 It is noon on Thursday, folks. Ted Ralston here at downtown Hulululu in our Think Tech studio with our show, Where the Drone Leads, and all of you faithful out there who watch this show every week, in fact probably work your life around this show, and normally we'd normally have a drone on the table here to act as a table decoration and a focus of our conversation. Today there isn't one. The reason we're talking about the other side of the drone business, and that is the issue of counter drone or counter measures against drones that are in the wrong place or unintended or perhaps even maliciously being used, and that's going to be a major factor as the whole emergence of drones enters our infrastructure and our school systems and our life. We still have to understand that there are potential downside uses and we got to protect against those, and so counter drone as austere as it may sound is a term that's going to be very important as we go forward here in the future. Anyway, we have one of the leading experts in that subject online with us today, Mr. John Mullin, CEO and president of Fromia in San Francisco on the Embarcadero. John's been on the show numerous times and he's joining us again. John, welcome aboard. I think it's good to see you. Hey, same here, and I think we're both getting older, John. I don't quite know how that works, but judging by the hair color and such, that may be going on and both ends here. You're laughing about it. That's okay. Anyway, John, again, we have a short time on the show. It's only a half hour now, and this subject is worth a lot more than that, but let's hit the highlights of what's taking place in the domain of counter drone, and I'm thinking really here on the civil side, we certainly know that on the military side, it's a very active issue and there's all the way to kinetic takedown and such and counter operations, but on the civil side, we have to be very careful about that. So we still think in the terms of detect and track and identify. And so what have you seen lately? I get GIPX and such that have pushed us forward in that direction. I saw a lot of new ideas and programs, I think they've reorganized the group there, so it's a new team, new thing, and it's a smaller crowd than before, but some very interesting technologies. The one we're focused on a lot is communication from the ground station to the device, because as you know, most drones, most commercial drones use standard unlicensed radio bands to communicate, which is a pretty vulnerable spot. So we're, our side is mainly looking at all of this communication, both as a counter drone and then also sharing with our offensive drone partners a way to manage communications without being jammed is basically the idea. And that's what we're looking the most right now, because we think that's the most vulnerable spot. Okay, so you're suggesting that the communication link between a ground controller that an operator is running a drone with and the drone itself, that electronic link, that's the area that is potentially most useful in the tracking and identification? And also that's easiest to to subvert with the jamming tool. So if you can upskate that link with using multiple simultaneous radio links or various techniques to counter jam, then you are one step up on your adversary who's trying to bring you down. So I think that's the key area for investigation, one of them anyway. You mentioned earlier the kinetic, kinetic where you actually blast either some sort of gun or net or something at the drone to bring it down. And that certainly has value as you can get close enough to do it. But most counter drones that we see right now use jamming devices to try to bring down the adversary. And the key, of course, to that is the tracking and identification and locating prior to the jamming, I would imagine. So if I think on the silver side where jamming is probably still not quite something the FCC allows, we ought to think of focusing in on the other pieces, the passive pieces, the identification and the tracking. Is the radio communication link still the same method of achievement of that? Other than that, there's a lot of advancement going on there. There's dozens of new product sounds. They do all follow kind of the same acoustic sound or radio frequency monitoring or the two main ones. There's visual monitoring as well and oftentimes a combination of the three. So you can either hear it with the sound, the actual audio sound, or you can see the radio frequencies where it's communicating and talking or you can see it visually itself. So those are the three main areas and a lot of tools are used in combination of all three to identify. And then tracking I think is still an infancy. You can track it, you can watch it either by a video or with a sound, but to put your own drone up right next to another drone and track it and move it in flight and stay right with it, we don't see anybody yet doing that. I mean there's people claiming it but we don't, we haven't really seen that happening too much yet. I think it's coming. That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that aspect of it, of that sort of passive-active combination, but in sticking with the purely passive piece, which is probably going to be the most tenable in the world of civil infrastructure management and land management and such, the very issue of identification and tracking even to the extent of just not knowing anything more than the general compass direction would all give us something a little stronger than we have right now, which isn't much. So if we were to take- I remember the last call we had together, Ted, we talked about the ID, where there was a licensing through an ID sequence. Although we haven't seen that on the market yet, we certainly saw it in the standards groups and we completely endorse that. We think it's a great idea. I think that's right. And that's happening, John. You're right. We did talk about that before. There was an AIRAC, Aviation, Rulemaking, Advisory Committee, the FAA is in panel with a bunch of people on it to go figure out how to do that. Is it going to be ADSD? Is it going to