Most of us, dronie, the latest fads, probably will be old news taken by eric, one of the best drone photographs, only just Getting Started on the drone journey. Lets get going n typical churchill fashion, we will start with chris. I am chris anderson, co of robotibs, the editer of wired magazine for over a decade. How i went from the editer of a magazine to a co of anary Space Company is a story we will probably end up talking about. Back in the media days, i didnt have to run my own factory, now i do. That is the hard part. The fun part, we get to put cameras in the air, and open up imageing and dig data. I am eric chang, director of images. I have a Consumer Science degree, that fell off to my parents dismay, ended up doing underuar photographer, and publishing, recently, i have been sucked back into technology. Here i am. I have been in drone space for ten years, being at m. I t. , then at boeing, then, working on helicopter system, was brief ly an airline pilot. Flying the otter, and started to address problems, in developing a drone for a targeted application, we build a platform, the platform is hardware, software, and cloud services, power drones and enable them to be developed by power companies. One thing we dont do is build the drones ourselves. I am christian sands, founder of sky catch. We build drones to for collecting data. Use the roberts to collect data over the job sites, our goal is to help all the companies with logistics, help them optmyself safety, and very thankful to be here with you guys. That is great. Thank you. They did jobs, dirty or dangerous, these two are both robots, intelligent, compared to where things were a few decades. What is going on with the processors, essentially, running the batteries, the radios, because the economies, the apples and the googles of the world, these components just put in different packages, can do thing that is were impossible ten years ago, and a Million Dollars what are the advances that you have seen, enable you to do the footage we have seen tonight. To be stable in space, it is something that photographers have been looking for for a long time. Everybody who has had a go pro in the past, they can get that hero shot of themselves doing something that they think will make them look cool. You know, this is the extension, you let go of the pole, the camera falls away. As we sit here today, every week, there is a new development out, or a new company, so, for the creative pursuits, these things are opening up something that we couldnt, we dreamed about. I was going to say, we couldnt have dreamed about them. I dreamed them about, if only one on that, all of human history, we have been stuck, our perspective is stuck at eye level. For the first time in history, we can see the world the way the birds do. Without having to be in the air. Without having the skill of flying something. Cameras can be positioned in space. Now that i you have the boom of a speilberg for free, what are you going to do with it. You are obviously attacking the space center in a different way. As we look at that arc, why are you going after the space ru going after specifically . Photographer is i am excited about it. We believe that drones will be used from aeg to infrastructure, inspecting power lines, bridges, oil, natural gas, land management, antipoaching operations, some of which we are involved in now. To address such a wide variety of applications, you need a platform. Companies arent leverages a that they cant extend in hardware and software, not having to develop all of that themselves. They can focus on the pieces of hardware and software, meant to be differentiated for the application. That is what we are building. And christian, you are addressing a number of challenges in the space. Specifically, battery technology, is one that you are doing unique things around. Can you talk to us about that . Our strategy, or our vision is not as exciting as some of the stuff, filming kite surfers, all that stuff. We work with construction people. Early days to try to figure out how to make their jobs more efficient. More productive. So, early days, i spent a lot of time on the field. Trying to figure out if this is useful for them it after a lock the weeks and months, i discover that it was you know, you know, ran into a couple of people. One superintendent, once said, he is like, at any given point, there is it at least 100 questions in peoples heads that can be answered by seeing something. If they see it, they can answer that t move forward. Basically, what he was saying, i can shave days off construction. Millions of dollars, that is really what motivated me to start the company, and sky catch. Our biggest challenge today in technology, we are solving with the partners, is basically, completely automating, making it fully autonomous, when it lands, swaps a battery, swaps data to the cloud, so ru not involved in the process. How long can a drone fly for on a battery . We spent a lot of time optmyselfing the chart, how much electricity was sent out to the motors, optmyselfed the drops for the size, the props the motors, we get 35, 40 minutes with high wind time in the air. Our average missions are about five to ten minutes and cover a large amount of area. So, you know, the idea behind doing a swapping of batteries, batteries havent e, volved in ages, wont e, volve any time soon. Some of the companies doing interesting things with batteries have not been tested there. Are batteries that last longer that 45 minutes, they have not gone through the rigorous tests to make sure the battery is safe. Most of us are buying batteries that are thoroughly tested by great companies, mass produced for hobbyists. Battery technology is being addressed. As you look out over the next few years, the pace of development seems to be so rapid. Cant get my mind around what it will be like two years from now. What you are looking at as the next wave of developments that will enable cases with drones, chris . This weekend, three followme projects lost. Two on kick start, one on ours. Followme s the drone follows you, biking, running, skiing, whatever, the drone stays 30 feet back and up, keeps the camera focused on you, gets that perfect hollywood view. That on one level that is you exactly what the youtube generation wants. Incredibly complex gps, image recognition, posts. Smoting you, and trying to figure out what right angle is. This is the kind of stuff that was science fiction, this is thedroid you were looking for. This was just this weekend. Three projects that launched. One of them raised a half a million in a day. All based on that platform. So, that was just today. Tomorrow, this mapping function, what christian is doing, a notion of construction, arguably the number two industry, agriculture is the number one. What this 300 copter can do, is a one button mapper. He does circles around the construction site. Gets sent to the cloud n this case, and creates the 3d. Model, snapped on to the cad model. It is happening every day in automaticed fashion, now you get, you are the client. You want to