 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. It is a noon hour on Thursday, folks. Ted Rolston here in our downtown Honolulu Studios of Think Tech Hawaii with our show, Where the Drone Leads. Actually, we've transported the studio to Wailanola Beach today for good reason. No better place to be than Wailanola Beach unless you're here in the studio. And welcome our guests to the studio today. We have Daniel Mendoza and Mosea. Oh, I got it right. Okay. Thank you. And Daniel's joining us from right next door here in Honolulu at HPU, Hawaii Pacific University. Dan has an incredible position as a freshman at the university. Tell us about what you do at the university. Dan, not in your classes, but in this particular application you've gotten. So currently I am the vice president of the Robotics for Good Club. Robotics for Good? Yes. No? Okay. That started here at HPU, Hawaii Pacific University. Next semester I'll be taking on the role of president, in which case I hope to lead the club in a grander scale where we actually become more involved into the community. That's great. And so this is a robotics club recently composed at HPU. And you're working how to identify identification of the core activists who are going to make this thing go big and get missions associated with it and get it out into the community and also have outreach to the rest of the university so people who see it can maybe come in and join, right? Yes. And you're a freshman doing this. Yes. That is incredible leadership, I would say. And I hats off to you for taking that on. You also have to go to school, right? Yeah. And do your studies and take exams and things. So you must find this game in the way of that in time to time. So right now I am a marine biology major where most of my time is spent either at the Loa campus, the Hawaii Loa campus or down at ATM, Loa Tower Marketplace. But for next year I am going to be dual majoring in marine biology and biotech engineering. So I'll be spending more time at the lower Bishop building where the club is actually held at. So you're going to be a very busy guy in the next year. You're going to be the president of the club at restructuring the club or structuring the club, taking two different majors within the engineering domain and a lot of transit in between campuses. Yes. So it's going to be a very busy time. So we hats off to folks like you who come in and take that kind of responsibility and make it happen. That's fantastic. So how do people get a hold of you at HPU or any place that want to hook up with you as the club just as questions about HPU? We put your contact data up here on the screen. So you can contact me by email at dmandos5myHPU.edu and that is my direct email for all intents and purposes for the club itself. Okay. So whether you want to be a student at HPU in engineering in general or have questions about HPU or join the club, that's the way to get a hold of you. So if you don't have to be and take any part of engineering, you don't even need to know how to code. So what we're doing since most of the students that already are in the club don't know much about engineering or coding. So we're going to have specific days where we're going to teach about coding and teach about some aspects of engineering referring on how to build things. Right. So people who aren't makers or people, people who aren't engineers in training, people who aren't that oriented in that way are still welcome to your club. Yes. And you're going to provide that level of base guidance to get them up to speed. Yes. So right now we have marine biology majors and then we have business majors as well as international policies majors as well. I think we might have anthropology thrown in or not anthropology, eastern studies thrown in there as well. We branched out. Anywhere from philosophy to strength of materials is all contained there in coding as well in the middle of all this. That is fantastic. Again, I can't see how you can not be totally consumed by that. There's so many different directions you could go and so many different people you could pull on to fill out that tapestry of very multiple diverse opinions which is kind of important these days. But hats off to you once again personally for your own leadership in this. At the age of 18 as a freshman taking this thing on, it made your task. So that's good. I hope that HPU attracts more people like you and brings them in and makes this thing go fast and furious. So robotics, that's an interesting focal point. How did you personally, then Daniel, get involved in robotics and become this interested in it to spend this much effort of your personal capital on this project? So in high school, I actually took an engineering course from Project Leadaway in which case I actually have some transferable credits for engineering as well. You came with credits already. You came with college credits. Yeah, I came with college credits. So apart from regular advanced placement classes, the EP classes, I took that one which was more centered around the principles and just an introduction to engineering in general. So that's how I got, little by little I got interested in that. But what mainly caught me more interested is of how much we could actually do with robots themselves because a robot could actually do a bit more than a human can. They could go to more dangerous places. They could observe and gather data that a human can't possibly gather as well. So little by little I started getting interested in it and then, so for next year, I'm going to be biotechnology engineering. So I'm going to find a way to incorporate that with marine wildlife as well. And one would think that there's probably certainly a common engineering process behind all those things and the solutions may be different, but the elements of the solution could be a lot of commonality. And