 Very warm welcome to all of you, my name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the IIEA. I hope you are all keeping well and staying safe. I'm delighted to welcome our keynote speaker, Mr Bobby Healy, founder and CEO of Mano Aero, who will talk to us on drone technology, social opportunities and regulatory challenges. You're very welcome, Bobby, and we appreciate you taking the time out to be with us today because I know you've got a very busy schedule, so thank you very much for that. Bobby will speak to us for about 25 minutes or so, and then I will go to your audience for our questions. Please join in our discussion using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. You can send us in your questions during Bobby's presentation, and I'd really appreciate if you give your name and affiliation when you ask a question. Thank you very much for that. Please join us also on Twitter at Twitter handle IIEA. Bobby's presentation and the Q&A is on the record, which is our normal practice. We've all seen during the COVID-19 pandemic how technology is impacting our lives on a daily basis. Technology can and has helped us redefine problems, create solutions and help us reinvent the future. Governments worldwide including European and our own government are looking to the future after COVID-19 to secure economic recovery, embracing two key agendas, the green agenda and the digital agenda. Today we are talking about drone technologies. Drone technology offers huge potential for developing innovative applications in a wide variety of sectors that benefit Irish, European and indeed all societies around the world and will help create new businesses and jobs. Within 20 years, the European Commission says the European Union, a drone sector is expected to directly employ more than 100,000 people per year and have an economic impact exceeding 10 billion euros per year, mainly in services. Bobby Healy may query that assessment. Bobby has already started on his journey of developing his business Mano Aero. He will talk to us about his vision, showing us how he is making it a reality and how it can work and he will discuss with us the opportunities and challenges of drone technology and will explore some of the social implications and potential social benefits. Drone technology has the capacity to change the dynamic and local economies and particularly in rural areas as well as in suburbs. Bobby will explore examples from his work. He will also set out some of the regulatory implications and regulatory challenges associated with drone technology and the emerging EU policies in this area. As civil aviation evolves towards more automation, drone technology will also be crucial to the competitiveness of the European aeronautics industry as a whole. Bobby Healy has an impressive record as a technology entrepreneur, an experienced inventor, investor. He originally worked in games development, working for emerald software and also developed games from Nintendo. He was the founder and chief technology officer of the land technologies at travel software technology group. He was previously the director and chief technology officer of car trawler, the largest travel technology platform for business to business car rental and transport solution. As I said, he's the co he's the founder and CEO of Manoeiro, which he started in 2018, and was the first Irish company to apply to the Irish Aviation Authority for a drone operator license and approval. He has an impressive set of investors. One of his backers are the Colson Brothers Patrick and John from Limerick. And together with the Colson Brothers, Bobby is one of the companies supporting the development of the new innovative computer science program in UL. Bobby is also active as a mentor to startups, including startups in the NDRC, the National Digital Research Center, Dogpatch and other groups. Bobby, we look forward to your presentation. Thanks very much Joyce. I must get you to write my LinkedIn profile for me. Actually, there's very comprehensive description of certainly my background and thank you for that and thank you very much as well. And for the invitation to speak at the IEA. It's a real pleasure. And, you know, I'm always very excited about speaking about this business, but it tends to be to investors where I'm raising money, you know, or family that think I'm, you know, lunatic for starting this off. So, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to take you through a rather unstructured but hopefully interesting 20, 25 minutes of an explanation of what this is all about. And I really would be delighted to take any types of questions at all. There's, you know, we have our proponents and our detractors in this business. And for the early proponents and Morden, we did a survey recently in Galway where 98.5% of people said if they had drone delivery available, they would avail of the service. But there are, you know, a handful and I'll explain to you why we're doing what we're doing and the broad benefits to society at large and talk about technology as well a little bit. And as Joey said about the societal and the kind of regulatory parts to that. You know, so if I take first the tech, you know, nothing better than leaning over and that is a drone delivery robot. And if I do this, that's what it looks like to scale. So it's slightly larger than a seagull, an average size seagull wingspan is just a little bit smaller than that aircraft. And that aircraft flies at 50 meters to 80 meters at about 60 to 80 kilometers per hour, and it can deliver cargo directly from a retailer, a small store, butchers, fishmongers, Tesco, you name it, directly to people's homes. And I'm going to show you video as well, as well as take you through kind of the adoption that we've had in Oranmore, which is our second town implemented in Ireland but but first from the top level. As Joyce explained, you know, some numbers around job creation, you know, actually I love that one pwc did report two years ago. That put the prize at about 600,000 new jobs in the UK market alone for a 1.9% incremental addition to GDP, just through enabling that 400 500 feet of airspace for drone usage. So drones across all categories of survey inspection all sorts of different uses for drones but not even thinking about what my company, mana plan to do and if you know your Catholicism you