=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 319 ===
Title: LDO 319 - Drone Soccer US
Recorded: 2021-10-07
Hosts: Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Andrew "Frank" Hyams, Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash
Guest(s): David Roberts, Kyle Sanders
Total audience: 2,250
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Xve5swbaI); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1138948264-letsdroneout-ldo-319-drone-soccer-us.mp3)
=====================================

Drone Soccer US - https://www.dronesoccer.us/

[0.0] Jack: Hello and you're listening to Let's Drone Out and special thank you to our lovely patrons that helped donate so that we could pay the editor to remove the swear words and silly things we say. Massive thank you to.
[14.0] Jack: Carlos Campos.
[16.0] Jack: Art Faulkner.
[18.0] Jack: Sam Dahmer.
[20.0] Jack: Mikey Dread.
[22.0] Kyle Sanders: On with the show.
[24.0] Kyle Sanders: Let's Drone Out now.
[54.48] Jack: Tonight we are talking about drone soccer. Tonight we are joined by Andrew St. Frank.
[60.48] Jack: Good evening.
[62.48] Jack: Stephen.
[64.48] Jack: Hello guys.
[66.48] Jack: It's me Jack.
[68.48] Jack: And with us tonight is Carl Sanders.
[72.48] Jack: Hey thanks for having me.
[74.48] Jack: Hi there.
[76.48] Jack: Hello and welcome.
[78.48] David Roberts: Thank you for having us.
[80.48] Frank: Yeah well thank you for coming on because it was a few months ago now that I came across drone soccer talking to people at the Western Park International Model Show which is sort of where I first became aware of it.
[96.48] Frank: People were talking about the FAI rules and mentioned that there was this new kind of part of the FAI that mentioned drone soccer.
[105.48] Frank: That's exciting. There's something new that I'm not aware of.
[109.48] Frank: So I looked back through and found out about how this sort of originally started up in a slightly different form in Germany and then it was really sort of popularized in South Korea in 2019 when I was the drone masters
[131.48] Frank: where they had a competition there between the South Korean team and the German team.
[135.48] Frank: I think that was kind of really where sort of it spawned out.
[139.48] Frank: But it seemed like the US drone soccer guys seemed to have got the furthest with making this into a thing because everything sort of seemed like it's gone on hold everywhere else.
[150.48] Frank: But you've been making strides leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else at the moment.
[155.48] Frank: So I'm really happy that you've come on to sort of talk to us about what you're doing and how you're doing it and you know everything that you're doing with drone soccer as well.
[165.48] Frank: So thank you very much for coming on.
[167.48] Stephen: Should we ask them how they got started with drone soccer kind of where you got off board and where it started?
[173.48] Frank: What's both your backgrounds?
[174.48] Frank: How did you meet and how have you ended up doing drone sports?
[179.48] Frank: Sure.
[180.48] David Roberts: Let me just back up a little bit in respect for the notion of drone soccer and where it came from.
[186.48] David Roberts: Just since we're in an international broadcast, we're hoping that people from all over the world listen to this.
[191.48] David Roberts: And so we want to respect the notion that there was a gentleman named Ji Soo Lee in South Korea who was probably his original idea.
[199.48] David Roberts: He wrote the rule set and had this notion of drone soccer.
[202.48] David Roberts: There would be a family sport, the family unit in Korea, I understand.
[207.48] David Roberts: Usually it's a father, mother and a child.
[210.48] David Roberts: And so the idea is they'd be able to go to the park with their each having a drone soccer ball and be able to compete and play a nice sport against other people.
[218.48] David Roberts: That was the initial idea where it came up.
[221.48] David Roberts: So that was probably about 2014, 2015 when Ji Soo started building a team towards that end and coming up in different variations on what a drone soccer ball would be.
[233.48] Stephen: So not your typical mass team event then designed to stop a number of other social interaction events.
[239.48] David Roberts: A new tech way of getting out and interacting with your neighbors and the people around you to get outside and go to the park doing something else that might be a whole bunch of learning.
[250.48] David Roberts: So we had a nice long conversation with Ji Soo Lee a few years back when we were just doing the research on what drone soccer might be, what it is, where it's coming from.
[259.48] David Roberts: We gained a lot of respect for the folks in Korea that put this all together because at this point there are thousands of teams that are playing drone soccer in South Korea.
