 All right, everybody. Please give a warm welcome to Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine. Thank you. So today I'm not going to be talking about my day job. I'm going to be talking about what was once a hobby that has turned into something of an obsession and basically boils down to open sourcing the military industrial complex. So what could possibly go wrong? I'm going to start with basically a little story of how I got here, and then we'll get into the technology, some of the legal and business issues around it, where it's going, what it can do, and then hopefully we'll have time for questions. So let me just dive in. Again, I apologize for the, I think the images. I'm told this is out of my control, so we will deal. Five years ago my day job is running a magazine website, iPad, and all that. We get lots of products in for review. I also have five children, and I really want to get them excited about science and technology and have consistently failed year after year, possibly because I want them to be excited about science and technology. They're not, or possibly they're just not, they're just not geeks. I started a site which is now quite large in a company called Geek Dad specifically to try to find projects that you can do with kids that are fun for you and fun for them and sufficiently geeky, but my kids mock me and all my projects. However, five years ago on a Friday we got, in the office at Wired, we got some products in for review. There was a Lego Mindstorms Robotics Kit and a radio control airplane. And I thought, okay, this we can do. I know my kids are into Lego and planes are cool. So I brought them home and I said on Saturday, kids, we're going to build a robot out of Lego and on Sunday we're going to fly a plane. And they said, cool. So this is Saturday. This is Erin. She was, I think, about nine at the time. Eight at the time. And she opens it up. And you know, the instructions show you how to build a tripod, a little three-wheeled robot. It's really pretty great. I think it's awesome. This is Daniel. He's getting it working, etc. So we spent all morning building this thing. We then programmed it. And if any of you have experienced Lego Mindstorms, by the way, I love Lego Mindstorms. So it's on their advisory board. I think it's a wonderful thing. But if you have any experience with this, you will know the same thing that, oh, is this doing this to you as well? Okay, no. Anyway, you will see the same thing I did, which is that kids are really hard to impress, especially with robots. So they did this and after you've spent all morning programming it, it will roll up to a wall and it will bounce off and go backwards. And like, they've seen transformers. They know what robots are supposed to do. Where are the lasers? Why is it not three stories tall? It can't fight. So they were kind of disappointed by that. And I was a little annoyed by how disappointed they were and the whole beautiful programming language did nothing for them because there were no lasers. So then on day two I said, okay, fine, we're going to fly the plane. So this is what we had and we took it to the park and this is what happened. I launched it. It went into a tree and it wasn't so much the humiliating scene of Dad launching a plane into the tree. It was the absolutely mortifying scene of Dad climbing into the tree afterwards to dislodge it. I had to bribe them with ice cream after that. Anyway, so I was annoyed at them. They confirmed all their suspicions that geeky stuff isn't cool and I went for a run afterwards and I thought about the day and I thought the Lego mind storms came with these awesome sensors. It came with a gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer, a compass sensor, had Bluetooth connection so you could connect it to GPS. It had lots of processing power and I thought, you know what? You could probably almost fly a plane with that. You could probably almost make an autopilot with the Lego. So I came home and I said, kid, one last thing and we're going to sit on the dining table and we're going to make a Lego autopilot. And so this is what we, this is the first one we did that night. You can see it's totally hacked but those are the sensors, those little sort of square blobby things on the back. And I posted it to slash dot Lego UAV and it went on the front page and got lots of attention and the kids then kind of lost interest but I went right down the rabbit hole. So this was our first one. We put it in a plane and you can see, you know, it was really hard to interface the Lego with the radio control system because I didn't at the time have a way to do anything now but at the time it wasn't. So we actually used the Lego motors to move the whole servo back and forth on a little rail. Anyway, it kind of worked. We had a little Lego camera up hand tilt assembly on the bottom and Daniel did the programming and there it is in the plane. And then the next thing we did is we made it a lot better. This is one that's got a nine degree of freedom IMU, a inertial measurement unit with gyros accelerometers, magnetometer and a proper RC interface. And at this point I was really starting to sort of think this could actually happen. So we put this one in a plane and this one really did fly and is now in the Lego Museum action in Billund as the world's first Lego UAV. And I was hooked. The kids lost interest but I was hooked and I decided I was going to learn all about this. So I googled common filter and all this stuff and decided obviously Lego is a great way to start but it's not, not to be the right way to make an autopilot. And I kind of, you know, I went down the rabbit hole and started a site called DIY drones. And this is what I tend to do. I tend to sort of, you know, be sort of dumb in public. And if I ask dumb questions and to share my learnings in public, it turns out that it's kind of inviting for other people to join me. My ignorance about all this was an invitation to others to share