probably know where the word mana came from and if you don't you'll have to figure it out. So our basic you know this business I started because I'm a computer programmer that's my trade, you know, write video games, it's a hobby, and I love it, and I still love it. And, you know, I've always loved building companies and building technology projects. And when I saw the marriage, or shall I say when I saw the kind of the confluence of technology components like LiDAR solid state radar and batteries, battery chemistry, you know, look at electric cars, electric cars have driven this improvement of battery chemistry which has driven the amount of energy that you can get from a battery which in turn has allowed you to lift the 20 kilogram object for 20 minutes. And if you think about that as a raw technology capability, then, you know, and then with with with that as a tool and just like the caveman had fire. And in the 1990s we got the internet, they were just basic tools that enabled, you know, things to happen. But if you take that confluence of different technology components and you make a drone out of it. And then you look at a use cases for that particular technology, you look no further than online food delivery last mile delivery of online food of pharmacy critical food items. COVID test kits we're delivering at the moment, everything. So, you know, I thought that it would be worth exploring to build a business that would take this technology bring it to the production quality aircraft, and, and then answer the question of can you, in an economically efficient way, change the way society moves things around suburban and rural communities. So just to be clear, it's not valid for big large dense cities with tall buildings so in case you're wondering will we ever deliver to balconies. The answer is no, we will deliver to roofs. And so I think Mexico City 20 million people, everyone has a roof that they have access to for drying their clothes. That's perfect but New York City, San Francisco, no. And closer to home, Tala, of course, no problem. And pier street, not so easy. So the way we work is we fly. We arrive. To deliver we look for two meter diameter space on the ground, and we lower the product down to the ground. So, so the business, the marriage of technology, and particular domain is usually what it forms the, the genesis of a an entrepreneurial project. And, you know, I quickly spoke to the aviation regulator in Ireland to once I figured out that the technology component was viable, and that the unit economics were viable I could we deliver with a fully loaded cost less than what it would cost just a person in the car to do, which we were replacing. And when I asked those questions, I met with the aviation regulator here in Ireland, and I must say, and I'm very lucky to be saying this, we have, you know, here in Ireland and aviation regulator and the transport minister that really wants Ireland to be a world regulator on the drone delivery and drone use case stage so we, we had an open door with the regulator and if you're in the drone business if the regulator isn't, you know, forward looking and isn't willing to be a partner, you don't have wings, you're not going to be able to move forward. Nearly three years ago to the day when I'm able to regulate I was given a very clear signal that yes, this is something we expect to happen in the future. It's something that Europe has been planning for for quite some time in Europe has, you know, EASA, which is the Association of Safety Agencies across Europe of which the Irish Aviation Authority is a member. And it's very, very clear that not only is there a willingness there, but there's actually a willingness to win to the Europe will be the first to adopt drone technologies for all the benefits that they provide. And I found that I won't say as a surprise, but I was very happy to know that my didn't have to move my business to the United States or anywhere else for that matter to be able to grow it because quite frankly, you know, don't let my accent fool you. This business would be wherever we're allowed to proceed with pace. It's where we can get the best technology talent. That's one combined with where we can get the best support from government to actually get the job done. I regulator and transportation and in Ireland, particularly where we've gone first, we, you know, you may have seen in the news we did a project and money gall and combined with the HSE and the aviation regulator, and we launched a small project and money gall population of 700 or 800 people. And during lockdown to the cocooning houses we were actually delivering critical food supplies. And as a trial only as a trial but just to prove what we could do. And that was last March, March 20, just as lockdown had come in. And, you know, I think that in itself is amazing. There you have a gigantic organization like the HSE, pulling their shoulder behind something to test out, you know, if we can do better. And a very what I would call a traditional and conservative segment of government, which is the regulator that sole remit is to ensure the safety of people that are flying the air and people that are on the ground and manna a VC backed entrepreneurial, you know, bunch of, you know, well, just look, a mixture of oil and water to work very, very well. And, and from that, that went very well so we, we then went to Oranmore and Oranmore is a case study in, in doing this properly because Oranmore has about just short of 10,000 people in it, and about 20,000 homes. It has a large Tesco, it's a big suburb right on the estuary on the West Coast of Europe. And it's a difficult town to get right. But it's also, we're rolling in with a product that's essentially flying objects that are 20 kilos over people's in their airspace that's, that's where they live. And, and we're going in asking for permission to basically bring the future to this time. And, and, and to ask the town to be part of that future. And it's really interesting like we have such massive support from from the people in Oranmore, but it was done in cooperation. So we first work with local council, then the Chamber of Commerce, then all of the local vendors either the, the small little coffee shops, the small little restaurants, anyone that has a small business in Oranmore, and of course Tesco, you know, the giant that is Tesco