why my idea is to give them an interactive pathway to these skills through a choose-your-own-adventure video game. A video game will allow them to see these scenarios in a safe environment, and on-screen see choices they might not normally think of. They would get to see that their choices do have consequences and that tough times do pass. The ideal audience for this would be pre-assession recruits, people excited to learn about the Air Force they've just joined. And we can see choose-your-own-adventure still on streaming platforms. So we now know that while there is a vintage factor, it's still relevant. Next slide, please. The Alpha version, named Branches, is currently being developed here in San Antonio. In it, the player goes through the storyline until they get to a scenario and make a choice. That choice opens up a new branch in the storyline towards a new topic and new education. While the Alpha version only has a few topics, in the future we can add anything simply by putting in a new choice at a scenario juncture, leading to new options for education. Next slide, please. I have shown my proof of concept version to all walks of life and the overwhelming feedback I received was that it was viable and addressed a need. From there, I went to leadership and subject matter experts across the joint force, looking for someone to tell me that my idea was dumb so that way I didn't have to work on it anymore. Unfortunately, they have all loved it and given me their total support to continue working. Next slide. That is why I have built a team of subject matter experts to help us get the best tools and training after our airmen's number one topics. Next slide, please. While making the Alpha version, I learned that while I have a lot of experience playing video games, I don't have as much experience writing them. That is why today I am asking for $150,000 to hire a video game content writer, someone who can take my team's knowledge, expertise, and passion and translate that into a compelling narrative accessible to our airmen. From there, we'll have a beta version and we can use the other $150,000 for web hosting, allowing that beta version to be used by anyone that asks. From there, we will get large scale feedback and A1Z at the Pentagon, by policy, the owners of suicide prevention have said they can take that data and then take this entire project under their larger umbrella. So today, choose your adventure. Be the ones that said yes to giving our future airmen better choices. I'm excited to see that future and to hear your questions. P.J., thanks so much. I appreciate choose your own adventure. I have always been a huge fan that I appreciate that the vintage may still be relevant. I'm a huge fan of that piece of this application. If you could talk to me a little bit about the $150,000 in development, it sounds like it's being presented as a one time cost, but imagine it will continue to evolve and develop. Do you see future costs in development as well or do you really feel like that $150,000 will get us where we need to go and maybe there's an organic opportunity to change that in the future? What do you think? I think that while the money is going to definitely get us set up, it's going to depend on you and leaders such as yourself on what content we add because we will need to hire more writers to expand that content. Thank you, Pat. Thank you. Great question. P.J., I have a question. Great job, by the way. I love your energy behind your whole idea. You've targeted the earliest session, so young airmen and guardians. What about us? What about the leaders? Vintage. What about us vintage people that this problem doesn't escape us as well? What are your thoughts? What have you thought about that? I am so excited you asked that question, ma'am, because what you're describing is my 100 meter target. My long term goals is for this to then move up to ROTC, let's say, and then finally to leadership to be able to have the same language as our young airmen as well. I would love us all to be speaking that same strength-based language. Can you talk a little bit about how you incentivize? What's the thought for... Go do the video game. I can imagine a couple things. One is it's required, which has its benefits and drawbacks. And one is that you just invite people to it, in which case it's got to offer something. It's probably not going to be flying dragons and stuff like that. Maybe it will be. But can you talk a little bit about the incentives that will encourage people to go? Because part of it must be, you have to have an open mind to step into this and then choose the adventure and learn from it. That's an amazing question. I'm so glad you asked it, because that was probably the number one reason why I thought our pre-assession recruits would be the easiest incentive. From there, probably the best idea I've been given is that at the end, if you've unlocked enough endings, you get some kind of certification, something that then they can show their leaders, something they can put on it as an EPR bullet. So you think the incentive for the newest sessions, what is the incentive? Is it, hey, if you want to put your paperwork in, you've got to go do this? So that's the incentive, or is there something more like, what are your thoughts around it? I understand that. Yes, that is my in general thought process, not that it's required purely optional, but their excitement to see the Air Force, to experience the Air Force, to get a leg up, and maybe even have some of those tools going into BMT, which is, let's be honest, a stressful situation, and they would want to have that