their own learning and help teach me, etc. So today DIY drones is quite big. You can see the stats right there. But basically our philosophy is that drones, you know, that in your pocket is basically all the technology you need for a drone. In every one of your pockets you've got a smartphone, I presume. It's got gyros, it's got accelerometers, it's got GPS, it's got a magnetometer, it's got cameras, it's got processing, it's got wireless, it's got memory, it's got everything you need. With the right cable you can fly a 747, you know, more or less. And thanks to the economies of scale of the smartphone industry and the apples and Googles and etc., those chips are really, really cheap, like just a few dollars per. And so we've hit that moment where technology that ten years ago was military industrial classified stuff costing tens of thousand dollars is now in your pocket, this is MEMS technology, it's super cheap, it's super good, it's super accessible, it's easy to use and we're like, you know, it's time for the hackers to take over. So we started creating autopilots. This is one of our first ones. This is RGPilot Mega. It's based on the Arduino open source computing platform. And basically we just did a derivative of the Arduino mega board and then just did a layer on top that had all the sensors and all the necessary RC interfaces, radio control interfaces and all that. Our current boards look like this. This is the latest, greatest of the RGPilot series, it's called 2.5. You don't actually get it as a board, you get it in a little box like this. This costs $199. And basically you take this box and you put in any vehicle and it makes it autonomous. It is a magic autonomy box. It does planes, it does helicopters, it does multi-copters, it does cars, it does boats, I'm sure it does submarines, we haven't tried yet. But anything that's RC, you just put this in there and suddenly you've got a drone, fully autonomous, totally programmable, you know, telemetry, GPS, waypoints, the works. Which is pretty cool and it's 100% open source, open source hardware and software. We just yesterday released our latest version of this, which is PX4. This is done with ETH, the Technical University of Zurich, which is one of the best at unmanned aerial vehicle or drone research. And this one's got an ARM core, it's an M468 mega Hertz, it's a real serious processing power. It comes with all sorts of shields, including things like optical processing and this. So you may be heard of the Parade R drone, which is this really cool toy you can buy for $300. Unfortunately it's not really a drone. We define a drone as capable full autonomy. In other words, it flies itself. You can take over manual control if you want, but basically it is, you give it a mission. You, with a point and click, and I'll show you in a minute, you point and click on a mission planner, on a map, you say take off, go to these waypoints, loiter, take pictures, keep the camera, something, etc. So basically you look at the laptop or you just watch the video and the plane flies itself or the aircraft flies itself. That's what we call a drone. In other words, capable full autonomy. The Parade R drone is got fantastic hardware and software, but it's not autonomous. However, we just, yesterday, released this board, which will allow you to replace the closed source electronics, the AR drone, replace it with our open source, PX4 electronics, and make it a fully autonomous vehicle. So you may have heard a lot about these multi copters and quadcopters, and that's kind of the thrust of where a lot of us are going these days. I want to explain a little bit how these things work. You may be wondering why now, and the answer is that quadcopters are basically not, they're inherently unstable. They can't be flown by humans. They, you need to basically change the speed of the four propellers, and as you'll see later, there can be many more, change the speed of them about 100 or 200 times a second to keep it stable and also to move forward, left, right, up and down, and et cetera. Basically, two of the props go one way, and two of them go the other. And each one of them has a speed controller that can operate very fast. And so basically what you do is when you want to go up, you speed them all up when you want to go down, you slow them all down. When you want to go to the right, you speed up the one on the right, and slow down the one on the left. When you want to yaw, which is sort of like this, you speed up the ones that go counterclockwise, and you slow down the ones that go clockwise. And it's just physics, it's just math, but it's a solid state device, which is to say, with the exception of the motors themselves, it has no moving parts, which is really kind of awesome. Hopefully my screen will come back here. Just one second. There we go. You can also, once you see the math, once you understand the math, which is really just speeding up and slowing down props, you can sort of extend it. I hope this is showing. You can extend it to all sorts of other configurations. Six, eight. You can do those kind of V-shaped ones at the bottom are designed to make a very clear view for video. You can see the one at the bottom has six in two sort of stacks, which is again also to open up the space for the camera. And it's just a matter of kind of speeding up things and slowing down. No, it's very good for a computer to do and create a fantastic robotics platform for aerial robotics, which is technically hard. Anyway, it can only be done by computers. And until the introduction of these mem sensors and fast on board processors, this wasn't possible. So it's kind of been around for about ten years, and it's becoming the drone platform of choice because it is so flexible. And you don't have to. You can take off in your backyard and use it even in doors. So this is kind of the way it looks. We have these two big code bases. Arju copter for traditional helicopters and these multi copters and Arju plane for