are our anchor and allow us to fly from their roof. So you'll see I'm just going to briefly show you what Oranmore looks like today. And this picture here is Oranmore on Google Maps. All those orange lines are real drone deliveries. And if I hover over some of them, that's Tesco Oranmore delivery. This one here is coffee, coffee from another coffee shop. This one here is more coffee down here, cameo type and so on. And I can hover over all of these lines and show you what people are ordering. But the point is, and this flight here is a six and a half, 6.7 kilometers away. And what's interesting about this is, and look, you see some, you know, for this is ice cream delivery. The point is 30% of the homes in Oranmore are now using this service and use it for the most normal things that you could possibly imagine. Now, I was sitting there a couple of months ago, and one of our investors was there with me on the roof of Tesco just, you know, check out the technology, and somebody ordered a head of broccoli. And, and that's a case where online, somebody ordered a head of broccoli from Tesco, and they received it in about four minutes, but point of it is the broccoli cost 60 or 70 cents. And they got it straight to their home exactly when they needed to have to be dinner time they obviously had no veg, you know, being Irish meat and three veg. They were down one. But think about that an online transaction for a product that is delivered to the house within minutes. That's an idea of the impact that we're going to have as we scale this business. And when you when you apply that to actual behavior, consumer behavior, more than half of our deliveries in Oranmore today are for coffee. They're for coffee in a croissant or a scone, the average basket value by drone delivery is twice that of a walk in customer for the coffee shop. And it's interesting because that's new business that didn't exist before. So that coffee shop had a certain amount of business and you know it's a it's a tough business but you know people make it work. But when you give that coffee shop three minute access every one of those flights I showed you by the way the median flight time is two minutes 40 seconds the maximum flight time is about three and a half minutes. And, but when you give a small vendor, three minute access to 50 square kilometers of customers that transforms that business that means that that business no matter via a fish monger, a bookstore, an electronic store we've got to deal with Samsung to deliver Samsung phones can be anyone. But the point is you can now get to everybody in a 50 square kilometer catchment area in three minutes and for free because we don't charge we charge a consumer delivery fee. So how does that change things. Well, you know, I have my own thoughts, and we're seeing a small version of it certainly in our more. But my view is that we're going to enable a totally new type of commerce we're going to transform existing small businesses to just get more demand from existing customers. We're going to change consumer behavior so consumers won't be getting in the car to get their camel tie they'll get it sent to them by a robot. And they won't be, you know, going down drive and this particular journey was nearly three kilometers for the head of broccoli. They won't need to make that journey. And the nature and behavior the granularity and the frequency of commerce in suburbs and rural communities will totally change. And that creates opportunities for existing businesses. So think again, that small coffee shop that coffee shop or the two that we deal with now or more will be closed. If they didn't have drone delivery totally blows it wouldn't be viable. Now when lockdown ends, what would it look like well, they might have a much smaller footprint for walking customers, and 10% of their business will be walking customers and 90% will be getting coffee in three minutes to the full population of three and a half or 3000 homes. So, so, so small businesses will change. And then look at the bookshop. I think we did the world's first ever delivery of the book. And, but champagne football if anyone knows the book and is available for purchase in the or more bookshop, and it was bought online and delivered by drone in a few minutes. And think about that. That bookshop has a better product than Amazon have for our more residents. So your local residents now sorry your local small businesses actually because of the logistics can now outperform the gigantic tech businesses that have distribution at their core and logistics at their core. So we're enabling jobs and suburban communities that wouldn't have existed before. We're also creating a better life for people that live in these towns so when we think about diversity or dispersity of population dispersely of jobs. We have underpinning, you know, government strategy of the national broadband plan which is absolutely fantastic on the big backer and broadband is great but you know that's broadband. You can get stuff. If it's not viable, you know, I always pick portumna as an example portumna as a population of about 2000 people. You know little restaurants and little shops pop up in portumna every year and they close down six months later. There's none of business it's too far for people to travel to. There's just none of demand. So those shops had instantaneous access to, again, 456 mile radius operation and they could get everyone in three minutes, those businesses would be viable, and that means that living in those towns is more viable so rural and suburban or distributed living becomes better on a par with dense suburb with the tallas and with the, you know, dream nas and so on of Dublin so so we're kind of equalizing the balance of access to commerce and access to small goods that didn't exist before. And on drones, you know, everyone has questions and I know all the questions, but the top questions are, and what about privacy, what about noise, what about jobs, what about safety, what about wildlife, and that's the order by the way of priority that they're passed in. Privacy is a really important one because we know that big tech have done a lot of damage to, well, they've done a lot of damage to confidence and to trust in the general population and the government on what and how far they're willing to go with customer data. So I think the drone delivery