be some other form? Is it going to be AIS-like? Exactly what is it going to be? And then how is it going to be implemented? So once that happens, the availability of that information to law enforcement or public safety, whoever might need it, is going to be available. So that means there'll be ground stations coming up and such. And of course, the interesting issue is here, the people who are going to be the non-compliance are the ones that aren't going to have that capability. So for example, a homemade drone or something like that wouldn't necessarily have that functionality in it. So we still will have this need for the passive tracking and identification. And I think also, when you can identify somebody who's spoofing somebody else's address, that's even more likely a more suspect stealth partner. And you know that that does happen in ships, ship IDs across the ocean. There's times that you see two or three with the same ID. It's illegal, but they do it, right? So that's the sort of thing you really look for if you can. Well, when we've seen some examples of ship tracking in the northwest specific marine monument area, you'll see a lot of that. You'll see a lot of identification change frequently, couple times a day sometimes. And so yeah, if it can be spoofed, it probably will be in the same will apply to unmanned air systems. Nevertheless, I think the need is going to be there and is always going to be there, even with the electronic fingerprint coming forth. So once again, if you were to imagine a, say a major sports event that draws international participation and therefore has interesting profiles of people involved and is perhaps there's others who want to disrupt that. So something like that were to occur. How would you envision setting up a police agency or a public safety agency with a base capability of determining that there are drones in flight and a general idea of their location as a starter? You know, the aerospace guys, Matt, Gregory and the others have a tool they tested out back at the Rose Parade. And that worked very well, surprisingly well, for identifying drones and the ground station from the signal. And there's many others that are coming out in that area. So that kind of technology. What I would hope we get someday is a national registry so that if I've got a drone up in San Jose, California, and it's being tracked and somebody has stolen the ID and that's in Hawaii, then when the police see it, they'll know that it's stolen the ID. That's future, obviously, but that's, I think, the sort of thing we need because if you're going to hide, you're going to steal somebody's ID and then go somewhere else and pretend you're them. So we need to be able to look for things like that. That's not the basic. That's a little more advanced. At the basic level, it's just providing the local police and fire department, frankly, with information about what's in their area of regard. And then it would be pretty much up to them to go figure out how to deal with it. Either identify and locate the operator by the physical nature of having a controller in your hand or some other aspect of crowd behavior that would tell you that there's somebody in that area that is providing the control function. So that, I think, is going to be, or our base starting point has to be, which then again is a human component as well as an electronic component. And somehow expressed in some graphic display on a screen. Also, if you're using standard unlicensed ban, a drone off the shelf, it's going to be very standard communication. And if they do that, it's going to be easy to jam and easy to bring down. However, if somebody makes their own and they're an expert in waveforms and they make a communication that's not standard, when the police try to jam it, it's not going to jam. And they'll know right away that this comes from somebody who's trying to hide. Right. And if that's the case, that's the sort of thing we look for, I think. I think that's right. That would be the identification of somebody who's pretty seriously and has some intent on his mind here that it goes beyond the average person who simply bought something and is perhaps using it without proper education or attention to the rules. Right. I think it'll be fairly simple for police to, you know, the small little jam guns to point it at their drone and it'll either go right down to the ground or it'll usually go back to its ground station. And that'll take, I'd say, 90% of the nuisance or 95% of the nuisance though. But, you know, the ones you're worried about are the nation states or the people that have various purposes and they'll have different kinds of situations. And in that situation, that more extreme situation, which is going to have to be more of an engineered solution with a lot of pieces in it, including acquisition, training, testing, transportation to the site. There's a number of other markers that would indicate that kind of a nation-state event taking place and so that the left of launch, so to speak, would have to be where the primary focus is there. Right. And that's where I think a lot of your kinetic responses come up because if somebody's actually got a fully autonomous with no communication or they've got a communication, like you say, detail where you do the disruption on the distressed communication, then you're going to have to go after from the kinetic connected to the ground town. You know, you bring up a really good point. As the automation gets better and that's happening everywhere in cars and in vacuum cleaners in your house and everything, as the automation increases, the mission can be programmed and it can be independent of any kind of ground communication. So we can't lay back and think that there's always going to be a communication link between the ground station and the drone that is going to be a dependable source of identification. Right. That's exactly right. And again, you're seeing the difference between the hobbyists who's got a nuisance drone or maybe the press event who wants to take pictures versus somebody who's much more serious. And I mean, they just tested it this week. Google just