UAS News Podcast — 2013-12-18
Transcript
Music Welcome everyone to the next installment of the UAS News Podcast Series where we interview newsmakers and discuss the news and applications relevant to the global unmanned technologies community. I'm your program host, Patrick Egan, and as always I'll say hello and warm holiday welcome to our co-host, Mr. Gene Robinson. Well, Merry Christmas there to you, Mr.
Egan, and Merry Christmas to all our listeners out there. I hope it's going to be a good one. How can it not be good with the UAS News Podcast and Drone TV?
You are correct, sir. I forgot about that, but you are correct. It's going to be a great one. Yes, well, I just put film number one on, let's see, Monday.
Put some footage in the can. You should probably, I don't know if you've already seen that, but you should be seeing that soon. Yes, I believe I'll be seeing that tomorrow night. As a matter of fact, you should.
And I think today will be the second episode we'll drop on the YouTube channel. And this one is Believe It or Not, Only Educational. It talks about being a good neighbor in the Nass and then also some safety considerations for flying quadcopters with guests all around. We're going to break with tradition and no one gets beat up on in that episode.
I thought about throwing something in there just for continuity, but then I figured, ah, we'll let that go. But anyway, okay, so let's see here. Any news stories of value this week that you saw?
Gene? Well, as usual, there's plenty to talk about. There seems to be a ramping up of activity all across the board. I understand that the AUBSI Christmas party was last night and Academy, who was knee black water, announced that they have received their cola.
Good for them. I'm sure they are going to put it to good use. There's just more stuff that you can shake a stick at to talk about. You just got to figure out which one is the most topical.
Well, I'm going to have to go with the 12 FAA business days of Christmas. You know, I thought that was pretty good, but in your usual jocular fashion, you have put it all in perspective in those 12 days. I know. It wasn't like there was really a shortage.
It really writes itself. But I figured, you know, we're going to have a little fun at Christmas. And I'm waiting to come to size with the announcements in the test site centers. December is ticking away, my friend.
What's today, the 18th? Yeah, we're moving toward the end of the year fairly quickly. And there were some rumors running around that they might leak one test site out. But then there was, of course, the hubbub and the furor over.
If you did just one, it would give them unfair advantage, which I'm not sure how that would work. But there you go. Well, again, this is a do no harm to my holiday vacation situation. But I'll give you one.
New Mexico City University. Yeah, hand clapping sounds or party whistles. We'll keep it up for that one. But yeah, you know, I mean, if they don't announce, you know, and people are, oh, OK, well, you're kind of critical.
But if they don't announce in December, when they kick this game down the road again, I mean, are you going to be left? Personally, I can't talk for you, but for myself, I will not believe one word they have to say. They will be showing me from one point out. Well, it would be administratively consistent.
So it would be, but we've been guaranteed that it was going to be a more open and public process and that they could be held accountable to their word and all the rest of that. So, you know, we'll see if that happens. If not, that's going to not good for the industry. But anyway, you know, I don't want to be all blue and blue this joyous season.
So, you know, what would any other news stories that weren't, let's say that were encouraging and exciting? You know, there are more you start to you start to see more positive stuff, I think. I think we're starting to see more first responder things that are coming out. You're you're seeing more fire departments that are starting to get more vocal about being able to use the technology, which is, you know, probably said that that's a good place to go.
And then, of course, you're seeing more and more vineyards and more and more agribusiness looking at this thing. And I think that that's going to be some of the emphasis that we need going into 2014 to add that additional pressure. And there's just been a string of stories like that. I'm sure you've noticed.
Yeah, well, and then that kind of leads us into our guest today in the show program, Agri-Air. We're going to talk about agriculture and, you know, I mean, people are really talking about it. I've talked about how some people are saying it's the biggest thing since the plow and all the rest of that and forced agricultural revolution and things like that. So what we're going to do is going to bring on our guest, Dr.
Mack McKee from Utah State University. Hello, Dr. McKee. Hello, Patrick.