know what is going on the construction site or watch on the cloud. Watch your building, snapped on to the very cad model that you approved. Watching it build up. Digitized, perfectly aligned there. Is no b. S. You have ground truth or air truth, if you will. That is a 300 copter, imagine another five years. You are talking about technology underneath or on the drone. Ru not talking about the drone itself. In terms of the mechanics, we will see more development there, or have we reached we talk, the model is from the camera to the cloud. Go pro. Eric, more highly controlled. We are bringing the sensors, the smart phones, the camera, the control the cloud, and big data. And huge render farms. The point, the drone itself is a vektdor to capture data and transmit it to the cloud where sense is made of it. Where do you think the world is heading . The internet enabled it, we are sharing the data through it internet. Everything came at the same time. Going back to what chris said, a lot of it came from the smart phones. Allowing the pieces to be affordable. It is already on instagram. If you find it under eric, you can obviously, retweet it. The piece dividend, the software, and open sourcing the hardware discips n speaking to tuall. In separate companies, you seem to be collaborating around the common designs. That is probably one area i have a different perspective. The open source projects are exciting. It is what got myself into this space to some degree. A lot of people on our team. The number of applications broaden. And deployed above peoples homes, i think safety and reliability will bottom, all they are building is developing the apps themselves t less around getting in to and modifying the android kernel if you will. I know you have been using some of this. I am using three robotics source. Making modifications to make it fully autonomous. We had to make modifications, and vast community of people. It is easy to get access the different source code. We couldnt afford to do our company and work on autopilot. Lenox is the most secure operating system there. Is a reason it runs on lenox and not windows, i brought up this here for a reason. This isnt ours this is a chinese drone made to hobby king. They improved it. It is a dirivative design. They improved upon it. We have 20 years of open sauce importance. If you are using chrome, lin ox, you get it. Open innovation, with all bugs are shallow. I think this is proven, this is the we have the drones out there, if you would rather have something cheaper. Looks like a phantom it works great. We did nothing to make it happen. The world used it. All of us, outside, seeing the drone, and the mapping exercise, i was slightly stunned. You guys are the professionals, i know there are people here in the space. It takes a while to learn to you those pilot these things, how different it is to learn to fly and control them. . Do you know how to push a button . Eric and then. How most people are using them today. They are manually piloted. They do hoover by themselves. The drekds we are guy will them are not throttle up it is go up. High level instructions, we will watch it back move higher and higher, as the neck neckatology improved it is easy to put one in the air and do something simple. If you are arent very careful, metic louse, you have a goal. Know how to get there. If you maybe you race motorcycles on the weekend. You may end up crash one of these. If you are piloting it for creative purposes, ru moving the camera around in space. You need to have right now, you need to have feedback, the controls to respond in a way that lets you feel connected to the device. I have flown it without using the radio. It goes there and comes back. While it goes there, i am controlling the camera, trying to be creative in that way. There is always going to be that component, in the creative space, of someone is directing the sensors around in an interesting way. The autonomy, there is always going to be tied to some amount of manual introduction. That could be programmed n i could imagine a director telling it where to go, having someone else push the button. Do it 20 times, i think it is a complicated question. They are easy to use, to do something with them takes a bit of skill. Autonomous approach. Our focus has always been the data. We are using the tools to get the data fast. Retreat it fast, be able to alocate the robots, they are bad. Hot. Most of our projects, if you go to the client sights are not very interesting, mine is in the middle of the desert it is extreme let valuable to where they usually send people on top of them. In terms of our technology, we used to tell investors, in a world where you have no bikes, we basically have photographers that need to go around a construction site, we created a bil to get on it and go around. Our focus is not the bike t is the data coming back to us. We mixed, you know, creating the wheels and christs products r our chriss products. How safe and reliable the systems are. You look at people and companies who operated these for hundreds of thousands of flight hour, all of that is in the military. A significant portion of their losses are all related to pilot and operator error. As we develop the software to make the aircraft autonomous, and put things in forced work flows in place, there is someone who can check and ched oo make sure it is a mission, and someone different will pralt the vehicle, driving hitting go, and datda processing, and analystics and insights may happen differently. As part of the cloud, i think a lot of that will be part of what makes these systems more safe and reliable to operate. As well as seeing a void. In development, the allegor rhythms, taking into account where the other vehicles are located, cooperative or noncooperative, all areas that we are working on development. That is something that is in everybodys mind. How to solve that official without using power. Your colleagues are doing something there. Ru going to introduce them . I am not going to pitch it tonight. If you poke around. You will see cameras. There is some interesting demos, examples of what we are working with a variety of different topics. Turning back to the topic. I look at control like that i dont know how it works. Are we going to have to get certified . Is this getting a license to drive a car . I used to fly fix a wing. I was certified. You have to pay. All of you today, it is kind of gone away. You can just fly them yourself. You dont have to have a certification, you used to have to be in a certain spot to fly. In terms of the faa, i think they should establish a certification, where you say in a year from now, if you want to run a business, fly drones, it will keep people away from doing crazy things. We should expect that they will be looking for which is one, certification at the level of a director of operation says, at a company that is operating droens. This is a person experience before the drone takes off. Maintenance of the vehicles, putting the right processies in place. Ensures it is a save and re safe, and the operators