UAS News Podcast — 2012-05-09
Transcript
I guess we're out there. Gene Robinson, are you on?
Yes, I'm here, Patrick. Okay. Well, we decided to mix things up a little bit instead of, let's say, doing this recording and letting people listen to it later. Gary kind of prompted me to go ahead and do it live, so we're going to do it live.
We're flying by the seat of our pants and we'll have to see what happens. We're starting out. This is the inaugural podcast here. Basically, SUS News is trying to come up with new vehicles to give people more information about unmanned aircraft systems, unmanned technologies, what people can do with them in different uses.
We wanted to get some experts in here to give people some insight on these subjects. Our first guest is Mr. Gene Robinson from RP Search Services. We're going to talk to him.
I consider Gene to be an expert in the application of unmanned aircraft systems in SAR. He's been doing it for several years. We're also announcing here that Gene has a book coming out and it's called First to Deploy Unmanned Aircraft Used for Search and Rescue Law Enforcement. I've seen an advance copy of this book and I'm going to tell you that I'm impressed with what I've seen so far.
I think that this thing really could become the manual for law enforcement in SAR in the future here. I thought we'd bring that to our audience. Gene, maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about yourself. Is that possible?
Sure, Patrick. My background is in aviation. My education is in aviation with college. I got my degree in pilot's license with aspirations to be a commercial pilot.
Unfortunately, Mother Nature let me down on that and I was born with eyes that had to have correction and it was very difficult to get a job. I have been flying something either by the feet of my pants or standing on the ground since that time. I was big into radio control, obviously remote control, and designed and built my own aircraft for years. I became a computer analyst and computer programmer and did that for a very long time.
In 2000, I started getting back to my aviation roots and had a little bit of a convalescence that I had to deal with. I started reading up on different aircraft designs and started designing my own aircraft in the hopes of getting into the autonomous aircraft field. That brings you very quickly up to speed where it started for us. To be fair to the audience, I know Gene, it's probably eight years now.
Gene is also a board member of the RCAP, the Remote Control Aerial Photography Association, and one of the founding members of that. I came on board, I think we shared the same vision for that of promoting this technology for a myriad of different uses. The plucky kids with the gleam in their eye were out there trying to use this technology and build businesses and do everything else. Of course, we're all going along and the FAA comes in and says, wait a minute, you guys have actually found a profitable niche or something of positive use for this.
Well, we can't have that. We had the decree of February 13, 2007. Of course, I'm being a little facetious, but for those of us that were already up and running, that's kind of what it felt like. Would you agree with that, Gene, or what was your perspective on the February 13, 2007 edict?
I would have to agree with you completely on that. We had just completed a show circuit with the Department of Homeland Security and we were very well received. Every show we went to, we were very well received by both law enforcement and fire individuals. We had several aircraft out there.
We had several systems that we had used. We even introduced some massed systems, photography systems that were very well received. Just about every chief and agency we spoke with said that we have to have one of these. This is going to be an essential tool, especially when we showed them examples of some of the work that we had done since 2004 up to that time.
I walked away from a December show with a stack of cards of people that were ready to order aircraft and to move forward into using RPAs or unmanned aircraft for their specific discipline. As we went into January and we began to contact these people, again getting more positive results, the FAA's edict of February 13th immediately cut off all inquiries and all proposals for RPAs or unmanned aircraft with the comment that we really need to wait to see what the FAA is going to do.
I know you remember when we were working with ARCAPA back then and trying to promote some self-certification and working with the fledgling UAPO at the time, the members there said, you guys don't worry about it.
We'll have this worked out and you guys will be flying. I'm sure you remember that, Patrick. That is funny that you bring that up. It's another idea for a show.
I definitely think we should have the skeletons in the closet show, ARCAPA in the early days. I remember 2006, I had someone from the UAPO tell me, don't worry about it, 60, 90 days tops. I was like, oh, well that's good news because mom and pop's not going to be able to hold out for much longer than that. People were falling by the wayside and there's not a lot of the old guard left.