I appreciate the chance to be on your program. Well, we appreciate you being on the program because, you know, what we try to do at the SUS News is, and, you know, I don't know if you're a regular reader, but we try and, let's say, disseminate quality information to the community globally. And the reason that we want to have somebody like you on is you have some empirical knowledge of operating these systems for agriculture. So, without further ado, maybe you could introduce yourself to the audience, little bio, and how you came to be involved with Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
Sure. I am the director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory, and this is a large research organization. We have over 200 people, faculty, staff, and students engaged in a wide range of research all related to water and environmental kinds of problems. About seven years ago, we needed some high resolution, high resolution in both space and time remote sensing capability, and there really wasn't much that was affordable.
So, being not at all knowledgeable about UAVs, we figured how hard could this be, we'll just do it ourselves, and started building our own UAVs. And we're stubborn enough to stick with it, and so now we have a full operation. We have more than 30 people involved in our UAV development team and deployment teams. Engaged around the clock, it seems like.
It's hard to chase these guys out of the laboratory. So, we've been in this business now for more than seven years, and currently, or recently, I was named as a member of an advisory board to my state's governor on small UAS systems, especially with respect to the FAA bid that Utah was competing for that you mentioned earlier. So, yes, the test sites. We believe that in the small UAS area, for those doing scientific grade research in water and natural resources, we believe that we've amassed more hours of autonomous flight and acquired more terabytes of orthorectal imagery than anybody else.
Really? Now, with that, I'm just wondering, you've logged all these hours of flights and everything else, and you get pretty good records of all this stuff?
Yes. And anyone ever ask you, and say, hey, do you have any data about your flight hours and what you've done?
Just curious. It's interesting, from time to time, we will get a grammar request that is handled by the central administration here at the university. And usually, the questions we get are not that detailed in those kinds of things. We do keep a record of flight time for each aircraft and basically for each part on each aircraft.
So we can answer those questions, but no one's ever really asked that time aware of. Well, you know, a lot of these questions do that, Ron. They're probably not going to be occurring questions. I'm not trying to put you in a hot seat, but, you know, there's over – I mean, there's scientists, okay?
So in other years, you know, Gene and I have probably been at this about 10 years. And Gene, would you say it's fair that we've heard the data collection question more than a few times?
I believe that was the primary question that they had back in Reno when we met in Reno the first time, I think it was 2006. 2005, wasn't it? 2005, wasn't it? I, you know, all the years run together. They just fit along the box. But, yeah, the big thing for establishment of UA and the NAS was a collection of data.
And that's why it's very curious that as much as you've done, as much flying as you have done, Dr. McKee, that we thought that there would be a lot more interest in the data that you collect not only from an agricultural standpoint, but also from an operations standpoint because I'm sure that by now you probably have a very finely honed operation that goes out and is set up efficiently and flies your aircraft effectively, produces the data, gets back down on the ground, and you're off the field and ready to go, right?
Absolutely. We have actually now a couple of different flight crews were staffed up so that if we need to, we can send at least two crews in different directions. And there are protocols, there are checklists that are here to for each launch and each flight and so on and so forth. So some of the kind of data you're talking about in terms of performance and mission safety and other kinds of related issues, some of those data are probably out there and available if you know who to ask and if they're at liberty to share the information with you.
All right. Let's do like I said. Sorry, sorry, Gene. Well, I just wanted to, can I ask a real kind of sticky question?
I was just wondering, have you had any in-flight failures or do you know what the frequency is of equipment failures or anything like that? Just, I mean, it doesn't have to be this percentage, but there's just kind of a swag at it. I mean, have your aircraft been 90% reliable, 95% reliable?
Do you have a feel for that? Well, I would guess the reliability is much higher than that. I'm trying to think. Our flight crews reported one wing failure here a while back.