of the vehicles, they will need to be even if it is the same of the aircraft is fully autonomous. Somebody will be the responsible party for operating aircraft in a certain area. The other Interested Party is insurance companies, 1 in 50, 1100 companies, seeking insurance to fly drone aircraft is able to get it underwritten. The underwriters are going to play a very key role as well, in establishing what some of the processes and procedures, how the aircraft are designed, the software powering them s that will enable and determine how and where the aircraft can be used and for what purpose. At risk of being i mean, really . This . This costs 299 on amazon. It shows up under the christmas tree. Do you think the faa will require this plastic, which by the way, is going to be coming out in november. It will weigh about a pound. Maybe, it is all foam. It will be the hot toy. Fully autonomous. Everything that you described will be a toy, the hot toy this christmas. Faa certification . The panel is consumer drones, somehow, i got invited. Our focus is a little bit, i am happy to expand the fous, our fo susis different. Enterprise grade commercial applications, some can be addressed with a small camera from your cell phone. A lot of other applications with larger camera systems, carrying of systems, taking air into the aircraft itself, for doing analysis for air quality, looking for particulates in the air, there is applications, a wide variety of applications in many of the early customers are where the aircraft is two pounds or more, they are regulated. One of our early customers is delta drone, that operates in france. All of it is regulated. There is a process in which delta drone submit paperwork, it is faxed. It should be on line the prior to flying the drone for commercial regulation. What is the drones of the United States at the moment . Our number one priority is safety. Chris can reason that. That is the same thing, with the faa, they are focused on safety as well. I believe in my opinion, they are not equipped to deal with this sort of challenge. We have all sorts of id, certification, get Law Enforcement involved. Technology that detects guys flying around, to see how high they are flying tshlgs be a channelling thing to tackle. The faaville to step back, collaborate. Wree here in Silicon Valley, we have seen this picture before. There were telecons, and the telecomputers werent. Then the computers were connected over land. The lans were expected. That was the internet, wait we dont know how to regution this anyway. Bottoms up revolution. What we see is time and time again, you see white spaces, the world says, oh, l, 2. 4 gigaherts, you cant destroy the phone networks, Amazing Things with wifi, the Silicon Valley take the underthe radarar, and add more functionality to it. Under two pounds, you can do Amazing Things. They can have radar, if two pounds is the limit. Fine. You see this product and this product, on both sides, you can run forever and see productos both sides, i kick start ed an app to control a plane with my phone. You will be hundreds of products under that arbitrary line. The weights and the capability of the aircraft, and commercial use versus hobby. I am not certained. I came to the game later. I am not surprised. It has to do with what is leg, the rules the users are looking to adhere to. A set of guidelines, voluntarily adhered to by this community. And then, the rest of it is the message that these tlings here, they are not going to go away, we need to be responsible how we use them. I used to fly fixed wing in 1994. Not 1984, i am not that old. Used to put gas on them. It was a small community. It wasnt like, where everybody is a hob yift. Everybody can buy a drone and be a hobbyist. Back in the day, it was a small community, everyone knew each other, you got the same news and the same updates, things werent shareod facebook or twitter. It was you looking at this thing. Things have changed dramatically. The it doesnt fit the landscape today. It is interesting, i thumbed it the power airplane on kick start. I dont imagine it will be regulated. Camera technology, that is the world you are focused on. How is that e, volving. When we will see four k sensoros these devices. What will be possible . A year ago, in you would have bought one of these, to put it in the air, you were buying something, the go pro, the smallest pay load you can stiblg on this. This is notice, it has what looks like a lens on a stabilizer. We decided to split the camera into stabilized and unstabilized portions, there is no reason to use it to stop it on land. A robust capable, and a lens. I have flown these and those who handle it luckily, a camera is a camera. If you take away the use, it is still a camera of the same, you control it from another device. These cameras are going hop on the insane curve normal cameras are on. We you can expect this to happen. Flying cameras. Two different parts, one with a separate camera, one with an integrated camera. How does that e, volve . I dont feel that separate camera has i think you mentioned they are takinging a different approach on Camera Technology . Both of these are mechanically itemized, the sennors, and do this. Parrots with their next generation, the sensors have so many pixels. Put a fish eye lens in front of it, and move it around the sensor, so quickly, it acheers all the circulation in without weight or complexity. It looks like a lens. As a result, reducing the complexity. It is cheaper. It is safer. It is probably not good enough for the cinematog graphy that you do. It will be. Weight is critical. The fastest route to safety is lightness. If they are dragging size, shape, weight, exset ra. At that point, the regulatory question goes away. It cant possibly hurt anything. On the ski slopes, we see them going with the go props, when do we seed the personal drones follow them down the hill . Next week. You will see one follow the skier into a tree. None of the systems have any sense and avoid technology. By response seeing them g was not entirely positive, i love that they exist, i feel like the people who buy them and use them will products that actually follow you. If youre on the ocean in a yacht, its good. But on land you have things that stick up and its fornt that they will have to fly far away from them, much higher. Then theres a question of how do you retrieve them. You have to time their run pretty well so you still have battery life. So maybe these things will be like rocks. Theres going to be a lot more people trying to solve this a year from now. Its extremely reliable. I talked to Huge Companies trying to figure out how to collaborate and try to solve this. So lets flip to sort of commercial drones. A question for you. Where are drones you have given some examples of these cases, but where is the in for Drone Technology . Where is it good doing and commercial organization . This is my own opinion. I think that this is something that chris said as well. Were going through a phase where the focus is the drone itself. And just like the computer