planes. And then we have a desktop software kind of mission planner. And what you do is you just take this board, you get this board, which comes with no software, and then you take this mission plan and you just click on which one do you want to turn this into an aircraft autopilot, an airplane autopilot, a quad copter autopilot, a traditional helicopter autopilot, or even a car autopilot. And you just press the button and it suddenly is reconfigured to that side of aircraft. So it's kind of a universal autopilot in that respect. And it's all because it's open source code created by a community that's been modified for all these different variants. This is the way mission planning looks. You just point and click on the mission planner and give each waypoint a certain task. It can loiter. It can obviously take off and land. It can change altitude of various sorts. It can keep a camera focused on a point of interest. You can tell it to follow. You can click and say go here in real time. Or you can just carry another device that looks like this, that has a GPS module and a little radio device. You've probably heard of XB radios. We have our open source variants called the 3DR radio, which is half the price. And don't mention open source. And what you do is you just keep one of these in your back pocket and you just walk around and the thing will just follow you. So one of the things we're looking at here is with extreme sports going to, let's say you've got a kite surfer or wind surfer. You can just, when you feel like you're photogenic, you push the button on this thing here, little button being and the copter will take you, come out, position itself 20 feet behind you and 20 feet up and keep the camera focused on you as you do your thing. Just this kind of robo-camera or personal droid and then when the battery gets low it'll fly itself home. That's the kind of stuff that you can do with full autonomy. I want to explain a little bit about how we're part of the open source hardware movement and I want to explain a little bit about how this works. It's kind of complex. It has to be a manufacturing component to it. So what manufacturing costs money and there's real dollars associated with the equipment and the components and all that. So DIY drones is an open source community that's free and it creates all the software. So the bits are free and created by volunteers. The atoms, i.e. the physical hardware is created by a spin-off company we created called 3D Robotics and we create sort of generic boards, computing boards and then the community creates the software that gives them intelligence and useful function. This kind of mix of the two and you see many others. The Arduino project is another example of that. MakerBot is another example. Adafruit, Sparkfun, Seed Studios there's a whole bunch of other open source hardware communities out there and they all tend to have that same approach. Give away the bits sell the atoms. Community builds the software, does documentation does support a for profit company does the hardware support and all the kind of customer support around that and seems to work pretty well. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. I want to then talk about how we migrated to the point where we're making pretty sophisticated electronics and this is the cover of Make Magazine which is kind of the bible of our movement and last year they featured drones and the guy on the front is Jordy Munoz. I'll tell you a little story about how I met him. So when I started DIY drones again I knew nothing and people were just posting their hacks they're posting the projects and this one guy posted this hack by which he flew a helicopter with a Wii controller and he showed the video and it was really kind of cool and he used Arduino as the interface between the two and I thought this was awesome and I asked him how it worked. He told I hadn't heard of Arduino before and this was four years ago or so and he told me all about it. I had been using the basic stamp which turns out to be wildly inappropriate for these purposes. It doesn't have a floating point among other things. So it's really looking for a new computing platform and he turned me on to it very early in the project and so we became part of the Arduino project as a result and then we started doing these projects. We did a blimp called BlimpDuino. We did our first plane and I said you know what we're going to have to start a company to make the hardware because it's not enough to post the files and links to where you can buy components of Digi-Key etc. You actually have people want you know people if a soldering iron is involved you're going to eliminate a lot of the potential users. So we need to take soldering irons out of the equation. We need to do the soldering for them. We need to build a manufacturing company so let's go in business together and he said great terrific and I said okay so tell me a little something about yourself Jordy. We never met and he turned out to be at the time 19 years old from Tijuana, Mexico graduated from high school but not college was just in his apartment waiting to get a green card and was kind of bored which is why he was doing the helicopter thing and today he's the CEO of a multi-million dollar robotics company and I just what I love about this is that he was the perfect person for this job. He understood open source hardware he understood open source software he understood robotics he was incredibly smart and he was you know willing to try things and hack in public and share YouTube videos and charismatic and turns out he had all sorts of connections into the Mexican engineering world which turned out to be awesome but you know what are the odds that you know 10 years ago when the editor-in-chief of Wired decides to start a drone company that will end up with a Mexican teenager and the answer is zero 10 years ago and today it makes perfect sense and that's what I love about this is that we largely find the best