It sort of depends on what mode of operation you're asking about. Our R&D team, with the R&D team, we're continually trying new things, new software, new materials and so forth. And they almost sort of intentionally find where the envelope is and to do that, so the plane goes down. But in terms, and we fly under a COA here near the university for those kinds of purposes.
For applications, we have a war in the field to acquire scientific grade data on a real mission, on a real flight to serve a real purpose beyond just learning how to fly better airplanes. We have never experienced a flight failure. That's what I was looking for from an operational standpoint. I understand the R&D and that's what you're supposed to do, is push the limit until something breaks.
I was more interested in the operational end of it and I am not surprised to hear that answer. Well, we work really hard. Our flight team, our field team that goes out to acquire real data for real research projects, they work with our R&D team. And we don't, it's sort of no wine until it's ready.
We don't bring anything new out of the R&D side until our field guys really, really, really think it's ready to go to the field. And then we test it and test it and test it. So the likelihood of failure in the field, we take very seriously minimizing that. Well, and that's, you know, we kind of led you down a little bit.
But this is kind of a reoccurring, everything you're telling us is kind of a reoccurring theme in the community that we interview. But, and it's great to hear all of that. Let's get down into, because this stuff ticks off pretty quick. We're already 15 minutes in and it just seems like we just started the conversation.
But let's talk about some of the types of missions you fly with the small unmanned aircraft systems. You're doing more than AG, right?
Absolutely. We got into this because of AG. Turns out AG is the hardest problem to pick. So we showed our ignorance from the first day by jumping into the one that's most difficult to resolve.
Along the way, though, we've learned a lot and we've had projects that have found our aircraft very valuable in the water and natural resources research areas. For example, we've flown a number of flights using the aircraft to acquire imagery to track the spread of an invasive reed species called Phragmites australis across wetlands here in northern Utah. This is a very habitat-threatening species. It's invasive, a big tall reed.
It's taking over North American wetlands in really aggressive ways. One of the biggest problems they have is figuring out where it is. By the time you see it with land fat, it's too late. So our aircraft have been used to acquire imagery that has been analyzed by pattern recognition software that we have also developed here so that at better than 95% accuracy and at 25 centimeter resolution, we can tell you where that stuff is.
And then the managers of the systems can try different management approaches, and we can fly again and tell them how it works and so forth. So in wetlands and river morphology, where you're worried about sandbars moving around and where you might be worried about things like riparian habitat and in-stream habitat, just a huge number of applications that Aguilera has been fortunate to enjoy here. We've actually been flying applications. It took us two years to develop our first ready-for-the-field aircraft.
So we've been flying on applications for about five years. Interesting. So you're doing all this different work with these things. What types of systems are you using?
We use Paparazzi for our autopilot. And of course, the platform we use is our own development. It's called Aguilera. Actually, we're flying a second-generation fixed-wing.
We're also experimenting with our own design vertical takeoff and landing systems as well. We have used Paparazzi because it's open source, and for some of the payloads that we have in mind, it will be necessary for an onboard payload computer to be able to talk with the flight control computer and get it to change its mind about what has to happen next, literally on the fly. So we've used an open source,
and we continue to experiment in terms of platform with different types of materials, composites, and change sizes of payload bays because we have to accommodate different payloads and so forth.
So it's very much a work in progress. So but it's mainly it's home-brewed systems. You're not using any systems that were said, handed down by the federal government?
No, no. It's entirely our own creation. Excellent. And so it's kind of a, let's say, family affair at the university?
Yes, a large family now, but yes. And we have colleagues in Texas and California who have leased Aguilera aircraft from us and are flying them for their research programs as well. Excellent. Excellent.
That's what I like to hear. You said a curiosity because you said you were doing some loose water projects. Have you seen some of the work that UC Merced is doing with some quadcopters that, I guess you're using them to land in the water and take samples?
Have you seen any of that work? Yes, I've been to UC Merced. One of our colleagues is a good friend of mine there at UC Merced, Yangguan Chen. And water quality sampling and so forth with a VTOL is one of the ideas that they've been pushing.