era, everyone was focused on the computer. Then they were focused on the operating system. Then they focused on what Software Applications you build on top of the computer. Theres no new computers today. It doesnt make sense. Thats going to go away. Its going to be more focused on the practical things of how people are using and extracting out of the drones. Next year its going to be all this really cool stuff people are doing with drones that are practical, that are adding value. And eventually in the future, i read an article about how they are planning on using drones to mars and the moon to map mars and figure out if they can put a jet engine on it and map it out. People are going youre going to see a lot of this application five years from now. Theres going to be a lot of innovation. We have been able to get this far in just such a small amount of time. All of this innovation, smaller, cheaper, all of this opportunity is going to be far more reliable, so the opportunities are incredible. We had someone ask us if we could build one to clean windows in highrises. People building platforms like chris and jonathan will be able to provide for these different rare cases that people are coming up with. Some of the examples you give are aligned with improve safety so you dont have to expose workers to risk, but increasing productivity. Youre getting straight to what you need to do and not worry about the safety. For us were using tools that these guys are building to collect this data. Were teaching all of the industry how to use this data. We spend. Some of the projects were working are fascinating. We sit down with construction workers every day and they use images on top of the screen and draw surk ls on top of it. We have people using our images at these incredible sites. They print them out, take them out to the field and someone lost something in the middle of the field and e we launched the drone and created a new map and were able to find this item they were looking for just by looking at the images. So thats just collection of data and being able to e see things right away. We want to go beyond that. E we want to detect things on the ground, alert people, the crane move or the panel took five minutes, construction site was three years. Then you analyze the data to tell you exactly what were the pinpoints, what were the areas you could have improved on. The piles were not fast enough. All of the things are going to be tracked. Two weeks ago we had a construction site where they found a stockpile being gone and the contractor came back to recharge them for the stockpile and they were able to use the images and say, you took this pile away and then they brought it back. Youre also putting different senses attached to these devices. What are some of the you were mapping. It wasnt being done. That was just a gopro. It takes these images and those future recognitions together. The big picture here is that we like many other are digitizing the world. We have the ability now with this kind of law of sensors, m cameras, satellites, drones, camera phones, we have the ability to now measure the world around us, bring this into the internet shs the cloud and start to make sense of it. Agriculture is a great example. Thats an open loop system. You plant and hope for the best. Lets not Spray Chemicals until we have to. Essentially these things look like toys. Let me ask a a question. Safety wise theres so many things they havent thought about. You cant have uncovered props thing fly into your front yard. Between delivering something from a drone from point a to point b and they are always the same to delivering from point a to thousands of amazon lockers to delivering from point a to everyones household including apartments and including homes and anywhere else people may be asking for deliveries. Its likely much farther than five years out and may in some cases and some areas likely never be possible from a regulatory standpoint. But maybe applications where some things being delivered from a known area to a known area i think are some of the applications for delivery were going to see first. Some of our early customers are researchers at mit who have a grant to demonstrate the delivery of vaccines and medicines and areas of africa and Southeast Asia where the place youre delivering to is a known quantity and the place youre leaving is a known quantity and the case is a lifesaving scenario so theres a high motivation to make sure this happens. Its working with auto pilots, knowing your weight, you cant have that as a variable. It complicates the auto pilot. You mentioned the social good s aspect of drones. I would be interested to hear more about those examples of where drones are doing social good. Given that were building a platform so were focused not on a single application but all at the same time broadly on a lot of adaptations. We took a wall and started writing all over the Different Things on the wall we thought drones were going to be used for. We came up with a lot of the common commercial ones we talked about here. Then we also kind of had a section of the wall where we wanted to come up with some of the things that we hoped and we wanted to see drones really used for. And aerial delivery of medicines. And those are two examples that we have been involved in since. Any other one of the interesting requests we got early days, walmart found us and they asked us if this is something they publicly talk about. They do, they use satellite imagery to figure out how many people go to the stores. But they want to take a step further and find out how many people go to the stores based on their commercials on tv. So being able to map that and correlate that based on i did this ad campaign and 30 people showed up at the store. Globally and regionally, its huge. All the manufacturing plants in china where they can tell if they are manufacturing a new one because. The truck is going in and out. They are selling this data to different people. We have got like five minutes before q a. Lets talk about the Business Opportunity where the money is. I have seen predictions by someone who is actually in the audience tonight around the drone market by 2025 driving almost 100 billion of economic value saying in a couple years there are going to be 10,000 drones. I was wondering why the faa is coming out with a number thats quite so low. But where is the value today . How is it going to evolve over time. Theres money in hardware today. So it starts with hardware and quickly becomes data, services, so right now they are a a way to get sensors. What you do with them is a big opportunity. We think that we make our money from hardware. Were a software company. Were happy to have other people make the hardware. Nobody cares about the drone. They care about what it can do and whether thats video or still or pure data. Like Everything Else in the valley, it turns to a cloud source. Going back to what chris said, what these guys are doing is enable iing the public to so of what uber did for anybody to be a driver, they are doing the same thing. You