I remember a lot of people, jeez, we had even in the early days, 1500, 1600 members of people that were out there flying. I don't think that they're not flying. I still think that a lot of these thousands of people are out there flying every day. The FAA just kind of pretends that it just doesn't happen.
That is a, maybe that's the next show. We could get the board members from the ARCAPA on here and go down memory lane. That would be a very long show. Yeah, we might have to schedule a couple of hours for that one.
I want to kind of stay on target here with the book. Like I said, I got to see the forward copy of that. I was very impressed. You got a lot of good information in there.
I'm going to wish you all the success for that. I want to talk about that. With the book, maybe you could tell the audience, what do you hope to accomplish?
It's kind of a two-parter. Why have you decided to put it out now?
I guess it goes back more to our charter and what we intended to go for in the market. We never intended to go with DOD. We never wanted to enter that field because there were too many very large players there. We always wanted to go to the civilian market.
Our audience was search and rescue, law enforcement, and first responders. It was easy to get the technology that would be useful for them in the air. We had done that with the flying wing. The settled on the flying wing is our design.
It ended up being a very rugged design. We started pushing forward into those areas and assisting them on basically a free basis to show them, to educate them what they could do with a simple system, a very elegant, very well put together system. As we started doing that, we got called more and more for search and rescue, or search and recovery, or law enforcement support. We took our aircraft into the field and we flew them in every condition that you could conceive, in winds that people would just sit in their cars and not get out because it was so windy, in firestorms, in rain.
We even flew in a hurricane just a couple years ago. We started gathering this database of knowledge. There has been so much noise come out because there are so many different people that are saying that their system is the best. It does so many wonderful things.
It will do this, it will do that. It's based more on theoretical rather than practical application. We know for a fact that we were probably the first televised use of a UA on a search and recovery back in 2005 in Erwin County, Georgia. It was on court TV.
That gives us a bit of a legacy in that we can say that's ground zero for us as gathering the experience. We have flown many, many times since then. I can't tell you how many missions we've flown. To quell some of this noise, to actually put the ability of a small UA into perspective, it became very apparent to me that a book would be something that would be useful to the technology operator, the technology director of a department, someone who is interested in getting into unmanned aircraft,
and not getting the $100,000, $250,000 price tag for a piece of equipment that may or may not do what they are looking for it to do.
The book was as much a part of the education process as our practical application of going out and showing law enforcement how it works. That's what we hope to accomplish with the book right now. We want to get that information out. We want to show what a small unmanned aircraft can do in different environments, under different conditions, the data it can produce, because when you get right down to it, it is just a data collection platform.
That's what you're doing. You are given the incident command or the search coordinator, more data to work with. As we know, the more data you get, the better decisions you can make. That's where the small UA can really shine.
I think you're hitting on some good points, and very timely too, because I contend, I know you wanted to do the civilian stuff, and I did too. I just kind of wanted to go about my business, but I've kind of taken the military path, which is I'm a little bit of an anomaly there that I came out of the commercial side. People look at me like I'm crazy, because I'm probably one of the few. You're really hitting on something good there, and it's kind of what I call the snake oil salesman.
I actually have an article coming out in the June issue of Unmanned Systems about police and law enforcement first responders buying these and really looking out, beware the snake oil salesman. I think that you've really hit on that point. I really believe that these first responders that are thinking about adding this to their department really need to get educated. I think the timing is perfect on the book.
The bottom line are the wrong decisions could really have an adverse effect on their department. I do think it's very timely. I think that that's great. I think you have a wealth of information to share all in the right time.
I want to get into a little bit more about these searches that you've done, and I know you've done a bunch of them. The other thing I want to do too is if you'd like to give people your website address, you want to go ahead and do that?
Sure. We have two websites actually. The nonprofit 501C3 charity organization that we do most of our flying out of is at www.rpsearchservices.org. Then if you want to see a little bit about the aircraft we use, our website is www.rpflightsystems.com.
That will give you a little bit of background on both the aircraft that we're using and some of the searches that we've done as well. All right. If for some reason you didn't catch all that, just email us over at SUASnews, and we can provide you with a link to either or both of those. Okay.