We are in a new industry here. I likened the SUAS industry today to the Wright brothers in about 1904. It took six years between the time of their first flight and the time they got their first contract. And here we have this wonderful piece of technology and what the heck is it we're going to do with it.
And so a lot of people are trying to come up with ideas for what can we do with this stuff. And Yangguan Chen is one of those creative guys looking for ideas. I met him actually up here in Sacramento. He came up to testify to the state legislature when they were talking about introducing some legislation to restrict the use of unmanned aircraft.
It's too bad. He's a scientist. He came up here. He's trying to talk about the good uses of this.
And they're asking if these predator drones could see through walls and stuff like that. He's like, I don't know. You want to talk about my field?
I can tell you. I don't know about that. So that was just a total waste of time. But it wasn't a waste of time because I got to meet him and talk about what he's doing.
We have a lot of issues with the agricultural runoff into the water system here and the Sacramento Bay Delta and all the rest of that. I'm sure you guys face some of those same problems in Utah. Yes. Well, Utah will not be a state where precision agriculture and UAVs get going real fast.
California will. Maybe Texas. Part of that depends on how restricted the laws become. But where ag will happen quickly is with high-valued agriculture.
And there's not very much of that in Utah. There is in California. We see it happening there. Well, I wanted to talk about that because I wanted to talk about, you know, we moved into the second century here.
I wanted to talk about some of those viability issues. You know, and this technology, there's different sensors. It's kind of a funny thing. Nobody's ever thought of doing aerial surveying for clocks.
UAVs came along to these sensors. They're only for UAVs, which is kind of a big misnomer for the whole public. And the thing with the privacy issues is they believe that all these sensors are all brand new and were made exclusively for drones and only work with drones. We're on the manned aircraft system.
Most people, if you say on the manned aircraft system, they look at you and go, what? Oh, drones. Yeah, okay. I know what you're talking about.
It works better. But there are viability issues. And, you know, you were talking about some of the higher-value crops. And maybe, you know, you can hit on this because I think that all people, well, not all people, but there's a broad brush with the ag thing that, you know, like, oh, you know, wheat, you're going to make millions.
Soybeans, you're going to make a gazillion dollars on soybeans. But most of these crops, don't they have like razor-thin margins?
The value to agriculture will come first in the reduction of cost of production, not in the increase in yield. And that's very common for new technologies of all kinds introduced to agriculture. You reduce costs and therefore increase profits a little bit. Generally, you don't increase yields.
And what we will see is the earliest introduction of UAV systems in agriculture in areas where profit margins are relatively larger and where the value of the crop itself is high and hence areas where the additional cost of valuable information is outweighed by the reduction of cost of production. And so things like certain kinds of orchard crops and grapes and things like citrus and almonds and so forth, those are where we expect to see this technology take hold first. Right. Well, and that's kind of interesting.
I mean, I'm in Northern California and the net, if you talk to the farmers here, the net seems to be a crop that makes money. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a vineyard here in California. Vineyards should be everywhere in Northern California. There's probably grapes.
I could look out the window and see grapes. But I think the cost versus value is one of the things. But I don't think that people in this industry also realize how automated and let's say how farming is getting, let's say, more technology savvy. I hear that tractors are collecting data and they're plotting this data for, let's say, next year's rotation of crops and areas that may be deficient in fertilizers and whatever else.
Can you speak to that at all? Yes. There are automated systems produced now by a number of different manufacturers in terms of, you mentioned tractors. John Deere and Case and others have smart tractors that are capable of knowing where they are on the surface of the planet very accurately and capable of following some sort of program to accomplish certain well-defined tasks.
That is there. But those, again, you will see those introduced, those kinds of technologies introduced in areas where margins are higher. You will not find many of those in Utah, for example, where we grow low-valued alfalfa and seed grains. And as you said, relative to corn and soybeans, we're a ways in time from when this sort of intelligence is going to pay for itself with low-valued crops.