can be a Real Estate Agent and have a drone and fly services to people that you couldnt do before. You can be a search and rescue person with the drone and utilize the drones to find people with the data and all of that. The amount of things that are going to show up in the next three to five years are going to be unimaginable today. So the value will accrue to services, data, it wont accrue to the hardware space . Satellites are a presset. For this. A Climate Corporation said, hey, well take the data and sell to farmers. And so to their credit, they wept back and asked the farmers what do they want. We got this variability in our crops. They turned it into analysis and allowed them to generate better Crop Insurance and became an Insurance Company and sold for a billion dollars to monsanto. I cant wait until the day when drones are boring. Ive been using these every day for a number of years and i still get excited because they fly, but its just a tool. Its just the thing that can get the camera or a sensor somewhere and you see that in most people who use these things a lot. And it changes a little bit. If youre a sport flier and fly fast, the technology is change fast enough so youre always interested in whats coming out. Im interested in flying longer, flying more safely and Getting Better picture out of it. I dont think about the other features of the drone. You see that with journalists t too. This is about robotics in general. Ro the moment it works, its a dishwasher. They just do a job. Id love to take the word robotics out of our company name. And its just like who cares how it flies. It flies. Discuss. Our perspective, and i think chris mentioned earlier, the cost of the hardware is coming down every so many months. We have the viewpoint that just consider the cost of the hardware free. If all the hardware were free tomorrow. Where is the value. The value is in the software. And software specifically that requires fewer people on the ground to operate the aircraft. That software that enables you to operate them in a fully atom mouse way. Software that has the risks with the technology. Software that helps you be compliant with whatever the regulations are as they are coming out and what the insurance requirements are. So really software and then the purpose of all the software, the big giant Multinational Companies who are interested in using drones. They are not interested in using drones at all. They are interested in the data that they can collect by using drones. Drones is just one type of Data Collection mechanism. They already have some way to get the data. They are doing it from the ground where its intensive, dangerous, overly costly or time intensive to do so where any of the things can be decreased during the air. Lets have some q a. Two questions, first, is there any definitive website or publication or something where drone people go periodly. So if somebody wanted to issue an rfp for a particular drone, theres a new Drone Company every week so they wouldnt know who to send it to, thats the first question. Second, how will the new faa rules get made . Is there going to be a prosed rule making and whats going to prevent the bozo factor. For example, having a twopound limit on drones to me is kind of dumb because you could get killed by onepound drone falling out of the sky. So what would make sense to me is kind of the harm factor. What is the terminal velocity divided by hardness. A 20pound styrofoam drone would do less harm. Thats how france looked at the regulations. They have jewels of energy that they can have at any point in time. I think one of the biggest problems in the United States actually is that Congress Mandated that the faa come out with regulations and said one of the dividing points is 55 pounds. Its unfortunate. They should have said to the faa you come up with regulations that you think are appropriate and the faa would have likely looked at this problem and said 55 pounds does not make sense as a dividing line. Its a certain number of joules of kinetic energy. Other countries like france, they have dividing lines at much lower weight classes. The way to think about it is is really theres the territory and the unmanned, the space where they dont fly. Above 1,000 feet, what youre worried about is plane to plane collisions. What would take down a jet liner . 55 pounds would take down. 2 pounds, thats bird sized. But you kind of say, if it jet engine ingested this, would that be a terrible thing . That should be the limit. Below 1,000 feet, now youre talking about trees and telephone lines and children and that kind of stuff. There youre talking about personal safety and i dont want 2 pounds landing on my head. The other thing that exists at lower altitudes and 1,000 feet is manned helicopter flights including search and rescue, police, as well as life flight flights. They are almost always below 1,000 feet. They are more efficient the closer to the ground they fly. Especially in agriculture, crop dusting, within the last two years, theres been multiple incidents of small Unmanned Aircraft colliding with crop duster aircraft. The 2 to 4pound aircraft is a large obstacle to hit at 70 miles an hour in a plane that only weighs 1,000 pounds. The question is what is the right sand box . 83 feet happens to be a number arbitrarily in the law. 83 feet was some chicken farmer back in world war ii decided that airplanes below 80 feet were scaring his chickens. So you just tell me what the number is. 6 ounces, 83 feet, whatever. We can innovate around that. Theres a committee the question was how are the rules going to get made . Part of the process is theres a subcommittee 228 in which theres both people from the faa as well as several Industry Companies involved in coming up with part of the process and proposed rules later this year. The faa is supposed to actually release with their proposal for the rules will be which wont take effect until next year. Thats sfr smaller Unmanned Aircraft. The other question is how did you keep up to date . Is there whats the forum that youre all that once you go through. Which is tasked with creating the act. So once rules are in place, what are the standards, your hardware and your software have to comply with in order to be used . Should we answer the next question . Thats where i go. He collects a lot of break news about this space. And then unfortunately in the consumer space if youre interested in hobby flying, you have to go to the forums. They are vnot very friendly. Theres a couple of where the head of the faa talks about the challenges of setting up the law. One of the Biggest Challenges in this is we have a lot of relationships with the faa as well is working with Law Enforcement. Working with cities. How are they going to enforce these laws. And it just becomes extremely expensive if you start thinking about having these guys flying around and police having to be responsible for enforcing these things. Youll see cords filled up with people claiming they didnt break the laws and have no proof. Its definitely a a big challenge on that