[268.48] David Roberts: It's really the heart, the bed of where drone soccer derived from.
[275.48] David Roberts: So from there then our friends in Germany, Matthias and others, worked towards the idea of taking this drone soccer on as a sport that would be a part of the World Air Sports Federation or the Federation Aeronautique International either Louisiana or Switzerland.
[293.48] David Roberts: The World Air Sports Federation is the authority on all air sports records. You think of the Red Bull Air Racing that's part of the World Air Sports Federation.
[304.48] David Roberts: There's many different disciplines from helicopters, parachuting, full scale and even in models there's different classifications of competition that end up happening.
[315.48] David Roberts: We all compete together. You hear about scale aerobatic pilots that are going to nationals here in the United States that are ultimately going to compete on an international basis and that's all based on the FAI.
[327.48] David Roberts: So in about 2017, the FAI, 2016, 2017, the FAI finally, after a lot of conversation because things happen slowly within the FAI world just because they're a formal organization, they finally adopted a new set, new pair of set of rules.
[346.48] David Roberts: All the rules are categorized with a number and letter. So F9U was drone racing, which I think we've heard about. F9A, the rule set included within that was F9A was drone soccer.
[361.48] David Roberts: So with drone racing, we have seen that come forward all around the world and the FAI has worked very carefully to have world cup style competitions or world class competitions, mainly across Europe and Asia, not so much in the United States yet.
[379.48] David Roberts: There's other organizations that have been doing drone racing here, but ultimately Team USA was fielded to come to the World Drone Racing Championships held by FAI in 2017 in Shenzhen, maybe it's 2018 in Shenzhen and then 2019 in Ningguo, China.
[400.48] David Roberts: Where the drone racing, F9U happened, there was glorious competition, it was probably one of the best days or weeks in drone racing that was had.
[410.48] David Roberts: We had the opportunity to field Team USA from here in the US, president of MultiGP for several years and we put together Team USA, it was the fastest three pilots, the fastest female and the fastest 17 and younger student that went to China several times, I think three times.
[433.48] David Roberts: You didn't do a league to determine the participants.
[438.48] David Roberts: We had MultiGP as a league of 22,000 pilots around the world and we did have a championship competition here in the United States to field Team USA.
[448.48] Stephen: Right, they were taking out MultiGP, there wasn't a kind of drone soccer.
[453.48] Stephen: Drone soccer has not happened yet.
[456.48] Stephen: Sorry, we're still talking about MultiGP in this case and not drone soccer, right?
[461.48] David Roberts: What's your other time that...
[463.48] David Roberts: I found myself with Matthias, the German folks who were interested in introducing drone soccer to not only Europe but to the United States and sat down and went through the rule set that the FAI adopted for F9A.
[478.48] David Roberts: So when you think about bringing this to the US, at first I was really focused on drone racing but the more I thought about and looked at and studied what drone soccer is, the more it made sense that this is an incredibly cool sport that engages everyone in a room, that it's a type of sport that you can truly see the action.
[495.48] David Roberts: And we know from the students that they first have to build as a program where they have to first learn how to build the aircraft and then they program them, they fly them and repair them.
[508.48] David Roberts: And when they repair them, they turn into junior engineers.
[511.48] David Roberts: When they fly them, they discover the joy of flight.
[514.48] David Roberts: When they fix them and they fly again, they're thrilled, they're out of their mind, ready to go.
[520.48] David Roberts: We knew from those initial tests that this would be something that possibly would play, but we didn't want to just invent a ball.
[526.48] David Roberts: We wanted to make sure we underlined it with lesson plans and curriculum so that a teacher could say, we want to bring this into a classroom and here's all the lesson plans.
[534.48] David Roberts: That's excellent.
[536.48] Stephen: There's something like this is really key to getting participation.
[539.48] Stephen: You look at multi GP and there's a huge amount of skill, but it's very difficult for the spectators to really find a way into that sport unless they're already pilots themselves.
[549.48] Stephen: Or something like this, there's an instant attraction, I guess, an instant recognition of what's happening.
[555.48] Kyle Sanders: Well, and that's, you know, when we got started early on was what was exciting about the opportunity?
[560.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, we met at a big drone race we did on Air Force Base.
[565.48] David Roberts: And first, Kyle and I, he produced this race.