Now, I just wanted to interject because I know that Gene has got to, he's doing some more testing today. So Gene, I wanted to let you jump in here before you got a blast off. Anything you'd like to ask?
Or maybe Gene already blasted off, I don't know. Sounds like he's in orbit now. Yeah, well, he's... I'm sorry to interrupt.
I'm here. Unfortunately, I was directing a set up there real quick, but yes, I do have to drop off. Now, the one thing that I did want to make comment on is that years ago there were several large agribusiness companies out there that were looking at unmanned aircraft. Have you seen any of the larger agribusiness conglomerations approach you for this sort of technology yet?
We have not seen such. Years ago, I think that there were probably some missing parts. There always have been issues of FAA permission to fly and so forth. Our experience has been that that scared a lot of the market off.
Technologically also, we've seen advances in things like battery power and intelligence of software and so forth. Even in the seven years we have been in this business, there have been tremendous advances. So you don't have to go back very many years before you get to a point in time where it was just very scary and maybe not something that you want to bet the farm on, so to speak. We're starting to get past that now, but very slowly.
Agriculture will be an early adopter, I think, in areas where precision agriculture makes sense and high-valued crops. But even so, because of slim margins and because of the uncertainty in which agriculture resides, you've got weather uncertainty, you've got financial uncertainty and so forth, there will be a natural risk of verseness in agriculture. The further you get from corporate farms and the closer you get to mom and pop private farms, the more risk-averse the farmers will become. It makes total sense.
It's going to be a not overnight kind of adoption, I think, for this technology. This is going to take a few years. And there's a huge amount we don't know how to do yet, at least not very well scientifically. It's going to take a while to figure that out.
As I said, we're in that never, never period that the Wright brothers experienced between the time of their first flight and the time of their first contract. No one knows really how to do this well yet. And that's the stage we're in. Excellent.
Okay, well, I think Gene's probably gone now, but you brought up a lot of points that I want to talk about. There are so many factors in farming. And I think a lot of people that aren't, let's say, used to that agrarian lifestyle think, oh, you know, I'm going to run out here and start taking some pictures of this guy's rice and, you know, he's going to want to throw thousands of dollars at me. What do you say about that?
He may want to throw something at you, but not dollars or? Yeah, the dollars don't get thrown about easily, as has been our experience. This is not as easy as many people think. To fly dependably is the first issue that you must be satisfied with.
But beyond that, acquiring scientific-grade orthorectified imagery that can be processed into a product that a farmer or a farm manager can really understand and act upon, that's not easy. There are quite a few people out there that say, well, we can fly and we can give you NDVI imagery. This is, for your listeners, this is just a simple arithmetic calculation involving the reflectance values of a couple of spectral bands from imagery that can be acquired. And NDVI can tell you quite a bit about water and plant material on the surface of the ground.
But it doesn't tell the farmer what the farmer's got to do next in terms of fertilizer or in terms of water application or in terms of pest management or a whole long list of things. NDVI is one of many possible intermediate calculations along the way to give the farmer information, actionable information about those kinds of problem areas. And that's where we have focused. Our shop is not interested in flying UAVs.
Our shop is interested in delivering actionable information to an end user. Well, that sounds like, do you listen to the podcast or are we just like on the same wavelength?
I'm not listening. Go ahead. Actually, I hate to admit this, Patrick, but this is the first podcast I've listened to, but I'll have to go back and catch up. Well, this is the band that I'm banging all the time.
That's exactly, I mean, you know, some of the military projects, it's all actionable intelligence, right? How does that kind of mesh with big data?
And people are like, oh, you know, big data, there's tons of data. Okay, it's true. You can have tons of data. There's, let's say, a value in a picture.
There's a value in a picture that's got a time stamp. There's a value in a picture that's got a time and location. There's value in a picture. There's value in data.
But what is that data? And you're hitting a point here. I mean, when I was doing this as a business, go out, maybe take some pictures and you could do some basic analysis for the farmer. But that may only be a one-time shot.