end. We are tackling the private space area where a lot of these companies were working with is having insurance for things falling off the sky. So they are massive companies. They are sort of having they are proactive in working with the faa a plan of attack with them rather than trying to circumvent them. Great, next question please. Im eric cline. Chris, you made a a great comment which is were digiti digitizing the world. And my question to the panel is about privacy and ownership, which is what happens when i digitized my neighbor or what happens when i digitize my competitors or valuable data. How do you look at that Going Forward . I get this question a lot. The first thing is that a lot of people just are not aware of what the faa regulars already are. Flying over your neighbors backyard is illegal. Its banned by faa regulation, whether its a law or not isnt a matter of debate. You cant fly over populated areas. So anybody who is flying over your backyard is essentially in faa violation subject to a cease and desist. Privacy aside, and privacy in the United States is fragmented because its based on a community standard, which varies from region to e region, so we have 80 city and town legislative processes right now. And privacy is also a moving target thanks to Traffic Cameras and facebook. So i think that at least in the United States where e we dont have a monolithic privacy rule, its going to be sofled more on safety purposes rather than privacy. We dont want that flying over our backyard whether its taking pictures or not. Any other comments . I would just say theres a lot of existing tort law in the space as well around privacy. In many cases flying over your neighbors yard and taking pictures is more of a civil case than its going to be a criminal case or a case where the faa needs to be involved at all. A lot of these people dont know whatter they are yet and dont know what kind of cameras they carry. Its really not the case. Two weeks ago, a guy was attacked by a woman on a public beach because he was flying one. He caught it on video. And the complaint was that it was vertical video. And he posted the footage he got, which is very high level. If youre looking at the grand canyon, thats the kind of shot you get. She didnt understand. She chose to attack him for it instead. Also one of the things people dont think about until they see them is you can put your camera phone and hold it over the fence and take a picture and they have no idea. You fly one of these buzzing thin, they totally know. If i made my business. Out of operating a crane camera or doing helicopter shots for mov movies, i would be looking at this as rather threatening. They are looking at this as a tool. Its also something thats going to increase the total market size. So companies who are doing existing power line inspections by a manned helicopter are actually very excited about adopting this technology so they can actually do some of the miles of inspection of power line that maybe are not economic to do today via manned helicopter with drones. The whole space gets a lot bigger. You have these existing players doing perhaps something the old way. There might be a good. Reason for putting a helicopter in the air. They have already been using these. When you see aerial shots, chances are they are taken with a drone or something. They have been under the radar because its not allowed. But now thats starting to change. Were seeing conversations between hollywood and the faa and some exceptions to the rules. Unlike most robotics which we think of as replacing jobs, these create jobs. Its hard to get cameras in the sky. You train pilots, et cetera. So the guys are largely empty. Its not like these things are replacing pilots. These are doing jobs that are not being done at all. We were working with the university and we went to one of their u farms. We were introduced to the farmer and he did not like us at all. He looked at us like, ugh. And the professor introduced us, look, we want to try this new technology. This is going to help us automate the process of agriculture. He was completely u opposed to using this. Hes like, i walk my farms. I dont use these tools. And the funny thing that we sort of just understood the whole process. We went ahead and flew the drone around, got a lot of imagery. We were using these things so see what the drone is is seeing. And we invited him to fly with us. He refused to do it. We had one last battery. Do you want to try them on . He finally agreed. He said, all right, ill put them on. He put them on and hes like, can you fly to the left a little bit . Can you fly to the right . Can you go forward a little bit . So that was beautiful. Youre never going to get you always need someone to analyze the data. Thats what he was doing. He no longer thooz walk, but he can analyze the data using these tools. Next question. Hello here. I have heard about facebook and stuff like that. They want to provide internet signal to everywhere to remote places. Whats the biggest challenge you see here for facebook internet with drones. One of the big challenges is flying at such a high altitude. The way they are proposing doing this is flying at 70,000 feet. The benefit of flying at 70,000 feet is the controlled air space ends at 60,000 feet. The challenging part is getting up to 70,000 feet and operate where theres little air and where you need an incredibly light aircraft, which is in most cases, not incredibly sturdy, but you have to fly through all t the other layers of air space to get there. Thats the altitude thats nearing space so you actually have to harden your electronics and your software to deal with things like radiation. You were talking about the peace dividend extending the fundamental technology. This is similar to the technology. Are we competing with satellites . Between the musks and the planet labs and the we saw this before. 15 years ago it was satellite phones versus cell phones. You put 64 satellites out there and cover the world. Why would you put cell phone towers every three miles . Thats crazy. Its so expensive. We saw how that ended up. It turned out the higher band with, the resolution of the network beat the reach of the satellite network. Right now, these things have 100 times resolution better than satellites and they are under the clouds and they are free. The dispatch you can get any time access to the skies. The getting cheaper. And so i think this is going to be one of the. Epic battles. You get the system with these now with technologies. Thats correct. One thing i want to answer his question about facebook. Getting social Networks Interested in flying things is phenomenal. It helps all of us. Free robotics helps all of us. It helped me. It helps everybody. I think a lot of the stories out there specifically on that technology, i dont think none of it has been tested necessarily. But at least were thinking big. And i think thats huge. Going back to what chris said, taking satellite companies, i think thats going to happen. Its becoming easier and easier, flying under the clouds. Its