[569.48] David Roberts: He can tell, but it was the first ever on a United States Air Force Base, the Little Rock Air Force Base.
[574.48] David Roberts: First drone race.
[577.48] Kyle Sanders: We had 25,000 kids come in a single day to see all these exhibits.
[581.48] Kyle Sanders: And, you know, everybody's excited for drone racing.
[584.48] Kyle Sanders: That was my first taste of it.
[586.48] Kyle Sanders: My background is a combat pilot.
[588.48] Kyle Sanders: And even for me, drone racing was near impossible.
[592.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, that was when these new FAA rules were coming out.
[596.48] Kyle Sanders: And so I was very interested in the new space, but too tough for me.
[600.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, can't do it.
[602.48] Stephen: If you're a teenager, got those reflexes.
[605.48] Kyle Sanders: So when he told me about drone soccer, I said, now, that is something that I think could really bring a ton of people into the community, into drone sports, into drones in general.
[615.48] Kyle Sanders: And, you know, here in the U.S., the foundation of every sport is the middle and high school athletics programs that are paid for by the school systems.
[625.48] Kyle Sanders: So we looked at rolling out drone soccer in that way, create this foundation of students all across the country who are eager to play the sport.
[633.48] Kyle Sanders: And then they will grow into our professional and international players here in the next couple of years.
[637.48] Stephen: Great.
[639.48] Stephen: I imagine it probably is a lot more appealing to schools that they're flying around with something with a nice hard plastic case around it instead of just exposed props as well.
[648.48] Stephen: And so you'd be a little more inclined to let your kids fly those around at gymnasium than take a five inch race drone and rip one of those around.
[658.48] Kyle Sanders: Yeah. And I'm not sure what you what your flight rules are in the UK with respect to drones, but here the FAA has been really cracking down.
[665.48] Kyle Sanders: So a lot of these schools can no longer fly outdoors.
[668.48] Kyle Sanders: They have a lot of restrictions on getting teachers license before they can even teach drones.
[673.48] Kyle Sanders: And it's a challenge.
[675.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, drone soccer is an indoor sport.
[677.48] Kyle Sanders: It's inside a netted arena.
[679.48] Kyle Sanders: So it's safe.
[680.48] Kyle Sanders: The drones themselves are in a cage so you can literally grab them with your hands.
[684.48] David Roberts: And they're less than 250 grams.
[686.48] David Roberts: So we're below the limit.
[689.48] David Roberts: 250 grams for registration makes it a lot easier to bring it in.
[693.48] Stephen: So it's easy to get those parental consent forms, all of that good stuff.
[699.48] Kyle Sanders: That's right.
[701.48] Frank: I mean, the other thing in terms of sort of making an event easy to organize or, you know, not necessarily an event, but having a group of people together and flying something.
[712.48] Frank: I mean, with the FPV racing, the contention of radio is a big problem.
[718.48] Frank: But with the drone socket, it seems like it's all line of sight.
[722.48] Frank: So you're not worried about video clashing into each other.
[725.48] Frank: Is that right?
[727.48] David Roberts: That's correct.
[728.48] David Roberts: The 5.8 signal in the FPV feed can be a challenge.
[732.48] David Roberts: So there's going to be a limit to the number of people that would participate.
[735.48] David Roberts: We do actually see that eventually there might be an FPV version.
[740.48] David Roberts: I have one of our balls here and I think Kyle has one where we can put cameras on to them.
[744.48] David Roberts: We can talk a bit about the aircraft themselves later.
[746.48] David Roberts: But right now it is totally line of sight.
[748.48] David Roberts: And so there isn't a radio challenge.
[750.48] David Roberts: We could get hundreds of balls of flying potentially at the same time to begin to follow line of sight and with radio control.
[758.48] David Roberts: It's radio and FPV, it's radio and per person video.
[763.48] Stephen: So with that also served pretty well to get people their kind of flying credentials if they want to get a cert at the end of it so that they are legally approved by whatever model flying association you have in the U.S.
[777.48] Stephen: Typically those credentials are line of sight, right?
[780.48] David Roberts: Well, there's a couple layers to that.
[783.48] David Roberts: To initially get the credentials, one thing that we do within the programming of it is to jump right into the midst of the aircraft.
[790.48] David Roberts: It has a flight controller.