I'm coming out there and I'm going to give you pretty pictures of your crops. I think most people don't realize how into the farmers are with their own land. Maybe you could speak to that. Absolutely, and they have to be because it is a dynamic system.
Things are changing out there. You want them to change. You want crops to grow and mature and get to a stage of harvest where the product is marketable at a quantity and price that makes you some money. And if you can't do that, then you're not going to be a farmer for very long.
Right, so the information that a farmer needs is not a pretty picture. It is not even a map that tells you NDEI or temperature distribution or anything like that. A farmer is going to need to know how much water should I send down this lateral tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. A farmer is going to want to know what is the probability of an infestation of a certain blight on my grapevines and where might that be?
And is it at a point where I need to jump on it today? And it's very dynamic. And those questions have to be continually asked and answered or you're not going to be a farmer for very long. And so UAVs and remote sensing applications of UAVs in agriculture are going to have to fit into that system.
They will have to be one link in a large circle that ultimately delivers actionable information, not just pretty pictures. Absolutely agree, 100%. And that's another thing is that people don't realize, they're just thinking I'm going to buy this drone and I'm going to run out here and these farmers are just going to be beating down my door and giving me money. And I think you hit on some of those points.
Look, you're going to have to learn the market, learn the issues that are of value, what that actionable intelligence is that you're giving the farmer, how you're going to present it, what you're going to do and how you're going to do it and how he's going to say mitigate those issues that you're finding now. Absolutely. The folks we are talking with right now, those are the very questions they want answers to. And it is in that framework that they see the potential for UAVs, not just the pretty pictures and not just a one-time deal.
These things have to be inexpensive enough to fly frequently with gaps between flights filled by some fairly sophisticated modeling, which we also do here at the Udaw Auto Research Lab. Right. Now, and that's another thing that says near infrared. There's a hack where people will get to potent shoot and peel one of the filters off and they get their kind of their near infrared.
Now, there is no consistency between the different brands of cameras I hear. And there's very little consistency if I wanted to share my data with you, if you could really get, unless they ring out of the data that I'm sending you because of the variations, any sensors. Is that true or false?
Everything depends on the sensor. And this is a real problem that we face in the small UAS industry right now. We, there are close to scientific grade cameras that we could fly that would address much of the variability that you mentioned, variability between different types of sensors. Problem becomes one of cost and lack of spatial resolution and weight and power requirements and so forth.
And so we have a crying need right now for standardization of sensor types. And that's one of the reasons that we've started to get involved in the design of our own sensors here at the water lab as well. We don't need a big heavy camera, but we do need a camera that we know precisely what its spectral response looks like in each of the number of different bands. And with that and with some field work for calibration and so forth, then you know what you've got.
One thing we have been able to determine is that for the cameras we use, there is dependability between cameras and through time, at least the cameras of the same model type. But to go from this brand to that brand, then you start all over again. Right. And the operability is an issue.
Okay, well let me ask you another question because we're throwing out some of the issues and some of the timeline blocks that people that want to go do this are going to have to overcome. You know, you probably heard about this where the FAA said, oh, you know, that farmers can use, basically farmers can fly RC aircraft on their own farms, which to me is not really groundbreaking at all because they've always been able to do that. Anybody is able to do that.
But let me just ask you from your experience and in all of these obstacles that we've been talking about and issues to overcome and things like that, do you think in your experience that you're going to see, let's say, from the farmers running out, buying UAV systems and parts and all pieces and all the rest of this and trying to cobble together systems and using them for these various crops?
I don't see that for a whole bunch of different reasons. I think probably you're alluding to the 400-foot elevation ceiling camp. At least that's one of the things you're talking about here. And in our experience, 400 feet will not cut it for any except the very smallest farm.