people find us and today we have some of our community members work for Apple by day or Google by day and they contribute to our projects by night and we have people from around the world and we never would have found these people but they found us because we didn't public in a community. So this was our first we started obviously in a dining room table in a garage etc. and then a little storage facility so this was our first factory and today it looks like this it's just one of our two factories this is the one in San Diego we have a parallel factory in Tijuana right now for reasons I'll talk to you in about a minute but we have more than 50 employees you know a multi-million dollar operation we're only two years old and this is you know this is now competing in the aerospace industry by building on open source hardware by having communities do so much of the R&D we're able to accelerate the innovation path incredibly fast and build a real business model around open source because hardware intrinsically has a revenue model attached you sell things for more than they cost I'll talk a little bit more about the business model in a second just briefly you can get this slide online it's too much to see right now but open source hardware is a lot harder than open source software the formats involving CAD files and printed circuit board files etc. are complex and often based on proprietary standards the version control doesn't really know how to do diffs for CAD files and other complex design files the metadata is just all this stuff that's much more complex than text the physical properties what the authoring tools were the parametric qualities of the data the electrical qualities the sources of the components much more complex than just simple ASCII and code and the skills needed are just incredibly wide we need analog electronics digital electronics hardware engineering RF engineering design documentation CAD skills 3D printer skills aeronautics skills it goes on and on and on we've learned a lot about this world but we never could have done it had we not done it in public on a community our business model is really simple we as I say give away the bits and we sell the atoms we charge 2.6 times the bill of material times the underlying cost of the product and 2.6 is kind of a magic number it could be 2.4, 2.5 but basically it allows one 40% margin for us as the manufacturer and another 40% margin for retailers and what it also means that it's much much cheaper than closed source stuff so an autopilot that the military would sell for $10,000 or maybe $50,000 and even any closed source company would sell for $5,000 or $10,000 will sell for somewhere between $1,200 and that's because the underlying components cost so little thanks again to the cell phones and then the economies of scale of the cell phone industry and we don't charge for intellectual property and our R&D is largely free because it's done by a community and that is just an amazing advantage and 2.6 is a healthy business for us but it's orders of magnitude cheaper than commercial, closed source and God knows military technology and that's incredibly disruptive when we release our files we release them in their native design format and within 7 days the Chinese have cloned us we allow them to do this our license allows for commercial reuse how can we be in business when we give our cloners our files and permit them to clone us and the answer is they can't clone our community and we innovate really fast and good luck to them for keeping up what they don't know is what's coming next and so they can undercut us by about 30% so not that much actually but what they don't know is that we've got another product coming out next week and etc so they're taking some risk also if you buy from them you're taking some risk because our community won't support you and who knows what the quality is so we think that the real secret sauce of open source hardware is the community around the products the community creates the products the community supports the other community members and that is hard to clone that allows open source hardware to be truly open without undermining the business models of those who put up the money to do the manufacturing we try to get I say 90% the performance of commercial UAVs at 1% the price we'd like to get 110% the performance of commercial UAVs at 1% the price or 0.1% of the price we're not sure it's even that hard the innovation model of open source hardware is so advanced and so efficient and productive what takes Lockheed sometimes six years and tens of millions of dollars to develop we can do in a year for basically essentially zero dollars now it's not as good as theirs theirs is definitely better theirs is more robust theirs is mil-spec theirs is tested theirs is verified and certified 90% is good at 1% the price and maybe 1.5th the time or 1.6th the time is a really interesting approach and the point is that the gap is shrinking we there's a whole market out there which I'll talk about of people who would be interested in aerobotics but are not in the traditional markets of the military and that's what we're interested in regulation is fascinating by being open source this is a highly regulated industry these are flying vehicles it's got the FAA, the FCC the State Department the Department of Commerce this thing right here the export control rules that were written in the 1970s these things are qualified as munitions the cruise missile controllers it was interesting that as is often the case with export control the rules are written long ago are made mockery of by technologies advanced when my 9 year old wrote the code for that lego autopilot and he posted online we later determined he had weaponized lego legally that was weaponizing lego by the way that line made it to the front page my son is completely unimpressed by all of this but that particular line made it to the front page of failblog and he's really impressed by failblog so he's he