Well, surprisingly, we're already halfway through the episode. Time flies when you're having fun. I kind of want to move on, but I want to talk about some of the searches and some of your impressions of that and feelings and whatnot. Maybe you could kind of speak to that a little bit.
Sure. Well, to date, we have directly credited to the unmanned aircrafts. We have 10 recoveries. We have provided closure for 10 families who have lost loved ones.
Most recently was a two-and-a-half-year-old just last month that we flew on that they had been searching for for four days. Unfortunately, even though the book is called First to Deploy, at this point we are typically the last to deploy because they end up taking as many of the resources and assets that they can out to search initially, and when they exhaust those resources, they call us in and we fly, and we provide them the data that they need, and sure enough, we locate them. That's been kind of the SOP here for a while, and we're trying to change that.
Maybe I'm being optimistic when I say First to Deploy, but I do believe that unmanned aircraft will become the first tool that is pulled out of the toolkit in many, many cases for SAR and for law enforcement. I just wanted to ask one other thing on that note. Do you think that that has to do with some of the restrictions put out by the FAA, or is it just that people just don't understand the technology?
Why do you think that is? I believe, and I used to say for the longest time, you know the book Fear of Flying?
I believe that a lot of people out there that were just looking at the technology had that basic primal fear of flying. Oh, it's so complicated. Oh, you know, there's no way to incorporate it. We don't know what to do with the data, and I think it was just a lack of education for the most part.
We are now getting to the point where when you're called, as a matter of fact, just before we called in on this podcast, I was notified to go assist in a search in Mississippi. So we are getting that education process done, and we are starting to be called sooner. And sure, there are plenty of folks out there that know what the restrictions are. There are some of them that care very much about being on the up and up with the Fed and making sure everything is copacetic there.
However, there are just as many agencies out there that say, then the torpedoes, we need those images, and we need them now, go get them. Right. And we try to do that. It kind of goes with the application, usually time is of the essence, you know, things like that.
That's pretty interesting. The other thing I kind of want to talk about, and you're hitting on that, is kind of educating people. And I'm sure over the past years, you've learned a lot yourself, and you've incorporated other technologies and whatnot into your work. And maybe you could kind of elaborate on some of those combined technologies and also maybe the SOPs or what you kind of learned has worked.
Both technology and, let's say, application. Sure. One thing I've got to say is we're very lucky in that several years ago we signed a memo of understanding or an agreement with San Diego State University in California, and they are technology partners with us. Because of them, we have gained access to a suite of sensors.
And really, that's what an unmanned aircraft is about, is to fly a sensor of some sort. The sensor may be just a digital camera. It may be a thermal imager like a FLIR or a micro-bilometer. And now it's getting to where you can now fly a multispectral imager, which is becoming very much in demand.
And all of those things require computer technology, obviously. There is more and more software that's coming out that processes images. The more that you can pull from the images, the more data that you can collect quickly from the images gives you a very powerful tool to work with. For example, we use, listen, a plain old digital camera.
We started out with the little VGA's, moved up to 3 megapixel, 5 megapixel, and now we're up to 16 megapixel and pushing 20 that we can fly easily. Right. And we use the standard issue Mark I eyeballs to look at them. That takes a little bit of experience.
Right. I mean, there's a process to analyzing those pictures and images, correct?
Yes, it is. And we have come up with several very practical examples of how to do that, what it takes to get it done. And you essentially look for things that don't belong in a picture, which is kind of a different mindset to get into. On the software side, there are softwares that are starting to come out now where you can tell it, for example, you have a person that's lost in the woods or lost in an area.
What does a person typically wear when they go hiking? They'll wear blue jeans or some brightly colored object. So you can tell the software, go out and scan all these images, pull anything that you see that's blue out of these pictures and tell me about it. Interesting.
And it will scan through hundreds of pictures and it'll pop up. I've found five pictures that have blue objects in them. Would you like to see them?
I'm not sure that's a handy tool to have. It is handy. It is sensitive at this point, but they're getting cheaper and we're getting people who are working with us to try to reduce that cost on that piece of software. And then, of course, you can take off-the-shelf software.