[792.48] David Roberts: So we have it pre-programmed so that the aircraft won't tilt over more than 20 degrees.
[796.48] David Roberts: So that it's throttles cap so that it will allow success for the first student when they first begin to fly.
[802.48] David Roberts: It's fully programmable.
[803.48] David Roberts: We get beta flight so it's open source, fully programmable.
[806.48] David Roberts: Where they can then adjust the tilt, they can adjust the parameters, they can make it really a screamer.
[810.48] David Roberts: But initially it's set to fly.
[813.48] David Roberts: One of the things that we've done at U.S. Drone Soccer is we have worked very carefully with the academy involved aeronautics, the AMA.
[821.48] David Roberts: They are our partner in bringing this sport across to the United States, all across the United States.
[827.48] David Roberts: But also they are our partner with the FAI.
[829.48] David Roberts: They are a subset of the FAI.
[831.48] David Roberts: So that allows us to have the students go from local play, regional, national competitions onto World Cup Plays where we will have national, international competitions.
[841.48] David Roberts: But with that, then, we also, part of the membership program within U.S. Drone Soccer is that we provide membership to the AMA for every single student.
[851.48] David Roberts: So they begin their career, if you will, in drone soccer in a culture of safety that the AMA is providing.
[858.48] David Roberts: And also the AMA provides a lot of leadership in Washington, D.C., fighting against the FAA, working with the FAA on the rule sets that are coming out.
[869.48] David Roberts: The third leg of that stool is a part of our education piece, is professional development, where we are able to provide training to the teachers where they can go through our professional development program and ultimately get their 107.
[883.48] David Roberts: The 107 in the United States, an individual would take the part 107 test, which is for unmanned aircraft.
[894.48] David Roberts: They pass that test and then they are granted a license to fly unmanned systems.
[901.48] David Roberts: It's your formal pilot's license for an aircraft.
[904.48] David Roberts: So we totally have an on-ramp towards that.
[908.48] Stephen: That's great. And I imagine because there's no FPV, they don't need to worry about a ham radio license either, right? Because that could be a big deal in the U.S.
[915.48] Kyle Sanders: Right. Right. We work here in the U.S. I work with some state level aviation programs and the hard thing is getting kids in the door.
[926.48] Kyle Sanders: They don't necessarily know about aviation jobs or UAS jobs.
[931.48] Kyle Sanders: It's tough to get them to sit down and take a professional 107 license course.
[936.48] Kyle Sanders: Right. This is something that gets new people into the door, gets them excited about drones with something that they can pick up pretty quickly and have fun on a team.
[946.48] Kyle Sanders: And then once you get them in, you can then move them into more industry or advanced courses.
[952.48] Kyle Sanders: So this is kind of that opening of the pipeline. We see a lot of adoption with middle and high schools, you know, from 12 to 16.
[961.48] Kyle Sanders: Get them in. And then once they turn 16, they're eligible for that professional license.
[965.48] Stephen: Yeah, it's easy to forget. I guess I'm kind of been in IT for 20 years now.
[970.48] Stephen: When I was a kid, I could like go to some school fair where people were selling PC parts and go put a computer together and learn about it.
[978.48] Stephen: But these days, everything is just a glued slab that doesn't really give you an on-ramp to learn about what you're using.
[984.48] Stephen: And this is a really nice way to allow kids to actually see it's not magic and it's just a bunch of components and you can slot them together and solder a few wires.
[993.48] Stephen: Write a little bit of config and you're in the air rather than it just being, you know, you buy this thousand dollar box.
[999.48] Stephen: And if you break it, you've got to spend another thousand dollars. A really nice way of showing them.
[1004.48] David Roberts: I'm looking at the chat and it seems that maybe we want to take a step back and describe what drone soccer is, how the game plays.
[1011.48] David Roberts: Absolutely. Let's do it.
[1012.48] David Roberts: So, Kyle, do you want to go after it? Do you want me to?
[1015.48] Kyle Sanders: Yeah, absolutely. So drone soccer is a team sport. It's played five on five in the full scale games.
[1022.48] Kyle Sanders: It's, you know, I grew up playing ice hockey, so I would have called it drone hockey, but the South Koreans named it because it is a full contact sport.
[1030.48] Kyle Sanders: They're surrounded by a plastic exoskeleton and these drones are crashing into each other on purpose.