tested a glider that automatically seeks thermals and automatically goes for thermals without any communication from the ground and will go seek and climb up higher based upon its own observed behavior. So there's lots of sensors out there that are small and put the right kind of tiny computer in there that can pick up information from the sensors and have its own program flight station maybe 20 or 30 or 50 foot patterns and each one changes based upon observable behavior. Now you've got a full autonomous drone. And to do that 50 times over and you have a situation that would overwhelm the ability to respond to it in a heartbeat. That's right. And then, you know, there is a new sniper rifle drone from Israel that they've got, you know, half a dozen different kinds of guns on these things now in certain countries. So, you know, that makes it more serious, much more serious. So we're going to have to take this thing seriously. We have to start at the civil side where systems that are non-kinetic will apply and then but not limit ourselves because you're so right, John. The ability to escalate becomes in your hands as the various forms of automation and autonomy emerge in other aspects of this robotic world. So this is really an interesting and intriguing part of the equation. Let's pick the rest of this up and talk about how we would implement something in the very near term stay in Hawaii after we get back to our one-minute break. And I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Despang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veteran's advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty, and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. And we are back. Ted Ralston here with our guest, John Mullen, in San Francisco, California, joining us. John, welcome aboard again, sir. Thank you. Okay, and we've patched together our communication framework here. We beat Skype at its own game and it tried to fail, and we got around it through various means of duct tape and microphones and conference speaker phones. So we're making it work, John. And once again, we conquered the tyranny of 2,500 miles of ocean and have you trapped on the show. So we're just talking at the first half here about the various pieces of technology and the components that define the world of the threat, if you will, that we all have to think about in terms of drones and the general term counter drone. And now we have to think about how we would compose socially acceptable solutions that don't set the wrong expectation and handle what can be handled and with some kind of an intelligence framework figure out what it means when there's something that we can't handle. So we were talking earlier about the communications framework. The communication is linked to a ground controller and a drone is something that is a pretty good indication that there's activity underway. So if we start at that very simple level, John, of the things you've seen like a GIFIX and just on the market, what's the cost and what's the relative simplicity of putting something up in the back of a station wagon we'll say at a public event of some kind that can be used to generate that indication? The, for the offensive side, let's call it just drones, going out and doing what they're doing, the cost is coming down significantly and the quality is going up significantly and there's open standard tools, R2Pilot and many of the others that can be configured and etc. So as far as maybe a hobbyist or a person who wants to fly a drone, the market is just moving. Lots of competition, lots of high quality products with cheap and it's coming, the price is coming down significantly. So, I mean, for a very serious drone when you can spend six to $10,000 and get basically the state of the art of a standard quadcopter, I'm not talking a fixed wing or any of those, but a standard quadcopter, it's really come down a lot. A counter drone hasn't come down as much because there's not as many players, they're very serious players, some of them are the biggest companies in the world and they're going after this and a lot of military, some are commercial, some are police and first responder and different kinds of approaches, some of them have nets, some of them have different kinds of ways to knock out a drone. Most of them rely on jamming, but those prices are coming down as well. That product does less decline. See, it's pretty simple to put a definition of specification up for a standard hobbyist drone. It's not as easy to put a specification up for a counter drone because there's different environments. There's open land, there's sea, there's how high are they flying, what kind of drones are they, there's many different situations. So the counter drone does ensure that it's coming along, right? Is that a health banter? I think so. And so that tells us we're a couple of years away from some more of a standard and general approach. What kinds of technologies did you see, say at GIFIX, that would advance this side of it, the detection and identification side of it? Well, I saw identification and detection from combination of waveform and acoustic and visual. I saw a kinetic beanbag approach to doing another drone out. I saw some vertical takeoff drones that were very impressive. The Martin v-drone, that you get a better flight time and speed and load if you can do a combined vertical takeoff that then changes into a horizontal. So there's those. And a lot of different kinds of approaches electronically. There is a lot going on in the waveform, identification and also obfuscation, as I said. And then jamming. So that seems to be the key area that people have concentrated on. And in the waveform area, do you require a catalog to look at, to compare the current thing that you're looking at to a waveform catalog of some kind to make identification? Or can you identify that? If you're trying to hack in, some of the drone counterattacks, they'll just go after the electronic waveform and try to blast them. And that will cause the communication to lapse so the drone will go back home. But there are some, a more advanced group, a handful of them, that