Photoshop is a great example. And you take it and you apply it a different way, and you can bring out some of those colors. You can accentuate those colors. You can do gamma shifts, and it's very easy to do right there on your PC.
Once you get that macro built or you know which plug-in to use, you can bring the images up and scan them yourself and do it very quickly. So it doesn't have to be a $50,000 software package. It could be a little bit of training and Photoshop. Interesting.
I really like how you've used what was available. I guess you had to. I look at these expensive systems that are more geared towards the military or whatever. I work with some of those.
And when people tell me what they cost, or I'm talking to manufacturers, and they say, oh, well, here are the capabilities. You're getting 10 frames per second, yada, yada, yada. And I'm a little taken aback, and I'm like, wow, $120,000 for this?
And again, I don't see that training there, or down in the grassroots or out in the weeds like you're talking about, where you've really had to kind of use what you had and really wring 100% out of it. I'm pretty impressed with that. It's just a practical application. You have to look at the problem and see if you can come up with a solution.
And that's what we have tried to do when we apply our unmanned aircraft to these three disciplines. And it's been very effective, and we know that there are more expensive alternatives out there, but there are many departments that don't have a half a million dollar budget. But they still benefit greatly from having the data collected from the UA. Right.
I would agree with that. And I also think there hasn't been a real solid, let's say, this is what's going to come out as far as we've been waiting for years, or these are what the regs are going to look like. And again, I'm going to caution from my own knowledge. I'm going to caution these departments and municipalities not to buy something that's six figures, jump all in, get all the training, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then realize that, uh-oh, we may have gotten the wrong system for the application.
And you can tell me, are you getting more calls from police departments and municipalities? Are police questioning you about the technology, the regs, and how this might work in their geographic specific location?
As a matter of fact, we have, but it's been more along the lines of the regs. You know, the appropriations bill just passed in March. And in there, it states that law enforcement fire and first responders are to be allowed in the air within 90 days of passage using a two-kilogram aircraft, 4.4 pounds. Now...
Isn't that, not to interrupt you, but isn't that this month? Wouldn't that be, isn't that the 60 days or 90 days coming up this month?
Or am I, got the math wrong? No, you are correct. That would be the end of this month. And there are, I'm sure you've seen that there are already police departments that have purchased UA's and can't use them because they still haven't complied with the COA process that is required by the FAA, even if you are a bona fide public entity.
So they still must go through the COA process before they can even think about flying in their county. Right. Well, and I think that the mandate was talking about those expedited things because, you know, what's a COA take to get these days?
Is it still out six months, nine months, a year? The last one we got was eight months. It's hard to go out and first respond on an eight-month lead time. Well, we are coming up on the, it's a two-minute warning here.
Really, the show has been really informative, Gene. I think you had a lot of good insight. Right. And I would suggest that people that are thinking about purchasing this technology for their municipality or agency should probably call you.
So again, can we get the website one more time? Sure. It's www.rpflightsystems.com or www.rpsearchservices.org. All right.
That's good. And when do you think the book is due out?
We are going to shoot for a June delivery on that one. And it looks good so far. We're in the final edits and adding some images. And it will be an e-book and available in several different formats, I'm sure.
Okay. Well, that sounds good. I'm sure we're going to do a story and a review on the SUASnews.com website. A little final bit of housekeeping here.
I don't know how often we'll do these podcasts. If you have ideas or subjects that maybe you would like to hear more on, you can email me, patrick at suasnews.com, patrick at suasnews.com, and we will try and get those on the air. The other thing, if you want to advertise your business and you think that this might be a vehicle for you, again, email me and we can talk about that. Send you out a rate card or a media planner and we'll go from there.
And that about wraps up the first episode or first podcast for the SUASnews. Gene Robinson, thanks again. Good luck with the book, buddy. I know people get a lot of good information out of this, and I wish you all the success with that.
And I hope that you hung in there for all these years that you're still around when the SPAR comes out and you're able to make a living. That would work for me, and I appreciate you having me on, Patrick. Hey, not a problem. We'll talk to you again soon.
Okay. Goodbye. Bye-bye. And that's the end of that one.
Thanks, everyone, for listening, and we'll see you next time.