industry, us included, we won't, you know, we won't make that mistake, but we wouldn't be allowed to make that mistake. And so regulation already covers us. So we don't record anything. We have no customer information. If we're delivering to someone and or more, we don't know their email address, their name, their IP address, nothing. We record nothing, no video footage, no sound footage, absolutely nothing. And I believe in that. And I believe that that's critical to the adoption or the reception that we'll get when we roll out the product. Trust is everything. Noise is the other big one. So most people will have seen, or shall I say heard the consumer grade drone that you can buy, go out in the Harvey Norman spend five or six on a quid and get a drone that can do quite a lot. But they're very noisy. They're very angry things. They said they're cool technology. But if if you're lying in your backyard enjoying a very rare and beautiful Irish summer day reading, you know, your latest book. The last thing you want is a drone flying over your garden, not knowing what it's doing and making a lot of noise. So noise and privacy are massive issues that we have to address head on for this industry, which the regulator and legislation help with. And as it happens, our aircraft cannot be heard at its cruise altitude. So at 50 meters. And if we flew right over your head, you wouldn't hear us. And that's very, very important. And the other question, funnily enough, you know, before safety, the last actual thing general population worry about is safety. The other one is around job loss, they think, or they go to, you know, what, I don't want more robots taking more jobs. And what about that poor delivery cyclist for delivery that's working in Tallah, making a few quid, and so on. Yes, those gig economy jobs that involve, you know, young men and women on bicycles carrying hamburgers around will reduce or if not fully go away. And I believe that's a good thing that the number of accidents that happen on our roads and on international roads and carrying frivolous products around our enormous and it's not a good thing. It's a low paid gig economy job. And everything about it is not good for the person doing it except for the early wage. And our answer to that is the extra business and the extra commerce that proper logistics bring to the suburban town. And that will create more than enough jobs to replace those ones. So we think generally speaking, and all of the big consultants who would agree, enabling the drone airspace will be a massive incremental job creator. And so quite, quite confident about that. And then the last thing is business, you know, the business side of this, have a few more minutes and then I'll wrap up and take questions. I'm going to show you a video of the drone delivery as well. The business side of this is today, it costs operators aggregators, I think just eat Uber Eats delivery in Ireland. There's lots of others around the world, but the, the average cost of all of them is between $6 and $9. So five and eight euros cost to operate a delivery. So that's fully loaded cost of the guy or the girl on the bike, insurance, the bag, all those things. And it takes them a median time of 40 minutes to get the product from a restaurant to your house, which constraints demand, right? Because they so long, most people don't order that frequently. But in the end it cost them, let's take the average of six euros 50, it cost them for the delivery. But those aggregators have to buy customers online to through Google. So they have a customer acquisition cost digitally of bringing customers onto their platform. The restaurant has to pay for all of that. So the restaurant that has an average sale of 25 euros has to find 30 to 40% commission to pay to an aggregator to do the delivery for them. And that's the problem. This is today a $200 billion industry food delivery is $200 billion industry growing to 350 billion. Everyone is making money except the small guy. The restaurant that's, you know, making maybe 50 meals a day, maybe 100 meals a day if they're really lucky and barely breaks even, but now has to look at a 20 to 30 sometimes 40% commission to aggregators to do the to get the product to customers, right? But the problem is no one wins, right? Because those big aggregators are single digit margin businesses as well because their base cost is that $69. So nobody is happy with delivered food except the guy eating the chips. And that's what drones will fix. So what drones will do is it will completely remove that cost. Therefore, the margin of the base product, the food shop, the person making the scones person making the coffee, their margin improves their volume improves and the aggregators that bring those customers to them have zero cost of the logistics. We do all of that. So the world in terms of financial sense is a far more sensible world. And that's our mission. And in terms of timeline, if you're wondering when it's coming to your town next, and it'll be about 18 months before we plan to roll out across Ireland. We are, we are naming our next town, which is about 40,000 people in it. We'll name that town next month, probably the next three weeks. And that's all we'll do this year. We're getting ready to scale and we've applied for a European wide license already. We have a team in the United States with worldwide ambitions. We've raised just short of $10 million investment money to date and are about to announce next week, our series a round which is substantially larger amount than that. We have over 40 people in the company now just over 40 people, mostly engineers, like myself, and we'll probably grow another 200 or 300 people over the coming couple of years as we get ready for scale. And I think I've covered all points there Joyce. Now if you want to move to Q&A I'd be very happy to take people's questions. Thank you very much Bobby. An excellent presentation as we expected. Oh I didn't show a video. One minute, the most important, I'm sorry Joyce, let me just get this for you. So everyone knows what it is right. I won't talk during it, it's one minute 40 seconds long. And it's a delivery of a cameo tie to a family of four people and you'll see when you'll hear the kids outside the house, you know, all excited about it. You'll also notice that the kids are louder than the drone itself so here we go.