are trying to crack into the datacom structure between the drone and the ground. So not only are they trying, they won't just jam it, they want to get in and take control of the drone. Which means you have to crack the encryption and then take over control. And you can do that because there's a standard interface that will control you. Again, if you're a nation state, you're going to write your own interface where nobody knows how it's working. But if you're taking it off the shelf and trying to do this and that, then you use the standard interface that it's easier to work into. Pat, there's also the issue that if you really have a real bad guy, a nation state, but he knows if he gets caught in his hands with one of these very advanced military attack drones, he's in trouble just because he has it. But the committee tried to take it off the shelf, commercial drone, modify it slightly so that they can't be automatically nailed just by what they have in their hand. But I mean, you see it gets into a spy versus spy versus a spy world pretty quickly. But at a miniature scale. Yeah, the drones are very, they can be very lethal and they can be very scary, especially if you get a bunch of them up at once. I'm glad you reminded me of that because I tend to think more on the civil side where we're really dealing with the erroneous operation of a guy with no real adverse intent. But we shouldn't be jaded into that thinking. And we've got to think that there are people with intent out there and the opportunity is presented by the availability of systems that type of speaking. Wow. So it still goes back to the issue where we have to start somewhere. So in terms of what you've kind of said here, John, is that electromagnetic, electronic and visual, as well as acoustic are probably the frames of interpretation, frames of collection that need to be combined in some way to pull down a good positive signal. It doesn't have a lot of false positives. So that's a multi-sensor, multi-spectral analysis of some kind. Train so that it doesn't pick up birds or kites going through. And then you've seen the bits and pieces of that even recently as gifics. Have you seen any place where this all is tied together into what might be considered a package? It's definitely to be packaged but it's still immature. It's still early. It's still early. So, you know, and I think it's going to do what most markets do, it's going to segment. You're going to say, this is for downtown police within city streets within this kind of environment because remember, the electronic signatures in an urban environment are far different than went out in the field and went out somewhere else. So the actual environment that they play and work will segment. So a counter drone environment, if you're a police force and you're a downtown Manhattan, you're going to have a different kind of counter drone set of tools than you are if you're, you know, in the middle of Iowa somewhere or so. I think because the whole environment is different. Signatures are different, correlations are different. Also, the distance of time, you can find some of the many miles away if you've got the right tool. And if you're a military establishment, but you want to have, you want to be able to find it five, seven, eight miles away again. But if you're, if you're just looking for some hack in downtown Manhattan, you only need a block or two. So I think it's a different, different environment. You're going to see it segmenting here pretty quickly. Interesting. So we're going to see market fragmentation and in the, in the counter drone world. And it, it still has to, at the end of the day, come down to something ideally as simple as the speed gun and that's used to track speeders. So we've got, we've got a ways to go here, John. Yeah, we do. We do. But it's happening quickly. I'll tell you that very quickly. Yeah. And it's what's happening is, I think what you're saying as quickly is the ability to generate the drone based threat is happening faster than the counter drone understanding and standardizations coming together to deal with it. True, but you know, when you look at the drones that they've caught for ISIS, the ones they've used, and some of them other nations today, thankfully they're not as sophisticated as the ones that I've been indicating. Thankfully they're taking off the shelf and slapping a couple of things together and trying to do something. So at least right now, the ones that you really see in theaters and the ones you really see in the field, they can cause a lot of damage even if they just have this little drone out there. I mean, I think in the last couple weeks, a couple of drones have gotten close to Navy planes in the Gulf. So, you know, you don't have to be really, really sophisticated if you're in the right place at the right time. But I know it's happening. There's certainly lots of very bright people in these adversary countries you know they're working on it. Yeah, well that's actually a very good way to bring our conversation to a close because you've given the comfort that we're not, even though it's, you can imagine very complicated threats what we're seeing is a straightforward threat of commercially modified or a system that's been modified from commercial which has an in it the ability to track and identify it fairly well through the electronic connection between the ground controller and the drone. So if we take that as a perspective and branch from that, what I'd like to do is talk on the side about how we might implement that here in Hawaii in the next, say, six to eight weeks, John. So let me call you on the outside on that. And thank you for enlightening us here on the range in which this can go but then raiding us back in to dealing with what is near-term practical in terms of the threat and of the countermeasure. So John Mullen, President and CEO, Chief Engineer and Marketing Manager at Promia in San Francisco. Thanks for joining us again. And we'll have to remember exactly how this electronic communication lash-out works so we can get to next time. Okay, see you next time. Okay, see you all. Thank you very much. Bye.