 There we are folks, Ted Rawson here in our downtown Honolulu Studios, Think Tech, Hawaii, overlooking beautiful Waikiki in his case, and with our show Where the Drone Leads, weekly portrayal of what's taking place in the world of drones applicable here in Hawaii and across the world. And in fact, we have one of our Across the World Travelers on as our guest today, Chuck Devaney, in Las Vegas, is standing by. Chuck, welcome aboard again. Happy to be on the show Ted, thank you. Okay, and actually Chuck's probably the very first guest on this show, going back about three years or so by now I would guess. Well Chuck's been on the show many times, but this is the first time Chuck, you're going to be reporting to us on what took place at one of our world's largest drone conferences, just completed today, as a matter of fact, down in Dallas, the AUVSI, the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, big term. So Chuck, tell us about your trip to Dallas, and kind of in 25 words or less, characterizes the show. 25 words or less. No, that's actually, that's a throwback. Make it 25 words or more Chuck. Okay, 25 words or more. It was actually my first experience at AUVSI, I've always been too busy either with school or actually in the field doing the work. But it is a very large show, it's a very friendly show. I was told that it's primarily military, but I didn't really see that this year. I thought it was a pretty even distribution between the private and public sector. I saw a lot of larger aircraft that you normally don't see unless you are at a test site or a part of a large commercial entity or the military. I saw some very small drones coming out of the Intel booth doing a lot of the swarm stuff in their cage. I saw lots of new up and coming sensors coming out, and most importantly is all of the new ways to deal with data and data management and dissemination. That's cool. That whole issue of data management, dissemination, security, extraction, expression, all that sort of thing, that's really where the end game is in this game anyway. And in the time I've been to the AUVSI show, we didn't see much of that in evidence. It was mostly the aircraft or the rotorcraft themselves. What you're seeing is a change then, a reflection on that new awareness that it's the product out of the UAV, more so than the UAV that really matters here. Is that what you're saying, Chuck? I don't really have a baseline in terms of who was there before, and I know who's been around for a while, but some people have a booth, some people don't. But I did see a fair amount of up and coming solutions, at least in some of the hardware, video encoders, some video dissemination stuff, a little bit of fleet management as well in terms of software. But of course, as AUVSI probably usually is, it's really, really overrun by hardware distributors and in actual aircraft distributors. That's where the real eye candy was, of course. The things that attract you are the airplane models, helicopter models and such hanging from the ceiling and then the big booths. Once again, it's all that analysis that goes on, and then even below that is the cyber network functionality that keeps it all together. This is a fairly distributed network function that makes a drone run, especially if you think of the rules and the training and such that are required of the operator and the reliability and such required of the electronics and then the way that the whole thing integrates with other users in the airspace. That large picture is starting to come into focus then, is what your experience has been, Chuck, and that's really good news to hear that people are starting to think at that level. Exactly. You're seeing a lot more standard operating procedures starting to come about and different software packages that are being designed around those standard operating procedures so that people can standardize, actually become a part of a standardized industry in the way like we were talking about before we even came on. How do you survey a stack? How does one operate in an environment where there's a fire and potentially another aircraft in your immediate airspace? All of that stuff is still being sorted out, but the fact that it is being sorted out is very promising. It's going to make it a lot easier for us to reach out to those public entities that are going to be using this technology. Could you sense anywhere where there's like a centroid or where this understanding is coming together and is easily understood and expressed and maybe collected? Exactly. You know, everybody, there's little pockets of public service people, both law enforcement and fire that are kind of coming up with their own. And I think some of those people are starting to talk to each other. One person I ran into was Gene Robinson, and I talked to Gene Robinson at great length. He actually has a company now called Drone Pilot Inc., I believe, and they're coming up with their own set of standard operating procedures and they're actually, it sounds like they're talking with the FAA and others as to making that gospel so that others will follow. And Gene, being the forefront of the movement, especially in the search and rescue realm and dealing with FAA and public service, public entities, I kind of feel like he might be the go-to guy in terms of being the tip of the spear and actually organizing the whole thing for us. That's cool. And that's really important for us to understand here in Hawaii because as we operate, manage and generate business for the Pan-Pacific Unmanned Air Systems Test Range Complex, which is now Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon, Mississippi, and Kansas, all joined together at the State University levels, it's important for us to know where these standards are coming from and where the strengths are and where the good standards are emerging because that kind of sets the stage against which we have to consider testing. The whole role of these test ranges is to take the capabilities beyond where they are today as limited by the various laws, FAA rules and such, and find ways that beyond line of sight, flight over people, cluster operations, things like this can operate with the equivalent safety that we have today with existing systems. So knowing what is coming out in terms of an operational desire or a standard and testing against that but beyond where we are today is what we're supposed to be doing. So it's great to see that that is