going to happen. Whether analyzing a field or photographery, what kinds of interactions to do you see drones with nature . A bird landing on the drone or maybe colliding with it. Tell us about your experiences that are interesting. Im smiling because i wrote an article that talked aboutxc there are a lot of rules against these things. So bird strikes are a factor. This goes back to safety. If you can design these things so they are resistant to be struck by something, accidents can happen. Regarding birds in particular, the continuer is not a problem but the airplanes are perceived as intrusions into territorial space by the birds of prey. So hawks often attack planes. And i can tell you the hawks win. They usually flying a away from these things. Some elephants have been known to be afraid because they sound like bees and elephants dont like bees. You have to see how it might respond. But mostly its looking at where youre flying to determine whether you should be flying there. Thats the most important thing. One interesting thing related to birds, we had a big company come to us asking when we were saying we were about data and multiple companies came to us, which makes me believe this is going to be massive space. This company basically wanted to hire us to sway birds away from these, what do you call it, turbines. The contract and the deal was attractive enough for us to say, you know, lets try it out. We did a test. Its extremely challenging. You try to keep birds away from the turbines. And birds get used to you. They get scared first, but they get used to you. Its sort of as we put more things in the air, birds are going to get used to these things flying around. So california condor is an endangered species. They have been attracted north by ranches, by cows. But their natural territory is down in baja. So people were in charge of the zoo and others in charge of helping with conservation wants to encourage them to move down south. So what they do is drop these cow carcuses down south. How do you tell a condor theres a dead cow ten miles away. These birds look for these circling columns of other birds. How do you ensure you dont have a lot of time. You drop a dead cow, you want to get a circle of birds going. The answer is a drone. You get a drone to circle l over a dead cow. From a distance it looks like another bird of prey. And they keep doing it every ten miles all the way down to baja. Wow, that was a good question, thank you. Next question please. Awlqhi, over here. We have been talking a lot about drones as flying objects in terms of pound to pound, but as you said, chris, they could become like dust. So im wondering about how you are interacting with your clients and thinking about perhaps the drone is in our center piece tonight and able to view and listen to our conversation. While privacy you mentioned was kind of on the side, i dont think in those contexts thats really the case. How are you thinking about the evolution of drones in terms o of embedded sensors into everyday experience because humans do not have the capacity perhaps to sense that theres a sensor. It may be more obvious now because you have to take it out. Were going to have to catch up. This will catch up to the phone at some point. But these are getting more and more interesting. We have only gone in one direction historically. I dont know if that can sustain itself forever. People are building drones. The boats that fly around. They navigate on the water. Youre going to see a lot of innovation beyond flying things. The flying things get center stage and the most attention. Theres innovation in robotics everywhere. So industries they are looking for automation, remove human from dangerous places. Is so thats going beyond just flying things. Theres got to be a privacy discussion. It can move in space and record. We have o to think about privacy as a fundamental issue. No matter what tool you use, you have still violated their privacy. I would love to give a discussion of drones and treat them just as sensors and make policy around the entire class. Great, next question. This question is in response to jonathans statement about hardware becoming free. I think in the course of technology in the recent years is software has become free. Probably about every new service i enroll in today is with free software. You see maybe not so concerned about the trend and i was curious how that mentality works and the Business Model works around that. Certainly a lot of webbased software begins as free. Its definitely the case that a lot of people, especially Large Enterprises end up paying for a lot of that software. I know i personally pay for software as well as our company p pays for a lot of software. Some of the scenarios where youre using multiple drones, driving significant value. I think the Drone Industry in its date today is having a lot of corollaries to the computer industry. Its certainly the case that people started by building a lot of hardware building it in their garage where what you bought was a big brick of hardware. Then there was the emergence of the personal computer where initially youre buying hardware and the emergence of operating systems, which e we all saw dos and windows become the platform of choice for a number of decades and software moved into the web and then i think we began to see eventually a model that was a lot more around software thats free, but data thats paid for. So i wouldnt be surprised at all if we see a similar progression in where a lot of the value is in this space as well. I agree. So our model is we give away the bits and sell the atoms. We give away all the source. We happen to make money by standpointing the software and hardware. We get our share. I agree. Ultimately the data is going to be where the value lies and the services around that data. You see the services for free. They are not free. The product is you and youre paying in a different currency. So the data is what is important and thats why its free. There are consumables in all of this stuff aso i think all of te other stuff may be free, but bat raies tough replace and they are not going to be free. Next question. Hi, so eric you mentioned a few times that the drone is just a tool. So we have heard how its a cool to collect data and stuff. Im curious about specifically in the world of art, whether it be the next blue planet, what is it that the scinemaing to fer will be able to do that they have never been able to do in the past ignoring legality and privacy . The create thing about creative arenas is its really up to the people that are out there with the tools. Its whatever they can dream up, they can do. We really think about these as cameras you can arbitrarily position. So its mostly the low altitude stuff. Anything thats close to the ground thats beyond reach is new territory. And what were seeing now is a mad rush for people to collect as much of that footage as possible because its all new. The first video i had go viral was a video of surfers. No one had filmed surfers from 15 feet up before and tracked them as they were