 Friday afternoon, folks, this 22nd of July, one week after the Ides of July, Ted Rolston here hosting our show, Where the Drone Leads on Think Tech Hawaii in downtown Honolulu. And we've got kind of the three musketeers on today, three people who started this whole interactivity maybe four or five years ago, Dr. Song Choi from UH in the studio, thanks Song for coming on again, always a pleasure to hear your varied opinions and great experiences and wisdom coming our way. On the other end of the UH domain in Washington DC we have Chuck Devaney who is a UH star graduate out of actually out of the culinary school on Hawaii and then out of geography in Manoa and now after we educated him here in Hawaii a star student goes to DC to get a career on the East Coast. But he's still got no lower shirt on. Yeah, you're never gonna get that off of him. That's that goes as a trade. Actually in February he wears them too in DC believe it or not. Even better. Anyway one of the issues we have to think about is how we generate the cookies that bring guys like Chuck back into our domain here in Hawaii. Yeah, of course. After he's learned what the world's all about from the perspective of a U.S. operator on the East Coast and get him back over here. Of course. So Chuck, let's hear what you're up to these days. Well, I'm still at the UAS Academy. We finished up Trident Specter. That was something that we had we talked about previous. Other than that we I've been doing a lot of cinematography work for ABC Network. Good morning America. 2020 ABC's 2020 and then also just you know your typical R&D stuff in terms of software defined radios and integrating that into UAS to be an antenna, if you will, and then also doing some heavy lift copter integration as well. Chuck, is there anything in the world of unmanned earth systems you aren't doing? Well, it's not always in the air, Ted. We now have a submarine that we've been testing and we actually have it swimming rather well. We're integrating an autopilot into that as well. And then also we've got an autonomous rover that we've been working on as well that has some different sensors we've been putting on it looking for different aerosols, gases, any biological agent that might be hazardous to the human. So we put the robot in first to clear the building and make sure they're safe and then send in the personnel after that to clear it. You know, we have something I'll talk to, we talk about, the eater on the show or off, and that's the inspection of bunker fuel fuel tanks that are dry but need to be inspected for rust, corrosion and weld quality and this sort of thing. So we need to talk about that, Chuck, in terms of UASs that can fly inside the tank and aren't a source of ignition but are able to carry the various sensors that will pick up indications of corrosion and cracks and such. That's just a chop-talk here among us. Anyway, Song is here representing the larger activities at the university and we're working together for some time on these several workshops we've had across the university and what goes through my mind and Chuck's a great example of that is the whole world of UAS like robotics is cuts across all the departments at the university. Any university, not just UH but any, but universities are basically designed around departmental structures and people get rewarded for doing well in their departments. They get rewarded for notifications and publications in their departments. What we see here with unmanned air systems or unmanned underwater systems or unmanned surface systems, robots in general, is things that cut across all these domains and even reach to the end user. Could be Hawaiian studies, it could be the archaeology department, it could be the emergency management people. So how do we think about designing a program that's effective and attractive to kids coming in from high schools and such that allows it to operate within that departmentalized structure but across those department boundaries so that everybody's kind of sharing together and still get them out in four. Oh, of course. Oh, wow. Big challenge. Okay, well, as long as it's all on you, you don't feel any pressure. Do you everything? Well, the biggest challenge is always getting them out in four because with all the requirements that's happening these days, it's literally impossible to miss a class and graduate four years. So that's a big challenge. But as to your comment about getting the students involved with not only the robotics aspects but the applications and the environmental aspects, I think that's a direct tie. I've been involved with underwater robotics for many, many years and that also involved mobile robots and aerial robots. The one commonality about all these things is that the technology, the algorithms, the process by which you solve these problems are very similar. So it may be used in different environments. Underwater is obviously different than the air environment where in the air everything is very quick motions and you have to have quick recovery time where underwater, all the motions are very slow. The medium is very thick. We're more worried about the momentum that's created by the motions and all that. And of course you have other various aspects, the water itself, the presence of light, the presence of other type of materials in the air. And if you