had a brief personal pleasure there however there is an exemption in the export control rules for public domain and one of the nice things about open source is again it depends a little bit on the kind and the implementation and who did it etc but the way we do it is and we have legal ruling on this legal opinion on this qualifies as a public domain exemption so we're not regulated in the same way the FAA has rules that let you fly drones in the airspace commercially but you can fly it non commercially as amateurs so commercially you have to get what's called a certificate of authorization which takes like a year and basically there's a handful of them issued every year you can't get one but if you're flying non commercially and you stay under 400 feet within visual line of sight so you can basically accomplish that the gold standard of FAA's airspace control is what's called sense and avoid ability to see if there's another aircraft in your airspace and avoid it if necessary to protect people if you are on the ground because these aircraft, oh by the way micro drone I'll tell you about this in a second if you are if you are in this thing you don't have eyes on board you may have a video on board but it's not the same thing you don't have the same peripheral vision so you need to be on the ground you need to be able to see it so that you can do the sense and avoid for it that it can't do itself so we comply with those regs we stay away from built up areas stay away from other people etc we comply with that and as a result my children can fly drones in the park on weekend or perhaps other children who are more interested in this than mine although mine can be bride with ice cream to do it so they can fly drones in the park on the weekend but the university we live next to Berkeley can't fly drones the smallest children in the world can and I think that's just awesome because what it suggests is that there is a place in the regulations for amateurs and amateurs do some of the coolest stuff for the FCC stuff because we don't sell directly to end users in blister packs in Walmart we sell to developers we're not responsible for that final FCC verification of RF interference etc we do comply with liability stuff no money changes hands so traditional liability doesn't apply there for the hardware it does we have liability insurance you might imagine when you're asking insurance company for liability insurance you don't use the word flying robot said electronics that's what we were insured against we comply with all EPA rules about limiting lead and that kind of stuff but basically the point is that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in things like the aerospace industry is regulatory barriers and if you're a small company and you want to build drones in closed source you can't you can't fly, you can't export you can't do any of that stuff if however you're open source and you want to give away the technology and you want to build commodity hardware that uses software created by the internet you can and that's great what that means is that open source is tunneled through the regulatory barriers routed around the red tape and otherwise allowed innovation to flourish and to get this technology out of the hands of the military into the hands of regular folks and that's been the real lesson of our experience with the open source hardware movement it is incredibly disruptive, incredibly transformative and maybe someday we'll be sued or we'll find out that we're infringing on some patent and we'll just have to adapt we'll have to route around it, we'll have to figure out what to do but so far so good it's the best innovation model we've ever seen this is how we reward our developers the first time you commit you get a t-shirt that's something it's a physical good it could be just one line and you get that second time if you do a sustained contribution you get a coffee mug t-shirt and a hardware discount if you accept a role as a team leader you get free hardware if you're a core team leader of one of the key projects we pay for your travel to the dev meetings once a year and for the team leaders who've shipped a major product we give them equity in 3D robotics as a company I don't know whether and this has ever been done before that an open source hardware company has constructed their legal structure so they can give equity grants or options to volunteer contributors in the open source community but we think this is the way to go so now that we've done this a couple years we think open source hardware is just magical I mean it's free and fast R&D basically think of it this way this is kind of a little kind of a crude way to put it but we ship kind of okay stuff we ship a board that doesn't have much function and it isn't really perfect to the customers they pay us for the board then they contribute the code that makes it better they feedback the suggestions that improve the board both in the dev teams and the community as a whole we then incorporate the suggestions sometimes they actually ship us they do the design for us and give us their designs we then manufacture them and then we sell them back to them again they do their own customer support I mean obviously we have our own hardware support but the community they do most of the customer support is done by other users etc so the idea of and by the way half of the products we ship we now have more than 150 of them products came from the community themselves people had ideas they made designs and they just needed someone to put them into production they give them to us we then kind of our engineers work with them to make them manufacturable to you know ensure they use components efficiently economically efficient etc and then we then we sell them and then we put them into production and we sell them to the community at the lowest possible price and we think this model of community based development or co-creation as you called is just incredible and it seems to make