I was just going, you know, thinking in my own mind, I'm probably a couple of years older than you, not too many, but a few. And I was thinking as we're setting up the show, the difference between when I was raised in the 50s in the same spirit as you were raised, but now you're raised 70 years later, 60 years later, something like that, what a difference has occurred in the level of accessible and available information and technology in the hands-on level that we had versus what you've got. And the fact that this whole robotics domain could be something that you could rapidly put your arms around is really intriguing to me. So I'm going to ask you this, don't feel any pressure, but if you were to think of what the principles of robotics are, what would you think one or two key principles might be of this domain of robotics? And let me give you a context. If I think of thermodynamics, which is a major part of engineering, I think of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that have evolved by observation over years, and then the engineers observe things and then codify them and the scientists figure out what the molecular processes are to make them happen. But for example, a very important fundamental principle that thermodynamics is that heat flows from hot to cold, provided there's a conduction path of some kind. In aeronics or hydraulics, fluid flow goes from high pressure to low pressure. That's kind of like fundamental number one, electrical engineering. Electrical potential flows from high potential to low. So if you were to see those as the way engineering is structured and it starts with air and goes from out further, how would you think of the principles of robotics? I'm curious, it's not a challenge or a test, I'm just wondering how you at your level of experience see these things from a principles perspective as opposed to what the deliverable products look like. So again, with all of two minutes of preparation for your test, what would you say the principles of robotics are just a couple of them? So I would say that I would keep the trend where it goes from high to low. So from high availability to low availability. So take example for in Africa where there's actually evidence of famine because there's lots of droughts and things that affect crops. So we could use robotics to incorporate seeding in a different scale, in a different form. So from a population that has a high and exceeding amount of technology, they could transfer it to simple tribes that have a low form of technology. And then you could see that switch continue over from high technology to low technology and then you could incorporate that technology into their own and build it up. So their ways are still kept, but they're being introduced to how civilization is being changed in modern pace. So in that case, the concept of a principle turns from a technically measurable thing like electrical potential or hydraulic pressure into a social functionality. We can help you with the style of life you've got. We can help you with the circumstances you have as a result of environment or population growth, whatever. And we'll flow from a high tech orientation into an area that hasn't developed that technology yet but make it useful to them. So it's a mission oriented flow from high mission capability to a lower mission capability which happens to contain technology. It also happens to contain philosophy and politics and language skills and everything else. So that's a really interesting perspective and a very mature perspective, I might suggest, on a fundamental principle of robotics. So you've translated that to the value it provides more so than the functionality that it contains. And I wonder if everybody thinks that way about robotics. Well, I could only hope. Yeah, well, that is an incredible way to think about it and I applaud you and the folks at HPU for getting that thinking process instilled and then using it as an armature to bring more people into. Certainly in the traditional engineering ranks those kind of high level value applications are less evident than is just the effort of understanding the computational side of things. In fact, that almost suggests that the computational side and the application of the physics principles and such could be considered had been reduced to a practice now and so now the value of that, what the practice can generate where that human value resides can be focused on. And you guys are at the forefront of using robotics as the means to that. So robotics for good, how about that? That's a pretty cool title. And I really, again, I can't say enough about how important that is. I'll take you back 50 years to my day in age and I think a little factor here though that I thought about was that the ability to do that, to fabricate robotic systems and generate these systems that perform this value added work is because components aren't the issue anymore. Objects are the issue. That is, resistors, transistors, capacitors, things that make an electronic circuit happen are combined into a module of some kind. You get for 15 bucks on the internet and it comes in a nice statically isolated package and all and it comes as a connector, 61 pin connector or something like that. It comes with some software and it reports on its maintenance, reports on other things and it's ready to go. So now you can focus on what we want to do with it more so than how to put the transistors and the capacitors together. So I'll take credit for having been in the earlier generation where you had to compute all that stuff. If you want to have a timing circuit, you had to compute the RC aspects, the resistance capacitance and figure out what they wanted to be, solder them together, provide power to them and have some kind of a readout device and generate a timer circuit that way. So you'd spend all your time making that timer circuit. Now the timer circuit comes in a package for you and now you can figure out what to do with it. We're just building off. Okay, this is a fantastic education for me. I want to join your club and start going to some of these classes you're going to offer for the people from my generation who need to be upgraded to where your generation is thinking. That's great. We'll talk more about how your club works and how people can join it and we get back from our one break here. Okay. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock and I'm co-host of Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. Think Tech is important to our community because it provides a platform for all the important issues in our society. For the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. Give thanks to Think Tech. We'll run only during the month of November and you can help. Please donate what you can so that Think Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine. I've already made my donation and I look forward to yours. Please send in your tax-deductible contribution by going to this website. Thanks for thinktech.causebox.com. On behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech Hawaii's 30-plus weekly shows, thank you for your generosity. It is still the noon hour on Thursday, folks. Ted Roxton here. Think Tech Hawaii, our show where the drone leads. Now, normally we have a drone on this table. Today we don't have any drones on this table. We have a subject much larger than that in place and that's our discussion with Daniel. Mendoza Emocilla, who is the incoming president of the HPU Robotics Club right down the street. And Daniel, welcome on again to the show. We had a fantastic conversation in the first part and a little bit of cool discussion at the break. We were talking about the principles and fundamentals of things like robotics versus engineering and we had a awakening for me to see that you and your generation are thinking of these things from the perspective of the value they provide in the service. My generation, we thought of how to make them at the very elementary component level and there's somebody filled the gap in the middle with stuff that works, which is pretty cool. So what do you think the next phase is going to be? Now that you're working on robotic solutions for complex human problems, that will develop its own track and course through your efforts and other people's efforts in HPU and UH and other efforts. What will be the next major state change 20 years, 30 years, 70 years from now that when you get to host this show when you're a lot older and you get some young kid like you? What will he be thinking about? I believe the student or individual will probably be thinking about efficiency and design, most likely. So the designs for most of the Jones now, they kind of seem clunky, like big and chunky. Just a little clunky, yeah. And so if we're building off of what we have now and we modify that, we could have probably even a bigger drone that's available now, so we could do a specific task. So for future generations, it would be their job to find a way to make it simpler in design, so thinner or more aerodynamic because if we have too much things on it, it'll actually waste more battery because it won't function as well as it should. So little by little, the next generation should be focusing on how to make it more efficient, how to make it more user-friendly, or how to make it look so it doesn't seem like it's something that could tear something down. Most robots are good, right? Yeah. So kind of like if you see it at first glance, if it's just made out of disparate parts, it kind of looks like it's a skeleton of a drone and it kind of looks freaky to begin with. So the next process for that is should be how to make it look nice and pleasing and not scare off little children. That is another incredibly mature attitude and approach and I appreciate you educating me to what that next phase after you get started here is all about. And I will probably want to use both those phases you've described in future conversations with other people. I'll give you credit for having thought them up and educated me. I appreciate that very much. But that actually leads me into something I can actually contribute to. The very issue you're speaking of, making them less clunky and more user-friendly, pitching your hand better, does the job. That autonomy is a factor there. Computational superiority of how to get the job done right and design it right is a factor in there. And at the end of the day, reliability and safety and the trustworthiness of the system as you put it, not to be something frightening but at the same time, while being not frightening, it has to be really productive and useful and consistently so in order to win the hearts and minds of the population. That is an incredible challenge and there's folks I can, I'd be glad to acquaint you with outside of our show here that are thinking about the structured thinking that takes you in that direction. I'll just mention one, Nancy Levison at MIT runs a program called STAMP. Maybe you've come across that. System safety. Because safety has got to be the paramount thing here. Safety and reliability, which aren't the same thing. And what are the design methods we use to get there? You mentioned design. And having these designs self-replicate or generate autonomously and prevent a design that isn't safe from occurring. In aerospace, we went through that the hard way and have come up with logic and arguments of reliability and duplicity and things like that, principal structural elements and there's a bunch of logical frameworks that exist that have been very useful. Certainly the aviation industry is trustworthy and this is pretty high. Maybe it wasn't some time ago, but it is today. So