starting to happen. In fact, I was going to show on here, we were going to excite the whole audience here and do something never been done before on Think Tech Hawaii and portray an XL spreadsheet on the screen. But we ran into technical difficulties and can't do that, so we save our audience from an XL spreadsheet anybody wants that we can provide it. We got it yesterday through NDPTC, National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. It's got quite a few entries on it. It's a collection that ANSI put together of all the standard activities that are going forth in ASTM and RTCA and SAME and ASME and AIAA, all the organizations that are through their professional societies are touching the UAS game in some way, are collected on the sheet and it's intriguing to see the range of things that are being considered for standards. And that makes me wonder how the work that Gene is doing that you're referring to, how that fits in here. For example, the NFPA, National Fire Prevention Association has taken on the role of establishing user needs, user perspectives for drone operations, representing all of public safety, law enforcement, fire, public health and this sort of thing. And they'll be bringing up those user needs which would include I would think sensor accuracy, battery life, wind tolerance and operational things that they need to think about. In the same way, I believe ASME is thinking about search and rescue in some committee work. Then there's all the technical work, motors, batteries, structure, radio communications, chip security and all these different things have their own category and their own organization watching over them. Things like human factors, how much sunlight should you be able to look at your screen and still be able to read it in terms of backlit. So the industry is moving in a direction that allows it to have standards and sort of self-regulate by imposing standards that are generally accepted and that's what the NFPA wants. It wants a self-regulating industry based on logic and best practices to avoid having the FAA have to come in and establish standards or establish requirements for us. So anyway, Chuck, what do you think the next year is going to hold in terms of additional directions, additional views and such at AUVSI? I think we're probably going to see more hardware come out, of course, but what I would like to see and what I'm kind of going to push for and as I develop relationships and closer relationships with a lot of these colleagues is we need to bring back in data standards, the accuracy standards of some of this imagery that we're collecting to minimize board propagation of air. In a lot of the reading, I don't really hear much from the ASPRS in terms of coming forth and saying, hey, if you want to play this game, this is a set of standards that have been in place for manned aviation for many decades and if you can't meet or exceed these expectations then we can't accept the data as being anything that's usable or actionable. That's interesting, Chuck. That has a couple of different pieces. You set me up to give a speech in two weeks to the geological society here in Hawaii and then why don't we take what you just said and push that on the society and have them start coming back with what standards might be that they would recognize from a geological perspective. I'm sure that the map makers and photo reconnaissance people are all going to come up with similar ideas of what standards are that make sense to them and have that included in this user generated requirement space. Yeah, and you're going to have different levels of that. For example, in my thesis, my graduate thesis, I talked about a comparison for automatic spatial referencing and whether or not it falls in within the requirements of FEMA in their floodplain maps, which would work well in a post-disaster scenario in a denied environment where you don't have things like street corners anymore or building corners or you don't recognize the landscape at all. At least you can get a pretty decent interpretation within three to five meters of where it's supposed to be and that's usable, but then the surveyor, he needs two to five centimeter data and we might have a bunch of people running around saying because they purchased the RTK system and the RTK system, because it's RTK, just automatically knows where it is from some sort of divine lightning bolt from the sky telling it that that's where it is. Unfortunately, that's not how it works, so we should probably develop some sort of compliance around what the needs of the survey areas because their stuff actually needs to hold up in a court of law. So there might be an industry there or an opportunity for a survey firm to offer compliance checks to people's data sets if they want to go out and achieve survey level accuracy. That's interesting. There's almost a time-dependent functionality based on there. Certainly the survey level of accuracy is required at the end of the day when everything's stable, but in a situation such as a disaster management situation or disaster recovery, a lower level of precision might be acceptable up on the first day to a couple of meters. You need to know where to get airplanes and where a truck's going to go and such, but as time goes on, that accuracy is going to get required to be tighter and tighter. Yep, exactly. And you know, if you're going to be using this technology to work with, you know, cadastral information in the lake or some sort of land dispute litigation process, you need to be able to show or prove that your accuracy is within a couple of centimeters because that matters to someone. That's right. At the end of the day, it's all going to be based on whatever's required to handle any litigation coming down. Exactly. And that's the end state. The thing about the coastal environment was sea level rise and the like. You know, a difference of a half a meter or 20 centimeters could be the difference of several feet of inundation. And so that's really, really interesting because the sea level rise and the global issues associated with that are going to place requirements on us to begin measuring these things in a dynamic environment where you measure, re-measure, do change detection and such. And it can't be done in a willy-nilly fashion. It's got to be done in a fashion that the results are useful and are going to make the situation worse. Exactly. We've got to minimize the forward propagation of error. Yep. I like that. I wonder where you heard that from, Chuck. I'm going to quote you on that next week. You probably heard me say it a million times. If I didn't say it, Matt Barbie said it a hundred times. Okay. So the forward propagation of error. Let's talk about the forward propagation of error and we'll get back from our break here in one minute. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At DiveHeart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. DiveHeart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, DiveHeart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. DiveHeart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search DiveHeart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. It is Thursday, noon 15, Ted Rawlson here in Think Tech Studios, downtown Honolulu. Chuck DeVaney in Sandy Bay in Las Vegas just gotten off on airplane from Dallas and Chuck is one of our, is the very first guest on this show many years ago and graduate out of UH Master's Degree. And now taking his knowledge and wares to Washington D.C. and not to Las Vegas. So Chuck, certainly a lot of changes since you first came on this show. I think your fame comes from being on this show as a matter of fact. Probably it has to be. I think that's where it comes from. So we need to have a lot of folks come on this show who want to get famous like Chuck. Yeah, all my fame. Tweet in. There you go. So anyway, Chuck, we're talking about our favorite collective term, mitigating, minimizing the forward propagation of error, which has so many aspects of thinking about in this whole game of drones as they expand. Tell us about your own company and what you're doing now in Las Vegas. Okay, so the company is called Quadrocopter LLC. We started out in 2010 as a cinematography company. Which is then blossomed into a sales and service of about 658 different products from batteries, props all the way up to large heavy lift copters. Of course, we carry free fly DJI unique and many, many others. They have done very well in that space and it's allowed them to grow and we are starting to develop higher main and we are going to start a geospatial division where we're going to hopefully solve some of these issues with data dissemination and hopefully try to do our part in minimizing the forward propagation of error. That's great. So I know someone who's there who would be very qualified to run that geospatial division. That would be you if anybody needs to know. I'm going to apply for it and see what they say. I'll let you know how it goes. Right now I'll just continue to sweep the floors at the office. But that brings up a whole point here. The amount of knowledge one needs to operate drones, UABs, UASs these days is growing so much and is expanding into so many other areas such as public land use policy and things like this that it almost really turns into becoming something a service has to provide, a knowledgeable service, no different than other services that we depend on. We're rapidly outstripping the ability of the average scientist or the average researcher to also become a fair and most effective UAS operator. It's really and maybe in another year or so worth of rulemaking and it'll have got to that point. I mean there's so much one has to understand because again it's all about the forward reducing, eliminating, trapping, minimizing that forward propagation of error, mitigating any potential cause. And we had our case recently, we're doing some work at Mokolia and it was right next to Dillingham Airport. So it's class G airspace, we could assert and just operate there but that's not reasonable, that's not mitigating because there's other folks who use that airspace also and they take, I wouldn't say they take latitude but they take margin that they think is theirs and so that's not going to change. We have to respect that and integrate, operate with them, be on the radio and realize that they will deviate from plan from time to time and we need to be ready to handle that. So it's not something that you can just simply walk up and do and especially like along Alamora Park or something like that in Honolulu. We've got helicopter traffic going by because that's an outbound helicopter traffic pattern coming out of the airport. All the eastbound traffic stays low to avoid airplanes coming in and runs right outside the shore at Alamora and Kakaako. So if you're going to operate- Air 1 and Air 2 always fly through there. Say again? Air 1 and Air 2 fly through there pretty low. Right, so on a corner wind day you've got helicopter traffic going out, airplane traffic coming in and there's no place for drones. But those things aren't easy to understand and they're hard to accept because that isn't what I thought when I bought this thing and took it home and took it out of the box and flew it in my yard. It's not what I had in mind. So there really isn't a good platform to get information one needs to be thoroughly vested and have mitigated all the issues or have trapped and halted all the forward propagation of error. One of the things you guys could do in the company is promote that idea and promote the idea and generate the issue of services that are provided that provide all that so the individual guy doesn't have to worry about it. Exactly, we certainly do plan on contributing to that movement as much as possible. I think that if you're going to do something you should probably do it right. Of course we, just like anyone else, could have a lot of opportunities or certain opportunities for a job or to make an income but also putting people in harm's way so we choose to not go that route. We have three or four 107 pilots and none of us are really going to put ourselves in that situation. So we feel like we're going to do our part to kind of be stewards of the industry and not allow that to happen. Of course anything that can be, and you've said this before, anything that can be abused will be abused and of course is being abused so we're always going to have that to deal with. But hopefully those people will continue to just operate in their backyards or consider it to be a hobby and not jeopardize the industry while it's still in its infancy. That's great. Do you think your company will perhaps put on a booth at AUVSI next year? Possibly, or they just might send me out to go lurking once again. We did have the opportunity to talk with many potential collaborators. So there is the option of us