leg up over their peers. Thank you. Captain. First off, I want to acknowledge your passion. It's very obvious that you care a lot about this program, so do we, trust me. You've asked for 300K, what's your baseline for determining what your costs were, and talk a little bit, if you don't mind about sustainment costs. I'm so excited to answer that question, because I was able to get that through this process, that part of the innovation rodeo, they connected us with the resource management branch, and through them we did a preliminary analysis, and they did so much work for me, that I had no basis on how to find those numbers, and they did, they went after it, and they gave me those numbers. And have you thought about the sustainment piece at all? The sustainment piece, yes, that if we, their projected analysis would be that 150,000 every year, just for the web hosting. Thanks so much. Thank you. Great job, I'm sorry. A lot of passion. Will that tail end cost, or the sustainment costs go up as we start going from a sessions, to from then listed, to the ROTC, to and then into the actual active duty members, Guard and Reserve, will that go up, potentially? Ooh, Chief, that's a great question. I'm sorry, I will get you that answer. Thank you. Jacqueline, I think you did a great job. This is a big problem, it's a nationwide problem, quite frankly, and so I'm curious on a two-part thing. One, when you say the folks you spoke to for feedback and survey were interested, right, and they wanted it, since they didn't have a game to prototype, explain how you sold it, was it a, hey, I'm going to make this game, you'd love to play it? And then secondly, are you able to partner with industry universities, the colleges that you've been working with for both the students, maybe even veterans long-term, because we've got a problem there? And how do you see that tying in? So two parts there. Amazing questions. The first one, I'm going to brag a little bit, that actually what I did was I built a preliminary game purely in PowerPoint, but they got to click a button, they got to go through a plot line, they got to see a story, and they got to see different endings. So they, I was told that they got a fairly full view on what I was looking for. As far as the second question, I've been networking, I've been looking for all those kinds of answers, and I'm excited for this process, I think it's going to allow my information to get out there, and I can connect to a lot more people in universities, in civilian sectors, to be able to get the best content. And I would offer to, don't limit it to that, federal agencies, I just came from another federal agency, and they're struggling with the very same scourge that the DOD does, and sometimes we think about this as a service-related thing, or a DOD, but you can imagine it's a problem everywhere. So other federal agencies may be doing something like this too, or considering it. So, cool. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, sir. PJ, thanks so much for your passion, as you've heard from the judges today. They may not know that you actually found out about the innovation rodeo because of your passion and your persistence. You were knocking down doors, you're like, who can help me? Who's here for me? And it's really what brought you here today, and it resonates in your story, and in your pitch, thanks for all your hard work that brought you here today. Thank you, and thank you all very much. All right, judges, two down. I don't know how we're going to get through six more. That's a hard decision to make after pitches like that. Don't you agree? Absolutely. All right, well, let's check and see what's going on with the rest of the pitch teams in the back. Jason, can you share us what's going on back there? Okay, so we are back here backstage at Techport Center and Arena in Port San Antonio. We've got our first two pitches are down. We've got our next teams ready to go right behind this door as we continue Innovation Rodeo 2022. So let's head on in and check on them and see how they're doing here. All right, here we go. We are in here with Craig Rednauer and Lieutenant Colonel Adam Wally Wallace. Craig, how you feeling? Feeling good. Ready to go. Okay, do you feel prepared having been coached all week? You feel prepared for this to go pitch to the judges? I do. I feel they have us in a good place. Okay, excellent. Anybody watching the live stream you want to give a shout out to or say hi to? Just all the civil engineering squadron back home. All right. All right, it's TE. Okay, Wally, how we feeling? Fantastic, sir. Okay, you feel prepared? You got butterflies at all? Extremely thorough. Okay, sure man. All right, a lot of energy. You ready? Oh yeah, too much Red Bull in there. We've seen you pound in the Red Bull during rehearsal, so. All right, here we go. Okay, judges, I think that Craig is ready to come pitch. What do you think, JD? We would love to see our civil engineer friend Craig. Bring him out. It's a beautiful day in the South Pacific. You're stationed at a forward operating base, tasked with maintaining the airfield. As you go about your daily routine, suddenly, alarm sound, the base is under attack. After all the smoke clears, everyone rushes to the airfield to find the airmen that were out completing their daily duties. After the last medevac leaves, you ask yourself, what can we do better? What can we do to have less airmen in harm's way? And the answer is autonomy. Autonomous vehicles reduce the number of airmen required to complete their tasks, such as sweeping FOD, removing snow, mowing, and other daily routines. This, these