how do we transfer that into the world of robotics? Because when we talk about integrating a bunch of components together that weren't necessarily designed together and a GPS board, a flight navigation processor board, a power distribution board, motors, they weren't designed to the same rules. They were designed to some set of rules and not quite sure what they are. There are some interface parameters that define how they communicate with another component. But how do we assert a strong interconnection framework, interface control, if you will, that allows them all to work together, all those components to work together and not fail and not cause one another to have a bad day? So that's an interesting challenge and I will, again, another one minute warm-up over to you for your answer, Daniel. So I actually believe that the way to make them work well off with each other would be to make sure they have the top of the line forms of connection. So if you're using the specific materials, not all materials actually transfer electrical currents the same way. So a gold might be better than silver or steel is actually worse. So copper, gold, silver, some precious metals, they actually conduct the electrical currents better than others. So for them to be wired with specific materials could make them work easily with each other. That way, when one attempts to fail it could send out an error message beforehand and it could actually be fixed right away by the next part of the machine or it could just simply be this one stops its current progress and restarts itself and transfers that information over again to the next one. So it would be mostly on how we use different wires or different connections so they could actually communicate to each other. So one of the aspects that you're referring to is the connectivity framework that allows everything to be in good contact with each other and not have internal resistance or some other form of interface blockage prevent a system from interacting with another system. And then the thing that goes through my mind a lot is the failure modes that occur as you begin to lose battery voltage, for example. At some point in time, the motors drop off. At some point in time, the GPS processor drops off. At some point in time, the flight management system drops off. And so we have to organize them in such a way that the most important thing fails last and that the least important thing fails first. Which then leads to another very interesting issue which we have all over the place in the world of drones. How do we separate the payload functions which are performing the mission? That is, are collecting the information, doing the analysis, whatever it may be from the flight system which is performing a different function. The flight systems are basically a mule just carrying the payload around. So in some cases we power today not necessarily rightfully so but the payload is powered off the vehicle's battery. Well, maybe that isn't the right way to do it. Maybe the payload should have its own battery so that any failure in the payload can't reach across and affect the vehicle itself. So your future is just laid out before you here of finding a way through these complex interactions in complex adaptive systems and having design standards that people can understand and can apply without having to get a PhD in some aspect of science. So once again, my hat's off to you for taking these tasks on and for even thinking about them and making sure you have that. Having that set up once again how would you suggest that the concept forward that you just laid out that is the proper integration of all these systems, how would we translate that into a academic curriculum in engineering or some other aspect of maybe math department, something like that? Even architecture is in there somewhere I suspect but how would we make the university curriculum that deals with robotic integration? And HPU is watching by the way so you're here. So right now I'm also part of the honors program at HPU. I'm assuming that to be the case here. So we have interdisciplinary work so we get two teachers from different fields and they have to learn to communicate with each other so I believe that our engineering program should take that form of theology or that form of idea of teaching to teach how robots should actually intercommunicate with each other because right now I have two very different so one's psychology major the other one's English communication major so they're on different sides. You've noticed that. And sometimes they don't always go... They're watching too by the way so you may not be a student after tomorrow. They're probably watching me too. So I've learned by watching them work together that little by little they could actually talk to each other and find out how to do things so if we could get the engineering teacher for electrical to communicate with the ones for biomedical or biotechnology and then they could communicate with each other on how to precisely teach the students how to build something where the pieces actually coincide with each other with each other in case that this piece has to work with that piece but it's not always thought of that way sometimes we are just focused on I have to make this piece a whole future scope for the engineering department at HPU and we are out of time this show runs very long we generally don't get anywhere near where we want to get talked about but I am totally impressed by what you guys are doing and I'll say to our people watching the show I think the future is in good hands as long as we can get guys like Daniel in on the future and you can contact Daniel at deammandos5myhpu.edu at the robotics for good club at HPU and we'll see you I think in shining stars a great success in the future of your career at HPU Daniel, thanks for coming on board