going down waves. Its not a great video because it was done a year ago, but it captured the imagination of a lot of people. So its really cameras that can stay in one place, hover precisely at low altitude that create opportunities. Theres significant challenges. They make noise. They are big, they have the possibility of crashing and you dont want the damage of fraudulence. So there are challenges, but if you go if you just do a youtube search on drone videos, youll find every kind of low altitude imagery imaginable. Some of it is incredibly creative. A lot of it is actually people having fun in the backyard. Its the whole spectrum. Its interesting. If you look at the rise of gopro being used professionally, one of the things thats amazing is for gopro is its disposable. When will drones be considered disposal . This costs less than the high end gopro. Well, you have to add a goepro to it. I think of them as being tools that are disposal. If youre working in imagery, you have spent a lot of money on time and gear and travel. These are relatively inexpensive compared to the other costs. The thing that im worried about when you talk about them being disposal is littering. You dont want to really consider them to be dispoez sal. If you go to some national parks, youll find phantom propeller parts because everyone has tried to fly through it. You want to think about these things. Batteries can catch fire. Theres potential for bad things to happen. One of the things weve been working on with the scientific thing is disposal drones where the airplanes is made out of cornbased foam. They send 100 out and none come back, but the data comes back. They are measuring the temperature. Of pools. What happens when they dont have to come back, it doubles the range. They land in the water, the foam melts. The very small number of metal bits sink to the bottom. The batteries are a slight issue. But the foam, we have solved the foam. Just one last thought on the creative elements. This is the golden age. In our pacts, we have the most extraordinary cameras and software and standard based on youtube that we have the ability to record our own lives in sinmatic quality. This is just one more of those tools. If you watch espn or an nfl game, you get these cameras on wires and incredible aerial shots. Why shouldnt your kids soccer game be recorded with the same fidelity . Now you can. Time for one more question. Regarding drones for delivering goods and looking ahead when were going to have hundreds of drones flying, how do you consider it a problem of the air Traffic Control . Its going to be private or Public Agency . Were working to explore options of building out what is considered an air Traffic Management system. Specifically for small uavs for this futuristic application of aerial delivery. I think some of the key elements of that is connectivity, interpret connectivity with the drones themselves so they can all be essentially relaying in realtime where they are positioned and coordinate in a way like the robots are all communicating their locations with each other in realtimes so what looks like a near miss between two robots is a wellorchestrated system by which the two could have never hit each other even if one of them had lost communication. Basically its a transponder where aircraft carry this thing and appear at the air Traffic Control. It doesnt have to be a physical device. Since we already have a link, it can be a virtual signal by which the aircraft senses its position and broadcasts that the faa may run. Our vehicles can already report their positions. We have cards that have registration and they are tracked by cameras in every corner and police and everything. I think early days, i was working on this thing called air highway. And we basically took the initiative to figure out how they can benefit with these things flying around. We created a structure to focus on how the city benefits and from registration, from toll payments, basically tracking every single move so that the cities also benefit from these things flying around. Then then we layer on top of that what the technology would be to lay out this sort of it was a very ambitious project. Sort of like 15 years from now. Thats why i never did it. I want to say thank you to our speakers so much for being so sharing with your perspectives. Its really appreciated. Your guidance preand during this conversation, you did a wonderful job. We have a small gift for you. It is the speaker tshirt of the club. Please wear that in good health. The video of the program should be available by tomorrow or next day on our youtube channel. And you have been a wonderful audience as usual. Thank you so much. Hope to e see you next week. Good night. Wednesday night, cspan 3 in prime time features events from the new york ideas festival. Well have a panel on efforts to include more minorities in the Technology Industry and the importance of mentoring. Thats 8 00 p. M. Eastern here on cspan 3. Wednesday the first statewide broadcast of the debate between the candidates for the minnesota governors seat. Markdayton faces challenger jeff johnson and independent hannah nick let. Live coverage at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. You can see other debates we have covered this Campaign Season on our website at cspan. Org. Heres a look at the candidates for oregons governor seat. Lets remember oregon was the first state to institute minimum wage. So this has been a core value of oregon for o over a century. I believe the minimum wage should be higher. I dont think it should be a 15 but it could be 11 or so. Raise i raising the minimum wage by itself doesnt solve the problem. Theres a cliff where your income goes up and daycare start to fall off. You move from 9 to 13, you have less money in your pocket. So moving up the minimum wage is very important. No one can live on the minimum wage today. Many require social services to support them. We have to address the income cliff so work actually pays. With you get a minimum wage increase, you actually end up with more money in your pocket. That ought to be our objective. Giving people the ability to take care of their families. In 2015, 9. 25 an hour. Should it be higher or stay the same . Focusing on the minimum wage, its important to know that oregon has the second highest in the country and the index with inflation, which is something that other states do not have. We need to focus on the fact that minimum wage is supposed to be an entry wage. Just looking at how were going to be able to raise the minimum wage, we need more jobs, family wage paying jobs in our state. And that requires us to focus on those things, the barriers that revent us from having good jobs in oregon. I want us to expand our Gross Domestic Product because when theres greater demand for services, that creates more desire for those products and that creates jobs. Minimum wage is an entry level wage. We need to provide more jobs to allow people to raise their families and pay their mortgages and have a future here in oregon. 30 seconds to respond to