[1037.48] Kyle Sanders: There is one drone on each team that is specially marked as the striker. If that drone gets to the opposing goal, that's a point.
[1046.48] Kyle Sanders: And all the other drones are defending and blocking to allow their drone to score while blocking the other team's striker from scoring.
[1053.48] Kyle Sanders: So it's very dynamic. You have scoring at both ends of the arena. And once a team scores, they have to repeat retreat back across the halfway point and then they can attack again.
[1065.48] Kyle Sanders: So you have three, three minute sets with a lot of action happening. And then in between those sets, these students run and quickly repair the battle damage and the wear and tear that these drones get as they're crashing into each other.
[1079.48] Kyle Sanders: So it's a lot of fun. There is a lot of complexity to the game. Once you start playing full scale, you can imagine there's plays and strategies and there's also two sizes of drones.
[1093.48] Kyle Sanders: We are introducing a smaller size in the U.S. It's 20 centimeters, so it's the smaller category in the FAI's rule sets.
[1102.48] Kyle Sanders: Basically a three inch core, but then there's also the larger 40 centimeter side, which is a five inch quad core. So that's what you're seeing a lot in South Korea, is that larger size?
[1116.48] Stephen: What's the play area? Give us an idea of the kind of the space that these are occupying.
[1120.48] Kyle Sanders: Yeah, on the small size, it fits in any classroom or gymnasium. It's three meters by three meters by six meters long.
[1128.48] Stephen: That is small. That's a lot of action.
[1130.48] Kyle Sanders: 10 feet by 20 feet if you're American.
[1133.48] Jack: I was going to say, you didn't even give us inches. You gave us full on centimeters.
[1139.48] David Roberts: We have worked very carefully with the Royal Air Sports Federation and the AMA to make sure that everything we're doing is fully in compliance with the FBI rules, the F9A rule set.
[1151.48] David Roberts: So we're going to be familiar with that as much as possible.
[1154.48] Stephen: And it means if the kids are going to aeronautic engineering, then that's nice and transferable as well, right?
[1159.48] David Roberts: So I want to do a little show and tell. I realize that this is a video and stuff that maybe we can see.
[1164.48] David Roberts: Here's one of the drum soccer balls, right? And I want to point out that when we say it's three three and it says they take a minute to fix it.
[1170.48] David Roberts: If I just take this ball and crush it.
[1172.48] David Roberts: Oh wow. What is that thing made of? That is just springy.
[1175.48] David Roberts: It's made of a polypropone. We very carefully chose what the material will be. It's eight annular wings.
[1181.48] David Roberts: If we look straight at it, it's eight annular wings, each of them an individual wing that is just held together with zip ties all the way around.
[1189.48] David Roberts: So the majority of the fixes that would occur might be replacing one of those parts.
[1195.48] David Roberts: This this annular wing, the exoskeleton can break and the aircraft can keep flying.
[1199.48] David Roberts: So we're flying itself very similar to a zip tie. Yeah. Is the material similar to a zip tie?
[1206.48] David Roberts: The material you just described. I hadn't heard that type of thing before.
[1209.48] David Roberts: It's similar to a propeller. Okay. Five inch quad propeller.
[1213.48] David Roberts: The propellers would shatter. That's why steel column falls. Now they are polypropylene so that it can take a bend.
[1222.48] David Roberts: Okay. Just take a bend and it will bend. It's the same.
[1225.48] Stephen: So when people say polycarbonate, polypropylene is the same thing?
[1229.48] Kyle Sanders: Different ways. You know, we carefully designed it so that this drone can be repaired with a single tool in 30 seconds or less.
[1238.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, you break a frame, you snip a couple zip ties, put a new frame on and you're back ready for the next next set.
[1245.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, your propellers, everything on the drone, a single driver can can do that.
[1250.48] Kyle Sanders: So you're seeing these students smash a drone, run over and, you know, one or two minutes later, they're ready to get back in the game.
[1258.48] David Roberts: We wanted to be able to keep competing. So another thing we determined during our prototype testing, we are using gem fan five blade propellers.
[1267.48] David Roberts: So we found, remember, it's just a game and it's three, three minutes set. So one of the propellers breaks, one of the blades breaks on a propeller.