think about it, it really is no different than all the little spacecrafts and satellites that we've been putting up in the space. What you're sort of saying is we really need to focus on the things that are common across all these and there's common aspects and common design thoughts, common systems engineering approaches and there's some root commonality that connects all these things. We need to pull that up and highlight it and that's what we focus on. So like you said, if we're looking at different environments, air, water, land, space, the commonalities in that middle area where all these vehicles, the control algorithms, the ways by which we have integration, they're very similar. And we want to make sure that they understand the generalities of the similarities but at the same time understand the specifics about each of the different environments. So what Chuck was talking about today was very interesting because he's working with aerial vehicles, but at the same time now he's working with underwater vehicles to try similar control algorithms. You know, I'll be the first to say if we got rid of some of the bottlenecks that we run into in engineering, for instance, power, would we have any problems? Probably not. If somebody came up with the Star Trek Dilithium crystal and the battery. Yeah, the battery. The battery for all time. All time, anytime, all the time. No charging required, you just run it and it works. So let's select the underwater environment. If we were to use a battery like that and we just light everything up, where is the engineering need? We just use the same thing like we're doing right now. I mean, we're talking to Chuck over the internet and we can see everything, we can move everything, we have no problems. I think that's what we're trying to get to. That's really interesting. There's so many directions this conversation could go. I want to highlight one thing that is like a near-term in state, if you will, if there's such thing as a near-term in state, and that is the week of the second through the seventh of October here in Honolulu at the state capital, where D-Bett is arranging Jim Crisapuli and the gang and the Aeronautical Advisory Committee are arranging for Aerospace Week to be taking place. I think it happened a couple years ago in the same way, and I think we have a flyer here that Zuri will pull up in a minute, but we'll have, I think, the weekend where there's an opportunity for contacting kids. There we are, Aerospace Week in Hawaii. The two through the seventh of October, a lot of focus on unmanned air systems, a lot of focus on the corresponding ground systems as well, and we're in the middle of structuring this together right now, but it looks like it's going to be access for the kids and families on the weekend, and then I think the height of it is the third or the middle of the week where we have the actual conference itself, but a lot of opportunity here that we have to generate and give people a chance to come down here and see exactly what we illustrate that. I can illustrate a battery, I can illustrate a sensor, I can illustrate a propeller. Something that's a little bit abstract is a bit hard to illustrate, so it's that abstraction that is where the commonality is across all these departmental models. So I'm going to challenge to you is to figure out how to illustrate abstractions. I'll give you the best abstraction engineering. How can you illustrate the flow of electricity in a wire? I'll go see Wayne Chiroma. There you go. But if you really think about flow of electricity in a wire, if I had a clear plastic tube and poured water down it, isn't that in a way the same thing? So let's take that for a minute. Let's ask Chuck to weigh in on this for a minute. Let me just take what you just said and turn that into a table demonstration at the aerospace. Okay. Let's think about how we can illustrate the reality of an abstract term like an algorithm that is useful to Hawaiian studies, useful to archaeology, useful to the natural sciences people, and think how to illustrate the reality of an abstract term like that. That would be so useful to communicate our need statement to the senators and the legislators who are going to be interacting with them a bunch. So let's hold that thought for a minute. We'll think up an answer here. Actually, it's on you to think it up. But let's ask Chuck to weigh in on this conversation a bit. How would we take these abstract terms and think of Song's concept here of finding that root common denominator that connects the various departments through robotics and U.S.? How would you, from your perspective, think about that and help us illustrate that? And by the way, we want you out here in the seconds for the seventh, representing the unmanned air systems academy as part of our display and demonstrations. Yeah. Well, thanks for the invite, Ted. I would dearly love to come back and visit Hawaii. And by the way, if you come, you're not going back. On my boat again. Do you still have my boat or did you sell it? No, I got your boat. Okay. Okay. So back to your question. And then also the Venn diagram that Dean Choi was talking about where you have the center commonality. A lot of the issue that I noticed in academia, you also see it, of course, in industry, especially in environments where it's very competitive and