So I don't know, maybe growers in Humboldt County would be happy. Outside of that, you'd have to have very small plots for that 400-foot limit to not provide some sort of stumbling block. In our experience, we typically fly between 300 and 1,000 meters. And that depends on what the required spatial resolution is and what our COA will authorize and so forth.
But if you're talking about large-scale agriculture, you're talking about a lot of land area. And you're not going to fly a little battery-powered hex rotor over 10,000 acres in a finite amount of time and deliver anything that is actionable. All right, well let's hear it because I've got a couple of questions. We're going to run the lawn.
Do you have time to stay on? Sure, I can stay with you as long as you like. Okay, this is always what happens. I've been doing this show for a year and a half.
I'm like, wow, 45 minutes is a long time to sell. I would always get down to the wire. And we're really starting to like drill down into the nitty-gritty. And that's about right here at the two-minute warning time.
So we're just going to run the lawn like this. Now, you did hit on the viability of that flight envelope. And I did want to get into that. And we will in a second.
But I want to go back to the farmer himself. I'm Farmer Brown and I'm growing alfalfa. And the notion that I'm going to go on the Internet, cobble together my UAV, and learn all of this stuff, and make my near infrared camera and all the rest of that, and start compiling my data, learning how to put this together, program it, fly it, and compile all that data. What do you think the chances from the farmers you know, how many people do you think are going to jump off and do that?
There will be one or two hobbyists that just like the idea of flying a camera duct tape to a wing to get pretty pictures. But in terms of developing hardcore actionable information, this is way harder than it sounds. And there might be large corporate farm enterprises that would have the financial wherewithal to invest in the development of that. But they'd be smarter to look around for somebody that's already done the research and purchase a product that has those capabilities.
We're talking about some really difficult things to do. A capture of multispectral imagery involving two or three cameras at a minimum. That is not easy, and orthorectifying the imagery from all of those cameras is not easy. You have to translate the imagery into reflectance values.
That is not easy, and there's no standard from one camera to the next. You have to know what you're doing there. There's additional on-the-ground field data you have to get to make, to acquire the information necessary to generate the reflectance values pixel by pixel. And then at the end of that point, all you have is pretty pictures.
You don't have an answer to any questions at all yet. So you have to analyze the data in the imagery, the reflectance data and the thermal data, in order to get information about evapotranspiration rates, or about soil moisture, or about plant tissue nitrogen, and so forth. And I don't see anybody doing that right now. Actually, anybody in the UAV industry right now, other than ourselves.
Well, and you're hitting on a point, because I do see, like I see a business model. And now even those variations, and those are going to all vary between crops. And I mean, I don't think there's a lot of people in the drone world who, let's say, are, I see them as corner cutters. And there's like, say, a huge or a wide area of something that you've got to know about.
Like a lot of people that are getting into the drone thing are not aviation people. So the whole aviation, let's say, part of this business is just beyond what they, they don't even think about it. It's out there, they don't really think about it. I'm not going to think about that.
But what you're talking about here on the data is a steep learning curve. So I do see a business model where you may have a guy, and I kind of, I call them, like a cool route model. I know farmers in my area, and when I was doing this legally, you know, I would talk to people, and I would have people that I would, I could come out and take pictures with them. But I would only have a limited amount of customers.
And I did not drill down, I'll be the first to admit, that I did not drill down the way you're talking about and giving people this actionable intelligence to go out and use in the field. It was more of a pretty picture thing. And, you know, kind of novel and all the rest of that. But what you're talking about is a steep learning curve for somebody.
Oh, yeah. It's not easy. And especially for someone in this, to get into this field who's just cobbled together a system. So I even think that the farmers are, you know, like you said, like you had a guy or two, okay, this is really neat and I want to try this.
But I really see this as a service-based industry. But what that does is it goes right back to the viability of the proposed light envelopes. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, I don't know, that small UAS arc and we're waiting for that rolling to come out of the house and God knows how many years, it's just pathetic.
But anyway, you know, we're always talking... Each one of it comes out, hopefully, at the end of the month. All we have is a start at that point. I think we're probably at least a decade away from having an answer to this question.