everybody it seems to work for everybody things get out there faster they get out there cheaper the community's ideas there's a path for them to show up in the marketplace and we can out compete some of the biggest aerospace companies in the world because we have an army of passionate volunteers behind us as I mentioned we're exempted from ending the regulatory barriers the business model I know the business model of open source software is always a little tricky it's super easy right we sell products for more than they cost and organically profitable on day one we haven't taken a penny of investment it's super there's lots of ways you can go wrong you get your inventory wrong quality assurance wrong etc but in terms of the business model it's like head slapping the obvious people keep coming like business professors keep saying can you explain your business model and we're like a 17th century British fishmonger could explain our business model we sell products for money and we charge more than it cost us they're like wait now say that again yeah that's really it it's just regular business now those products are cheaper to make because of our innovative innovation model thank you open source software and all of you and the generations that have come before us but the business model is just again head slapping easy and although our products are never perfect they improve very very fast again because of the with all enough eyes all bugs are shallow phenomenon and that sort of agreement that the community will help us make the products better and in exchange we will get those improvements out fast is the sort of secret sauce of what we're doing here so this is really where we're going this is the drone market out there tens of millions of dollars for global hawk millions for predators and reapers hundreds of thousands of dollars for scanning these are all military grade things tens of thousands of actually hundreds of thousands of dollars for ravens and global hawks and things like that or sort of the desert hawks the packages that you see in Afghanistan beyond and this is kind of where we're going right now all of our drones cost under a thousand dollars and we do tens of there's more than ten thousand out there the military has about eight to ten thousand drones and in America alone globally we probably have about twenty thousand drones we the amateurs have more drones than the military has now ours cost six hundred dollars and theirs cost six million dollars and ours are constrained to those FAA regs and theirs can go anywhere and ours absolutely are not weaponized and theirs are but nevertheless in terms of getting drones out there we're doing it this mount model is working we're democratizing the technology so that's where we are right now in the sort of the sub thousand dollar market we think that the next thing is basically to put this autopilot thing in any radio control vehicle any air one they should just be built in right we have this thing called geofencing where what you do in that mission planner I showed you you just define a box just draw a box and give it a floor and a ceiling so it's a three dimensional box and then you turn on geofencing and it won't fly out of the box and then you give your radio control to like a five year old and what happens they go it hits the virtual floor and it takes control back away from the five year old brings it back right to the middle of the box then gives control back to the five year old they can't crash the plane and it won't fly away and this is I think should just be built into any radio any vehicle should of course have this function we have the intelligence technology we have the GPS we have the sensors why should anyone ever crash again and there's other variants of it if you get if you're feeling you're losing control you just let go of the stick and the planes then just take over their own control so we think that sort of tens of dollars what now costs you know between like a little less than $200 should cost less than $100 and should be built into any kind of RC unit and then fundamentally this is going to go this is going to be single dollars and it's going to look like this this is the smallest quadcopter around it's actually a commercial one made by the Chinese it's made by a company called Wakara but it's hackable but just the systems integration on this is an example of where we're going to be going I mean you've seen swarming swarming quads indoors well you know that costs those things are incredibly expensive those motion capture systems the Vicon system costs at least $100,000 and often more we'd like to open source all of that the copters, the code the motion capture etc and we want to do it outdoors as well with onboard optical imaging GPS RF control inter aircraft mesh control etc we want to open source all of it and get you know make the sky dark with these things so we're having fun there are some hard parts in open source hardware as I say we need to create this architecture of participation we need to make it easy like a great game it should be easy to pick up but hard to master because open source hardware is so complex and there are these seven layers of you know CAD files etc all beyond the code itself it's harder to get the architecture of participation right but we're making process we're making progress there are many legal questions no one has told us that what we're doing is legal we have legal opinion to believe that it is we have lots of precedent we talk to the government all the time but nobody knows frankly in terms of patents who knows we may be violating something we don't know there's just so many patents out there and when it happens we'll deal with it the tools for collaborating are a little limited and as I say we deal with piracy all the time we protect our trademarks we protect our intellectual property beyond that and not everybody can compete with the Chinese with the open source model and who knows someday we may find that