sort of forming up a bubble like you used to see back in the remote sensing days and the early days of remote sensing and the .com. There's not a lot of communication between disciplines because everybody kind of wants to do their own thing. So now we're experiencing a lot of a lot of stove pipes and it's not just at UH, it's in every university. People are so involved with their own department and in what they have going on because perhaps they're in a race with the people on the third floor, are in a race with the people that are on the fifth floor. In terms of the commonalities to come to, you know, one table and I know that those efforts have actually happened here and there and I don't know how effective they've been, but if that dialogue can continue, the people in Hawaiian studies of people in archaeology and the people in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, political science, marine biology, can all come together and say, hey, what do you need and how can we solve that issue with this piece of equipment here? How can we make your team safer? How can we be more effective and remove the human factor from the loop to get a better result and then go let everybody run back to their departments and then come together again and say, here's my solution. Will this work for you? And we test it, we test it and we try to break it and so on and so forth rather than live in the stove pipe world of the vertical aspect of the third dimension. Why don't we try to make everything more horizontal if that's possible? Take those stove pipes and flatten them out and make them horizontal. You know, let's take Chuck's thought, that's a great picture he's painted here and I'm thinking of the aerospace week again. Let's take, Matt, after the first break here, let's take a little look at what we might do to preset the stage for what Chuck's talking about. That is starting right now and go to all the departments and say, what would you see as something that would be useful to you in your pursuit of education and such and useful to you that you know that the industry you're associated with is involved in and pre-arrange by getting them to think hard about this and have that total set of information on the table in illustrated form and the algorithms then are the pieces that connect them all and we can actually physically generate a viewable object that is the use of UAS in pursuit of quality of life in Hawaii. How's that? That's great, that's great. So you'll help me do it? I would help you do it. Okay, let's talk more about that after our first break. Sure. Hi, I'm Donna Blanchard. I'm the host of Center Stage which is on Wednesdays at two o'clock here on Think Tech. On Center Stage I talk with artists about not only what they do and how they do it but the meat of the conversation for me is why they do it, why we go through this. A lot of us are not making our livings doing this and a lot of us would do this with our last dying breath if we had that choice and that's what I love to talk to people about. I hope you enjoy watching it and I hope you get inspired because there's an artist inside you too. Join us on Center Stage at two o'clock on Wednesdays. Bye. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea. Please join me every other Monday to hear lawyers from Hawaii discussing ways to reach across the sea and help people and bring people together. Aloha. We're back folks. Ted Ralston here hosting our show where the drone leads downtown Honolulu at Think Tech Studios. We have our excellent guest on Dr. Song Choi from the University here again and Chuck Devaney who has escaped the gravitational pull of the University on the east coast and we're just talking about getting Chuck back here in the second to the seventh of October for the aerospace day or aerospace week at the Capitol and if we do it right we can set a trap and keep them here. I'll also tell you a better trap. So that weekend, seventh and eighth, we also have a vex robotics competition at Kamehameha schools. So that might be a great time for somebody to come over with a couple of these UAVs or UASs and even have demos to get the students excited about potentials of what they can do by understanding and participating in robotics. So this okay we can tie those together. We'll have a lot of industry here. We'll have a lot of people and a lot of individuals. Why don't we do that? Why don't we see how we can enhance that Kamehameha experience by bringing some of that functionality into it? I mean it'd be great if we can get some industry and some people that really are playing the end game to be at a middle school, high school activity saying hey this is what you can be when you get out. What a great incentive that I'm going to spend another four years in high school and another four years in college because there is actually gold at the end of that rainbow. Cool so let's do that. Let's let's hook that up with the guys at D-bed and make that part of the deal. You know and then as we were talking we were talking about this great idea of yours. Thank you. General Wong comes on the show from time to time. He has so many bright ideas we have to limit him to three bright ideas per show. You're going to be on at the same limitation so you've already done one so you don't have only two more for the whole show here. But the idea was