maybe teaming up with others. I did see that a lot this year where there would be multiple entities kind of sharing one booth. Like everybody from Nevada was in one booth. Of course the entire Parrot Group, which includes Parrot. Well they had Sequoia in a different group. The Red Edge cameras, they also have Pix4D and SenseFly, they were all in one booth. So there is the option of possibly doing that. At NEB this year we actually shared a booth with RedRock Micro which makes these little nifty lens motors. That brings up the other point that a small company like you faces and that's the issue of how many conferences to go to. You could probably go to one a week if you wanted to. And then there's some in Las Vegas which are right next door are very adjacent to you. Also there's the Drone World in San Jose which is almost a must comply. There's quite a good conference in Alaska and in New Mexico that are long lasting and very respected by the FAA and others who go. So there's a list of probably ten events around the country and maybe outside the country on an annual basis that really need to have your footprint there. Well I think that we're going to at least attend the two that are here that one of us will go whether it be our director or myself. One of us will have a presence there. And we go and we listen to the speakers and we listen to the trends and we talk to as many people as we possibly can. And before I even arrived even to AVSI I had already had like eight meetings set up with different individuals that I wanted to see and talk to that I've been in different email exchanges over the past few months just trying to see what do people need. What can we develop for them? What can we do to establish ourselves as a successful viable or an error less entity in this industry? That's great. It would be actually interesting to put together some kind of a professional society of groups just like yours and establish that self-managing culture and that self-regulating culture that the FAA desperately wants these organizations to get into. The model they're using is the what's called the light sport aircraft category of aircraft. It's not regulated. It's self-regulated. And it is basically driven by a bunch of retired airline pilots is where it came from. So it's got serious airplane DNA in its nature. But that's sort of same attitude would work really well and style would work really well making this drone game respected and productive and probably more expensive. A long way. Yeah, you know, people still need to make a living and I think a lot of the knowledge and stuff that has been created in this industry I think it's worth the money and anybody who wants to be serious about it should be somewhat better to go through some sort of training process where they have the skills like true resource management, good safe aeronautical knowledge. I think it's important. I think that the industry is definitely, it's the Wild Wild West. It's the Wright brothers. People are definitely pushing the limits. But at some point there's going to be the need for more regulation and probably some stricter vetting processes and rating. How are you actually going about getting a rating instead of just a 16-year-old person who can go take the test and pass it and you're able to operate legally within class year space anything less than 55 pounds up to 100 miles per hour. That's pretty significant to be able to legally operate. I think there should be some sort of practical involved. I think you should have to do a check ride and maybe there should be a type rating for a fixed wing and a multi-rotor in different levels of multi-rotors. Those are all really important points. You think about it and in the world of aviation the only license or certificate you can get without any practical training is this one, the unmanned air system remote pilot certificate. And just because you spent 150 bucks, went to a class and got your ticket doesn't really mean anything. It means you got a ticket. It doesn't mean you have any practical knowledge or know what to do next. On the other hand, if you got yourself a private pilot license you probably have 40 hours of dual training under your belt. You've got some emergency procedure training under your belt and you've passed at least one written to get you into that stage. So when you finally do get your private pilot license you've got a modicum of practical training and you know what the fuel smells like and such and you've been through airports you've been through a couple of emergency procedures and such and you are a step ahead of a problem that might occur in a limited environment. So we don't have that here. I wonder what the forcing function will be that makes that happen? Well thankfully knock on wood or whatever I've got to do one of these things hasn't yet been sucked up into a jet engine. Hopefully that's not going to be the deciding factor for this even though we've had a lot of near misses you hear about in the media all the time. Or you know a fatal accident an innocent bystander was hit in the head and the like. We're starting to see now where DJI is implementing some no fly zones you know you can't even arm their equipment if it knows it's within class B airspace or even underneath the wedding cake in class E or class G airspace it will still stop you from launching that aircraft and they're doing the same thing in areas where people are using these this technology for nefarious reasons. I'm not really sure if that really makes you know a point for what we're talking about right now but you know there are steps being made I think to try to minimize that you know those accidents from happening. That's right. Not once she's coming in and that'll be a big part of it and we're all together working on the issue of mitigating and halting the forward propagation of air that's what we're all about and by the way just as a side note on that some of those DJI products won't work down at the Kauai Nui airfield that's within the five miles of Kanyohi's class D to cast out them. Even though there's a letter DJI doesn't know about the letter that allows that to operate allows aircraft to operate there. Anyway Chuck thanks so much for coming on after an exhausting trip down to Dallas and appreciate your updates for some appropriate time in the near future. Sounds good Ted. Thanks for having me on the show. Always great man. See you later brother. Take care. See you all next week folks.