tasks can be completed with a single airmen operating multiple pieces of equipment. Slide. Every day we deal with multiple issues on the airfield, from FOD to bird aircraft strike hazard to simple human error. No longer will taxiway lights be hit because they were under snow and could not be seen. The precision guidance of our GPS system assures us that objects can be avoided even if they can't be seen. The same technology allows us to operate at off-peak hours and even at night. By installing this technology on standard equipment, we're able to utilize this equipment without the GPS guidance in manual mode, should the need arise. Slide. Through the first round of testing, we have proven that autonomous vehicles are both safe and accepted. We have developed equipment that follows a pinpoint GPS path based both on our current GIS information system as well as a path that can be developed by an operator. We're able to detect and avoid new obstacles such as animals or sinkholes as they arise. We're also able to perform emergency maneuvers such as exit a controlled area movement and then resume tasks once the emergency is cleared. All of this is done with varying less than three inches from the original intended path. Slide. Through the first five phases of testing, we had zero instances where the equipment did not operate as it was intended. After every phase, we received a comprehensive report on the results of that testing. During the final phase, we even had a civil engineering airman operate the equipment on the airfield. Slide, please. Several civil engineering squadrons and multiple other organizations have reached out to us to gain more information on our research. Some have even traveled to our base to view it for themselves. Slide, please. There was a time not long ago where the thought of an unmanned aircraft was simply absurd. Today it's commonplace. In today's Air Force, time is a valuable commodity for the airman. Autonomous vehicles give the airman more time to complete complex duties as well as keep them out of harm's way. Our research shows a $1.2 million return on investment in the first five years by installing this technology on our existing equipment. Today I'm here to ask for $1 million for continued research and development. This would include three autonomous vehicles at two base locations to be put into daily operations, giving you an immediate return on your investment. Thank you. Questions? Great. Thanks so much. I'll open it up to the panel to see if anybody has any questions. I think I have a question. It might be a little complicated. I'm trying to understand it, right? So $1.2 million for six vehicles, two bases, right? Is that going to be multiplied? Let's say the Air Force adopts this, right? So is that going to be multiplied times X amount of bases? And it's taken us five years to get the return on investment. So is that $1.2 million just initial because of all the testing that's increasing the cost? Or is that literally what's going to cost us for every six vehicles moving forward? That's a great question. That would be the initial cost and that is the $1.2 million return on investment is based on putting it on existing equipment. And yes, that would be a per base return on that same timeframe. Thank you. It's return not cost. That's correct. All right. That is correct. That makes sense. Yes. So it's not the cost. Utilizing autonomy to the extent that you've got a perspective of its utility for what you've proposed or you've on the leading edge of the autonomy use along the applications that you've discussed. Right now I feel we're on the leading edge. We've reached out to the FAA and other governing authorities. And right now no one is putting autonomy on the airfield that we're aware of. So we're kind of trying to blaze the way and open up a path for that. I have a question, Craig. What's the training tail that goes to this so that not only the person operating distantly the vehicle but also leadership and comfort and all of that. So the human side. That's a great question. The vehicle itself is very easy to operate and can be done from a standard app or a laptop computer. This is it's very easy to train. It's a user friendly interface. Very easy. And it can be taught on multiple levels and you can have multiple devices that you would turn on and activate for different levels of leadership to be able to control these vehicles. There's a piece of me that would think that autonomous vehicles off the airfield would be easier than on the airfield. Have you looked at that? I mean you talk about it all and you talk pretty much strictly on the airfield or have you looked at outside the flight line? We have looked at both. The equipment and technology that we're testing is larger scale equipment. So it's meant for more airfield bigger areas that you may need. We're pulling a 15 foot batwing mower at the time behind it. We have looked into other technology to do the parade field and things like that where this equipment is just too big. Craig can you talk to me a little bit about the tech and what it is that you're actually testing and what results would be successful for you? What would you call success? Success would be going out after we prescribe our path and having this equipment go out and do it flawlessly. If the emergency comes in we would perform our exit C main maneuver and then be able to restart and go right back out where we were with no instances. And to date we've been very successful. Let me just make sure I understand one part. I love your idea. I think it's great. I'm impressed that you've already gotten it