to have some way to graphically illustrate the issues of collaboration that Chuck brings up and the things technically that connect these collaborative things together in order to get past the departmental boundaries and such and some physical realizable function that we can illustrate in three-dimensional art that anybody can quickly observe what we're speaking of here to keep away from long narrative and keep away from monologues and keep away from arcane technical explanations which 90 percent of the people can't won't bother to read and get them home so we'll take that on and we'll keep we'll have Chuck keep reminding us as we have to we had this obligation right here in front of the public to come up with this wonderful three-dimensional uh attractant of some kind song. But you know like what we always been talking about uh you know pictures with a thousand words and a three-dimensional thing for 10,000 words. Yeah videos with a million words that means a demonstration is probably worth a billion words so if we can show some sort of demonstration that illustrates some of the physical concepts of physics or what's even harder uh visualize mathematical concepts I think that'd be incredible uh like I was talking about illustrating the flow of electricity as basically flow water going down a pipe because that's really the same thing. I bet a senator or a legislator of some kind could probably understand that graphically. Yeah we actually showed that to somebody before. Did you? Okay. You tested it already. Yes and it was with the senator and a house wrap. Okay. But you know Chuck since you're at uh the uh the unmanned academy you know how do you illustrate to a young person what autonomous or automatic controllers that's that's tough. Yeah I mean it's hard to it's hard to to illustrate it mathematically um you know um I guess in terms of autonomy I I show them a flow chart and kind of give them an idea of the historical concepts and it'll be very um application oriented so it'll be something like we are going to use this aircraft to collect data that we're going to generate a base map and derive some actionable information from. So I'll show them that flow chart and I'll show them um what the possibilities are in terms of error and precision if a human were to fly the aircraft and then I show them the possibilities of better precision and accuracy if the computer flew the the aircraft and let them see both of it. You know a lot of these guys you know young kids we we do a lot of stem eight and stem 10 classes and then and then we also educate industry professionals but that's more on maintenance operation safety and training. Some of these kids in the stem eight and stem 10 class are are really sharp and they get it and then others of course are you know more interested in Pokemon Go but you know that's just just how it is so I guess I use a lot of flow charts and actual live demonstration and say hey I want you to try to fly this you know using a simple quadcopter and try to do a raster type pattern and we're going to process that imagery and you can see all the pucas in it then we're going to have the computer fly it and you're going to see the differences in the output in the end and a lot of times then they'll understand what it does but they were not really going to understand what it is in terms of you know the the the PID IDs and all of those different parameters that drive a an autonomous system. And what Chuck's explanation just told us is how complex these abstract terms are and how difficult the expression of them is in the 30 seconds we have with a senator or somebody walking through. Oh of course. So we reversed this is a great stage point Chuck for us to try to build that maybe another aspect of the illustrative notion of some of these abstract terms like autonomy and autonomous operation but this then leads and you mentioned math I think at the beginning of the break or before the break this leads me to just ask both of you and for some feedback on this observation well we're once we have that state level change where we have algorithms working we have the the users talking to the suppliers and the whole system is functioning from a systems engineering perspective then we have this we generated this state of dependence where now people are going to be depending on these systems to function no different than the way a fireman expects the Scott Airpack on his back to function. He wants he wants to know when he goes into that fire he's going to come out with his still breathing and so there is this this ethics of design if you will or ethics of integrated design that we have to think about where we start if we start making for example UAS is that that same fireman is going to depend on that UAS better work in all conditions in fact if you look out Chuck we're having another hurricane coming at us this weekend so yeah I know I've been watching it it's blowing about 35 out there right now I guess in August so our our systems have to tolerate that kind of situation have to tolerate salt air they have to tolerate smoke and they have to tolerate particulate matter in the air and such and rain so we have to come to an ethic of design that allows those parameters to be addressed in the design of course and so that's a there's a lot of math I suspect involved in that but I think