Are you trying to ask the listeners? I'm trying to be realistic. I think we will be living with something that looks a lot like our COA system. Hopefully there will be bits and pieces of it that will be a bit more tailored for the application at hand and I'm hoping that agriculture will receive some benefit of knowledge of those who have been doing this for a while.
In COA applications or whatever they will become in the future so that there will be more of this technology used in agriculture. But we're just at the very beginning of that and I don't see things changing rapidly anytime soon. Well, that's, you know, I wrote another article about, kind of about some of these issues called Down on the Farm with Drone. And, you know, I do not see the economic viability of a 400 feet, 1500 foot lateral, you know, maybe if you did we'd go back to the Humboldt cash crop.
That might work but that's not really going to work here. And then the funny thing is, it's not even funny, it's just it's almost outlandish, is I will get calls, I get calls that I won't hire me as a consultant but they love to call me, you know, if you want to talk about commercial UAS use call Patrick Egan. So I get the DOD vendors and they're like, okay, yeah, we're going to get into ag. We're going to ag.
We're still green. I mean, I was joking at AUVSI, I mean, I've been standing out there in the overalls with the hat on and the wheat stock, you know, I'm like, yes, sirree. But the thing with it is, like, you say for one second, I tell you, you've got to put your feet back on the ground here, buddy. She thinks you're going to get some farmer brown has been about a million dollars UAV.
Right. He's got like 400 feet, 1500 feet laterally, even if he can't do it for half a mile. This thing's going to be whipping around your head and you're never going to be able to, nothing has to be in the air 24 7 365 to make sense because we could go out today and buy a 172 and screw all kinds of sensors on the bottom of the thing and fly around and do whatever we want to do. And we're going to have to pay $50,000 for the aircraft.
What do you say about that? Well, I think the entry level in this market is going to be at a fairly low capital investment cost. And it will be for the large corporate farm, high valued types of customers. It's not going to be flying at 400 feet.
It's going to be flying at a thousand meters or so. It's going to cost less than $50,000 and it will have some pretty impressive sensors on it, some of which are not miniaturizable yet today, but will be in a few years. This is where we are going here at the water lab. And all of that will eventually come together as and if our regulations, our flight regulations begin to allow for it.
And we will see benefits to agriculture, but it's not going to be 400 feet and so forth. It's not going to be a camera duct tape to the bottom of the wing. It's going to be something much more sophisticated. It's not going to be a military aircraft.
It's not going to be a million dollar man. The hard part is figuring out how to build a small UAV, the tax and scientific punch that is needed. Any idiot with a million dollars can get a UAV to do it. And those aren't exactly flying off the shelf right now.
No, no. I love these conversations. Now, you know, we'll head on over because you're in the academic world here. And this is what I hear all the time.
Oh, we're going to have STEM education. We've got to have STEM. We've got to do some STEM. Okay, great.
I agree. I love STEM. I think it should be STEAM. You should add art in there.
You got it. You got it. But where?
I get up on the top of a building and yell, where are the damn STEM jobs? Okay. And these types, this type of technology and the stuff that you're doing there, like you said, if we had some regulation that made sense, you're opening up these huge, let's say, new fields or augmenting existing industries with these types of engineering type jobs. And I say that possibly or more likely in the future, an engineer, the problem is the engineer may need to figure out is his own financial well-being or job.
Any comments on that? Well, that's pretty much how it is today, as a matter of fact. Especially given the economic downturn over the last five or six years, it's been tough across all professions. Engineering has been seriously hit for the first time ever.
Our graduates at master's and PhD level have had a challenge finding a job. And this is beginning to lighten up a little bit, but I think will become a fact of life. This is going to be the new operating mode. And you better be careful what you choose to be when you grow up.
And looking at opportunities in areas that are going to be expanding, that could be a smart choice to make. I've got to hope that this is one such area. We're investing heavily in this. Not only...