we can't either but so far so good the military and the US government likes what we're doing the Pentagon has been in touch with us constantly we're constantly briefing military agencies I get a quarterly checkup by the FBI they're happy so far we'll see how that goes the White House has been impressed enough to ask DARPA and the others to use our model for the future military UAVs and so DARPA based on the competition model that you saw with the Grand Challenges DARPA Road Race and others this year created an open UAV competition called UAV Forge that was built on the DIY Drone's Model and they just had their first year of competition there and nobody passed all the test as they didn't with the road race either but I think they will in the years to come so the White House wants to use this open innovation model for even military stuff we don't do military we won't do military but we're very happy with people in any sectors using our model to lower the cost of innovation and speed it up as taxpayers this is a good thing but I wanted to end just with one note before I take questions which is that I think the analogy right here really takes us back about 30 years when you look at the IBM PC the first one from the 1980s you ask where did that come to be how did that come to be did IBM scale down the main frame or did they scale up the homebrew computing club hacker boards and the answer is yes this is the first Apple too but what happened in the late 1970s is just what happened now which is that the essential technology in that case it was the CPU the 8088s and the Xilog chips and those initial processors became cheap and available and open to all and suddenly a technology that had been a military industrial technology which was computers which were originally designed for things like artillery shell calculations became open to anybody now do we know what to do with them initially no we just hacked them we programmed them etc but over time we changed the world I think the same thing is now happening in the physical world with things like Arduino Raspberry Pi with the Moore's law of sensors that are being driven by your smart phone technology what you have in your pockets right now is an underutilized hardware platform those phones you know this it can do so much more we're just scratching the surface of it and what we're doing is we're just adding the power of open source to all of that so this is how you can find out more information DIY drones is the site 3D robotics is the commercial side those are my handles but thank you very much and I'll take some questions thank you so I think we have microphones here on the sides and we're also going to have a Q&A session afterwards so please come up to a microphone and yes sir thank you though I've seen camera systems integrated into Arduino based flight systems and already are there plans for 3D robotics to provide a autonomous camera system? Autonomous camera system yeah so when you say autonomous camera we already do camera control so the drones control the cameras with the pan and the tilts and the zoom etc we also offer an optical flow imaging system so it can do it again with a airdrone offers and that PX4 platform I described earlier there's a really powerful image processing unit that we'll be releasing quite soon on that which will do onboard optical and image processing I'm from North Carolina State University I'm participating in the international area robotics competition we're going to open source all of that stuff basically every technology along the chain we're opening an image processing is the next frontier look for the PX4 image board to be out within about a month alright thank you thank you just the one mic it is the one mic hi Chris Romeo Espana I'm actually a community member I'm thankful to see you guys come out to DEF CON so far everything we've been doing has been with 2.4 rate of hobby RC controllers I've done we've done a little bit of work with the XPs flying over the telemetry link how big is the push going over to flying and controlling these drones over IP so using a flying over IP internet protocol so an onboard GSM modem or something right now we support a couple things you don't need an RC system although we do recommend it for safety's sake you can fly with XB you can fly with our open source XB versions which are called the 3DR radios you can fly with GSM although the latency is a little too slow for manual one of the deals with the FAA regs is that you have to be able to take over manual control that's what the pilot and control sense and avoid means so we won't let you fly just with GSM in the United States because you have no way to take over manual control because the latency is too slow for that link but we do have an Android board called the phone drone that will interface with an Android phone or other device and if you can get the latency down and can fly at home manually and again it'll fly itself so you're really just directing it that is enabled so yes you can fly Android yes you can fly XB yes you can fly 3DR radios you can pick your frequency etc 3DRC if you don't want it and every element of that is open source any push for a video over IP I'm sorry any push for a video over IP for the FPV guys an open source video radio the Chinese make great ones and they're analog and they work fine it isn't a high priority they cost 35-40 bucks so it hasn't been a high priority for us thank you I know we probably aren't sure yet but what are the practical applications of drones can you talk a bit about that the practical applications are initially things visual aerial photography aerial videos search and rescue border patrol mapping the nice thing about drones is you have anywhere anytime access to the sky so you can be below the clouds for example a lot of people using drones for agriculture as a farmer you want an aerial view of your crops you can see it in infrared you can see the water distribution you can see how healthy the plants are and