that's an an additional function we all have an obligation to to stand up and talk about uh Chuck what are your thoughts on on that how we approach that level of ultimate reliability that the that the users are going to expect and and are going to depend on well um you need to have a good sound team of uh systems engineers that are going to be able to you know set set the requirements and the specifications that um we'll have to definitely be rigid and and very well tested uh in order to achieve that level of safety and reliability I mean if you look at the aircraft industry unfortunately most of that uh has been written in blood you know to get to the get to that point you know so maybe we can kind of take those same principles in uh general aviation civil aviation um and uh and sort of apply that to uh the uh the reliability and the systems engineering that will go into the UAS industry it's going to have to be that way I believe anyway especially once we you know uh get in well after august 29th we're going to have 107 um it's going to be uh in up and working and uh that's going to be scary in and of itself with a lot of uh hobby uh grade systems out there yeah with with kids 16 years old capable you know eligible to fly an aircraft is 55 pounds and can fly 100 miles an hour um and then we're going to have the whole be online a site component so there not only will the aircraft itself need to be carefully engineered but also the the uh the peripherals the uh the ground station environment um all of the all the entire infrastructure will have to be short up to a certain extent and then uh you know a close very close watch watchful eye a white hat service you know overlooking all of these different systems out there I can't even like imagine how big it's going to be and and how potentially dangerous and unstable it could become you know what Chuck has just outlined is uh part of the value statement of these FAA UAS test sites of which Hawaii and Oregon and Alaska are bound together in one called the pan pacific unmanned uh air system uh test and research center and um I think that what Chuck does outline is a is a is a mission statement or one of the one of the elements of the task statement that should be undertaken by that but you're not just testing for the sake of testing is testing for the so if we can illustrate that as well this issue of this very abstract term of reliability and it'll illustrate that in some graphical way that people can understand that becomes a theme that are the state UAS test site which uh University of Hawaii and applied research lab will be involved in uh would would be a great mission statement for us to take on as well as uh using that as an argument for why we need the necessary investment and such and the partnerships and uh with the industry in order to take that on but if you wage could take that as a as its mission in the unmanned air systems world not so much structural design or electron electronic design but the integrated net result expressed in reliability and safety that would be a world beater right there well you know I think like what you're mentioning is uh is perfect big and if you look here at what's been happening in the news uh and you know I feel really bad for some of people that have dealt with on the other side of this but like the tesla incident in florida that really shows you how close autonomy in our regular everyday life is becoming and it's actually a pretty good predecessor to all the stuff that we're looking at in terms of drones and these UASs and UABs because if they're going to become that common and part of our everyday life people are going to have to think very deeply about how they are going to integrate into everything that we do and that once again leads back to the expressed values of safety reliability uh and the dependence that's that's been created and just imagine 10,000 drones flying over on lulu for example that's okay what do we do with that right so how do you get the planes to land if you do that it just doesn't work out so we get some some head scratching to do here and we need to illustrate all those things and and you know not shy away from these hard problems but illustrate them in some way and then get that to be the action that or the the debate that drives us to action guys like chuck we've got to get chucked back here chuck when you come in october you're not going back i get your vote give you both back to you chuck and that'll be your your inducement to stick around for a while we need that external influence brought back into us and once again folks uh the second through the seventh of october great chance to interact with the world of robotics and unmanned air systems and we'll do our best in fact we should put a tent up there tent made of made of uh volleyball nets and actually fly these things on the capital lawn you should you have to put that together there we are right there the flyer and with that uh chuck divaney in dc it's now 11 o'clock your time or something really late and thank you so much for sticking around with us today we'll see you again 10 30 sorry and dr song choy we'll see you guys so much for coming on the show anytime and thanks to jay feidell for putting us all together about four years ago in the first place and folks we'll see you next friday see you chuck see you again