through so many testing phases. As you look at the education piece, the training piece, and at each installation how does that all come together? I'm sorry I had trouble here. How does the education, the training and the finances all come together at the installation? Help me understand if that's a installation bill or if this once it's funded at the enterprise level the installations will receive the support and ability to do it while I understand on the flight line potentially in other areas, grass, snow, LRS capabilities and warehouses. I mean I see a lot of functionality in this across the Air Force and savings. I'm just trying to figure out how it applies at the installation level what that support would look like. Sure. The installation for the equipment and the technology itself would be part of the contractual package for the equipment on the tractor or the piece of equipment. The funding itself, I know equipment is funded through CE enterprises so if we're retrofitting that we would still be purchasing standard off-the-shelf equipment that is usually bought by a larger contract for our civil engineering squadrons and then we can retrofit that equipment on to whatever is decided to be purchased by the Air Force. Who's going to maintain the software that drives that? That would be through a contract that is through the manufacturer. Thank you. Yes. How difficult is it to pull a you know one of the packages off of one vehicle and apply it to another vehicle? Let's say you go from one type of tractor to another type of tractor. Is it reasonably easy to move from one to the other? It is. This technology, the company we've started working with uses off-the-shelf actuators and things that can be bought anywhere. And the beauty of this program is it can be put on any size vehicle. The parameters are then programmed into the computer system for the centerline of the tractor, how wide, what piece of equipment you're towing whether it be a sweeper, a mower, and then it translates that and knows to set up its path based on that. So it can be dismounted from one, put on another, and then reset the parameters in your program. One last question, if I may. Stage 5, what has been the biggest challenge? Is the money that's keeping you from getting across the line or because you're quite along the way? Right. Right now it is the funding that's keeping us from moving forward. In the very beginning, we had a lot of hurdles to jump, getting people comfortable with the idea of autonomous vehicles on the airfield. Through our phases of testing, I feel we've achieved that. I'm in effort to bring you here. Again, we can see the passion come through in your idea and what I love most about it is your intro, right? Talk about really making the mission, the rubber meeting the road, and how we can help our airmen not only safety-wise, but getting white space back into their lives. Really appreciate that part of your pitch to us today. Thanks for all you do. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Judges, judges, the name of this show is Innovation Rodeo 2022 and nothing to me says innovation like robot trackers, all right? Robot lawnmowers. I'm all about it. Listen, I got one of those little Roomba things at my house at Vacuums. I got four dogs and that is that, but on a huge scale. I absolutely love it. Colonel Adams, what do you think? I love it because I think there's application in a lot of different areas to save time and money. And I love that he has taken it as far as he has so far. He looks like, I mean, he's put, he's all in. He's gone. He's done the homework. He's done the legwork. Colonel Sam, thoughts? I'm struggling. Every individual that stood here and the teams behind them is just compelling. This is going to be really hard. Much harder than I honestly thought it was going to be. Craig crushed it. It's tough. The three that I've heard have been fantastic. There's five to go. We're going to take a break, but before we do, we've got one more picture for the first half of Innovation Rodeo 2022. And that is Lieutenant Colonel Adam Wally Wallace. He's going to come out and he is going to pitch your faces off. And are we, are we ready? Let's see Wally. We want to see Wally. All right. Let's bring Wally out. October, 2018. Tindall Air Force Base. Not a fun place to be. I'm standing on the ramp and I'm looking across at the rubble that was once our squadron. The situation is surreal. It's just utter devastation. We have no power. We have no water. Cell phones quit working two days ago. Internet connectivity? No way. What do you do? Now what if in this situation, I were able to pull out my cell phone and by simply swapping over to a Wi-Fi network, I was able to communicate with my team instantaneously. Whether via text message, I can upload pictures, upload video, or I can see where everybody is at over a sleek user interface. This is what our team is doing. Slide please. We have built a rapidly deployable alternate network. The ultimate goal of this is to bolster pace planning. We got the primary down. We got the emergency down. But are we giving enough love to the alternate and contingency portions here? You know, we had a network engineer, an Air Force network engineer, mind you, once tell us that we don't see the merits in your project. Our network never goes down. That terrifies me. So we're here to give commanders the ability to continue to fight the installation when we lose it all. Slide please. So what's the need? This isn't my opinion. This is rooted in joint publications, doctrine, and just common sense. You don't put one generator on a C-130. You put