just pick your spectrum and then more of the points you want a daily view so just putting a drone on a daily kind of a lawnmower pattern over your land with real time data satellites so those are the initial ones I mentioned extreme sports and the robo video those are fun as well but by and large most of the applications involve visual video and photography and a little bit of scientific sensing for now yes sir would you repeat the name of the Chinese quad that you held up this one is made by a walker would you spell walker walker thank you hi I have another question about applications I'm an RC hobbyist geek and a hacker and I guess of all the talks at DEF CON this one scares me the most I have to ask you do you feel like you've opened Pandora's Box to a dystopian future yeah I get that a lot open Pandora's Box what future it will bring we don't know so yes we've absolutely taken this technology that used to be military industrial classified technology and we have given it to the world including the bad guys I assume we don't discriminate against anybody we don't block any countries for software our software is on Google code they may block certain countries North Korea but we don't here's the thing it was already out there back in the day the first of the open source sophisticated open source something called paparazzi which was started maybe seven or eight years ago and it's still around so there were examples of this before and to be honest if my nine year old can do it it's not that complex it got classified so it's not that easy either but we just don't discriminate we kind of figure it's a tool we think it will be used more for good than for ill we do advocate really responsible use and we don't allow irresponsible use we don't allow any discussion of weaponization we actually will call our friends in the government if anyone on our community starts talking about doing something really really dangerous and we've done that a few times and we tell our community that we're going to do that more in the ahead of time but computers can be used for ill and for good so we kind of think that it's not our place to judge what people will do and if we're going to put the technology out there we want to put out there in an open context in an open community so at least those who are charged with protecting us can see what's going on and we invite the NSA and the CIA and all the others into our community to watch what's going on so that they can do their job of being informed about dangers and we can do our job of promoting innovation cool thank you very much what do you think the future of the regulations are going to be regarding this are you going to be regulated out of business one day? the answer is the FAA is going through a process to modernize the regulations and they've got a target of 2015 they'll probably miss but what they want to do is bring a class of UAVs make it possible as I say right now commercial use in the national airspace is pretty much impossible and they want to create a de minimis class it won't be as this small but basically ours are typically about this big or maybe that big they want to make a class of UAVs that are basically not going to bring down a jetliner they tend to be out of what's called non-friable materials, foam they're under two pounds etc and for that class that's in the United States and Europe is going through a similar path as for things like export control as again we opened our second production facility in Mexico and our community is on the internet so the point is that we're not really an American entity they can shut me down they can put me in jail they can bring my nine-year-old in front of congress for weaponizing lego they can shut down our U.S. operations if they want but the community is global and outside of I think any particular country's bounds and again our production facilities have now moved to Mexico so we're not even covered by ITAR anymore so we'll see I know the regulations are going to change and I'm expecting we may have to fill out some paperwork especially for people using the UAVs rather than making them we feel we're as insulated as we have prepared as possible for any regulatory eventuality so that whatever they do they won't stop the project they won't stop the community and they won't stop the technology they can stop me but they can't stop their own thanks hey Chris I'll make this quick 20 years ago radar guns brought radar detectors obviously talk about business and that'll be as quick so you have what you have in-home drone detector because I mean if I'm going to have all these 300,000 floating around which my distance, which my care you start manufacturing those as well to guarantee protection so if you got like 50 million running around my location I at least know that I'm picking up at least a couple of them anyway I wasn't sure I completely followed the question radar guns people started selling radar detectors started selling that process in order to counteract it basically anybody can use this technology for whatever they want and I'm sure they'll think of things I haven't thought of by the way that'll have to be the last question sorry I will be around afterwards so you can ask questions to me personally yes absolutely using drones to look at the military to turn the cameras back on the police back on the state this is absolutely what people are going to do being able to look for traffic spots I'm sure it's a perfectly good use the point is that this technology like the military invented the internet but we figured out what to do with it the military invented computers but we figured out what to do with it the military invented drones but we're going to figure out what to do with it and there will be a zillion applications that I have not thought of yet but the way it's going to happen is by making them cheap easy accessible and ubiquitous putting in the hands of people with great ideas and let them show us what they could do thank you very much