[1275.48] David Roberts: I think it's the end of the line. You can, we've seen losing two blades on one propeller and they keep flying because they have to make it through the end of the set.
[1284.48] David Roberts: Right. So you're defending. You can still, it's not the best.
[1287.48] David Roberts: There's a lot of vibration, but then they can stop, make that rapid repair and then get back on.
[1292.48] Frank: That is impressive. So the arena itself, I mean, I've seen a video by Mountain Country Radio.
[1300.48] Frank: Yeah. That looks a very, very fancy thing. This isn't just like a bit of netting around some scaffolding.
[1308.48] Frank: You've got like sensors and display boards and all things going on there.
[1314.48] Frank: That looks like a very fancy setup.
[1317.48] David Roberts: Well, I guess we can tell you about one of our secret bits of technology that we've come up with.
[1321.48] David Roberts: We have not made a formal announcement on, we're not making a formal announcement here, but we will tell you about something that's pretty awesome.
[1326.48] David Roberts: Within this aircraft, there's an LED board that's on the bottom, just above the battery.
[1332.48] David Roberts: It's actually the battery holder. That LED board has 24 LEDs that can be fully programmed again through beta flight.
[1337.48] David Roberts: They can tell the aircraft status, they can change their team colors, they can flash, all that stuff.
[1341.48] David Roberts: But also on that LED board are infrared emitters.
[1344.48] David Roberts: We have a scoreboard that when the goal is 40 centimeter internal, but there's a scoreboard that when the striker,
[1351.48] David Roberts: the aircraft that's been designated as the aircraft that can score for that team,
[1355.48] David Roberts: when that striker goes through the scoreboard, through the goal, it has infrared emitters and receivers.
[1361.48] David Roberts: It's an automatic scoring technology that we are perfecting, and we expect to have it so it'll completely feed our scoring system.
[1370.48] Stephen: One thing I noticed in here, because I skimmed the rules, and it mandated size, the voltage,
[1378.48] Stephen: but it also mandated the number of LEDs on the craft.
[1382.48] Stephen: That's a part of the rules itself, that you need a certain number of LEDs on there.
[1387.48] David Roberts: Yes, this is an FAI compliant race drum. It has 40 LEDs on it, similar.
[1392.48] David Roberts: So then they have to be able to be programmable on the fly so that this team assignments can be made.
[1396.48] David Roberts: And we want to make sure we built that into the programming aspect of these balls because it's part of dealing with systems,
[1403.48] David Roberts: part of understanding systems and multiple systems, and it's part of career and technical education.
[1407.48] David Roberts: When a student understands that it's good to get the propellers right, the flight controller set, the thing built,
[1413.48] David Roberts: they're getting an A in each of these courses.
[1415.48] David Roberts: So they begin to understand that as a matter of due course, they should just get an A.
[1420.48] David Roberts: They should do well in each category, and that's the inspiration under the hood that we're looking to do.
[1425.48] David Roberts: And we've seen kids get really excited about this, like, oh, we have to make everything perfect.
[1429.48] David Roberts: Well, then really, it's going to spread into the rest of their education, how they tackle any one classroom or any one class.
[1436.48] Stephen: That's just a lot more interesting than plugging something into a Raspberry Pi, isn't it?
[1442.48] Stephen: It's a lot better than just, like, look, I made my LED flash.
[1445.48] Stephen: You're like, my LED is flying around my head and bouncing off the walls. Wonderful.
[1450.48] Jack: Guys, one hell of a blink command.
[1453.48] David Roberts: You mentioned at the top of the show about the whole notion of COVID.
[1458.48] David Roberts: It's a very sad situation, of course.
[1460.48] David Roberts: We continued meeting.
[1463.48] David Roberts: We looked at that as a time when there were no expectations.
[1467.48] David Roberts: So we could quietly just work on coming up with the proper aircraft and the LEDs
[1472.48] David Roberts: and the partnerships with iFlight where we can get these masks produced.
[1476.48] David Roberts: And there's a whole list of things that we went down that we just kept meeting on every week.
[1480.48] David Roberts: Every day, we would continue at U.S. Drone Talker to build this out.
[1485.48] David Roberts: So we thought that that was kind of a new and quiet time.
[1488.48] David Roberts: We spent that year getting a point where then we did prototype testing with some of the schools,
[1492.48] David Roberts: many schools in Colorado, in the United States.