four. You fail over. So in this case, you know, you look at agile combat employment. The doctrine states right there. You need a communications network that is mobile, secure, survivable, and sustainable. LMRs and entry communication kits only go so far. To generate missions, you have to move data. Not just data to our senior leaders, but to everyone in that area. Additionally, what really shocked me was joint publication 3-12, cyberspace ops. Says we often discount our reliance on these networks. Therefore, I quote, resiliency is essential. So the current push, right now, we got all the folks in the right room. We got the hardware. We built an MVP. We have a six node mesh that we built. And it's awesome. We're trying to take this from a TRL 6 from a bench out into the field. And that's our next goal here is to get this field in our next flyaway exercise to show it's worth. Slide please. So the solution, or let's go with the problem here first. The problem here is that continuously comms kits, they may not do what you want them to do. Everybody may not even have them. They're infrastructure dependent. You got to feed this thing. You have to have a generator set out here. You may need the legacy copper fiber lines to feed it. And at the cost, the cost is what got us when we were doing our market research. Those little briefcases that the journals carry around, they're awesome, but they come with a six figure price tag. You can't give that to a PLL troop out on the line. Just simply not doable. So the solution here is to come up with something that's self-sustaining. It's affordable. It's also secure. Think of something that deploys a level of encryption that's superior to what we have now. And is NSA certified, by the way. And finally, I think the most important part here is that it's universal. That allows everybody on the installation to play when we do lose them all. Slide please. So what does this look like? And in simplest terms, this is what we've built. It consists of four components. The first is a solar powered mesh node, Wi-Fi 6. Within that little chassis there, we call it a bank teller tube on the back of a solar panel. Is essentially a seven day battery life. Customizable radios that can serve up to 500 users. Pretty neat. The second part of that are what we call the microservers. Within that same tube, we're able to embed single board computers and distribute capabilities throughout an entire installation. So think about this. You could have a rocket chat, matter most, chat client of your flavor, wherever you want over here. You could be running an ATAC server over here. You lose one node, you still have functionality across the base. The third part is the encryption piece. We partnered with another startup out of St. Louis that is providing hardware based encryption, not software based. That is quantum resistant, future proof. The fourth part is backhaul. Let's say those commercial ISP and cellular providers come back online. You want to connect this back to the world while your infrastructure is still degraded? You can do that. Additionally, you can take commercial satcom and plug this in to provide that connectivity. Slide. So what's the ask? It's a half a million dollars. We want to take all the smart people, throw them in the same room, throw spheres at this. We want to expand the footprint of our MVP. We want to feel this on a larger scale out there. We want to get it tested. We know it's going to have to go through Tempest. We know Apnex is going to have to look at it. Let them tear it apart. And then finally, the most important part is for your advocacy to stand on some people's desks to move those timelines from years down to months so we can bolster these pace plans and keep our team ready for the next fight. That being said, please throw your spears. So much while I really appreciate it. Open it up to the judges for questions. I'll start with a tactical question. So if you have a situation like at Tyndall, and you have people become TDY to support, is it easy to get them plugged into it? You mentioned that, you know, hey, everybody at the base can come and do this thing. You find there's a lot of times people come from out of town. Is it easy enough to get them tied into the same network? Yes, sir. It's a great question because the paradigm here is that you're going to have some administrators, essentially, for this network. You're going to have to go create username, password, certificate pairs, et cetera. So yes, you'll have to jump through some security hoops, but you can add people. Now those are already there? You can have them pre-vetted, pre-loaded, ready to rock and roll. I got a quick question. So I see that cost dollar-wise, but now we're talking manpower. How we thought what that would look like, what the cost would be of manpower. As far as sustaining the system, so chief, with this one, the comm squad are about chasing me out of the room with pitchforks. Who's going to sustain this, right? Who's going to be replacing these nodes? And I won't really reveal a dollar amount here, but they're essentially cheap enough that if one goes down, you simply replace it with another node. And it is a very, very, it's about a 10-minute setup per node that I can actually train Airman, the multi-capable Airman concept here within the unit to do it in a matter of minutes. So. So that's for that, but what about the management of the admin piece of it? Adding the users that come in TDY and that sort of thing? Yeah, that's a, that would have to be a determined by the commander, but we can get back to you on a, we're on a better plane with that one.