[1495.48] David Roberts: That helped us build out to make sure we come up with the notions like the five-blade propeller
[1500.48] David Roberts: versus the three-blade propeller.
[1502.48] David Roberts: So that ultimately, we finally, now we're coming out of the COVID cloud, hopefully.
[1509.48] David Roberts: But we also are now prepared to make a nationwide or worldwide announcement about our efforts with Drone Talker.
[1516.48] David Roberts: And this next four weeks, that's a lot of work.
[1519.48] Stephen: That's excellent.
[1520.48] Stephen: And you mentioned that partnership with iFlight.
[1523.48] Stephen: So far, I've seen designs by LDARC.
[1526.48] Stephen: I've used their kit in the past, but I wouldn't call them like a premium tier thing.
[1530.48] Stephen: iFlight are premium.
[1532.48] Stephen: They're up there.
[1533.48] Stephen: You want to get the best kind of bind-and-fly freestyle quad?
[1537.48] Stephen: iFlight Evoque, the Nazgol, they've just released.
[1540.48] Stephen: They are premium.
[1541.48] Stephen: So you've got on board with them and developed a chassis, an airframe with them?
[1546.48] David Roberts: We visited with them every week.
[1549.48] David Roberts: We visited with iFlight on a weekly basis.
[1551.48] David Roberts: And we have, all through COVID, it's an evening for us and a morning for them.
[1557.48] David Roberts: And that's how they kick off their week and we kick off our Monday night.
[1561.48] David Roberts: But we worked very carefully.
[1563.48] David Roberts: Again, we talked to several different companies prior and toured factories to see what the different places would be like.
[1569.48] David Roberts: And iFlight is just a fantastic partner.
[1571.48] David Roberts: They're very, very good to work with.
[1573.48] David Roberts: They've taken our suggestions.
[1575.48] David Roberts: And in so many ways, we've completely owned what this is.
[1579.48] David Roberts: And they have allowed us to do that, relying upon us.
[1582.48] David Roberts: And I think the partnership we have is based on mutual leadership.
[1587.48] David Roberts: They're leading in China with this, or they plan to.
[1589.48] David Roberts: And they've given us an opportunity to lead with this and bring this to North America, the United States,
[1595.48] David Roberts: and through our partners and pals in Europe as well.
[1599.48] Stephen: That's fantastic.
[1600.48] Stephen: I mean, it's things like this that get people on board and push the technology forward.
[1604.48] Stephen: Seeing an appealing use case drives the technology forward.
[1608.48] Stephen: And I'm sure there's going to be lots of interesting developments around LEDs and light pipes and all this stuff that come out of drone soccer.
[1614.48] Stephen: Yeah, we have.
[1616.48] Kyle Sanders: I'm sure you all are aware that, you know, it's tough to come in as a novice and know what to buy.
[1621.48] Kyle Sanders: And a lot of schools and school systems are relying on off-the-shelf drones that are fragile,
[1627.48] Kyle Sanders: that they get from the store or order from somewhere in that really aren't built for the classroom.
[1631.48] Kyle Sanders: Like you mentioned, a magic box that flies until you break it and then it doesn't work.
[1636.48] Kyle Sanders: So this is something that we really carefully designed that a novice can use to get into the sport.
[1642.48] Kyle Sanders: And then if they want to put a camera on it and race with it, they can do that.
[1645.48] Kyle Sanders: Excellent.
[1646.48] Kyle Sanders: So kind of bringing people in.
[1648.48] Kyle Sanders: And we actually pushed pretty early on to have this be a solderless assembly.
[1655.48] Kyle Sanders: So imagine learning to solder with 12-year-olds is a bit of a challenge.
[1659.48] Kyle Sanders: So the motors and flight boards are plugged, you know, so they assemble the hardware,
[1665.48] Kyle Sanders: but they can go straight into the programming, the test flying.
[1670.48] Kyle Sanders: A student can build this in about an hour and program it in another hour.
[1675.48] Kyle Sanders: And then they're learning how to fly.
[1677.48] Kyle Sanders: So the time to pick up the sport, you know, if you can hover in front of the goal, you can play the game.
[1685.48] Stephen: After you've spent a couple of terms, plugging in new motors and plugging in new LEDs and fixing your frame up,
[1693.48] Stephen: do you see a lot of people then go on and take it further and start to do a custom build of their own
[1698.48] Stephen: and get out there, fly around the parking lot?
[1701.48] Kyle Sanders: That's exactly the idea.
[1703.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, they can modify, upgrade, customize this.
[1706.48] Kyle Sanders: Some of the school programs we're working with have CNC machines that they're manufacturing their own parts for it.
[1712.48] Kyle Sanders: And that's what we want to see.
[1714.48] Stephen: That's perfect. Yeah.
[1716.48] Stephen: When I was at school, it was all making mirror stands and make a Perspex recipe book holder or something.
[1721.48] Stephen: If I could have made a drone frame, I would have been over the moon.
[1724.48] Stephen: I tell you, it's fantastic.
[1726.48] Jack: Oh, my God. I had a bottle opener.
[1728.48] Jack: You guys have got like way better mirror stands.
[1731.48] Stephen: Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it?
[1733.48] Jack: Well, they wouldn't let trust us with anything shiny.
[1737.48] Stephen: I wouldn't trust you with anything shiny.
[1742.48] David Roberts: Part of our philosophy has been to keep the rules set open or to keep them to stay within the FBI rules.
[1748.48] David Roberts: But if somebody wanted to show up to an event with their own modification or modification to this fall,
[1754.48] David Roberts: or it has to be within 20 centimeters, the aircraft has to be below 300 grams.
[1760.48] David Roberts: After that, they're fully compliant with the FBI rules.
[1765.48] David Roberts: And so they would be able to play into our realm.
[1768.48] David Roberts: As far as the automatic scoring stuff, we can always figure that out later.
[1771.48] David Roberts: But we do encourage everybody to be able to modify if they could.
[1774.48] David Roberts: We don't think they're going to be able to come up with a better approach than what we've done here.
[1779.48] David Roberts: They might. And we encourage that. We're excited about that.
[1782.48] David Roberts: And on the 40 centimeter platform, we completely expect to see a lot of amazing things that can happen with that.
[1790.48] David Roberts: The commercial application of one of these aircraft or 40 centimeter diameter aircraft,
[1795.48] David Roberts: the commercial application where these things could fly in a harsh environment, in a closed environment,
[1801.48] David Roberts: and be able to send radar, LIDAR, sonar, or be able to fly with all that.
[1806.48] David Roberts: It's a flight controller with you.
[1808.48] David Roberts: Or like put a servo on there with a grabber, have a bit of fun.
[1811.48] David Roberts: There's a lot of different things.
[1813.48] David Roberts: With our stabilizing technology, that can happen.
[1817.48] David Roberts: Let me talk about that real quick.
[1818.48] David Roberts: So part of the program that we did with this, if you think about, that's a standard electric motor.
[1823.48] David Roberts: It runs into interference. It tries harder.
[1825.48] David Roberts: And with a flight controller, it's programmed to tilt over and run into the wind, flying whatever.
[1831.48] David Roberts: So if the wind gets goofy, same with this.
[1833.48] David Roberts: It's going to be a similar flight controller, but it's going to run into something.
[1836.48] David Roberts: We know it's going to run into the side of the arena. It's going to run into the net.
[1840.48] David Roberts: And what we found with just standard programming is it would hit the inside and shoot up,
[1844.48] David Roberts: and then go to the corner and go, whaaat?
[1847.48] David Roberts: Yay, ammo!
[1849.48] David Roberts: So yeah, the only thing we could do is disarm and let it fall and go, oh no, net, what do we do?
[1852.48] David Roberts: So we spent a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of testing to program this aircraft
[1859.48] David Roberts: so that when it runs into the net, it registers the air and then dismisses it.
[1863.48] David Roberts: It just bounces off.
[1864.48] David Roberts: And so that allows me to not decline and go up to the corner,
[1868.48] David Roberts: but allows for the student or anybody to fly it and accept.
[1871.48] David Roberts: Again, it hits an air, registers it, dismisses it, and goes back to flying normal.
[1876.48] Stephen: I imagine there's a lot of people doing whoop races and things that would be really interested
[1880.48] Stephen: to hear what you came up with there.
[1883.48] Kyle Sanders: Yeah, and they're certainly not indestructible, but they take a lot of abuse.
[1887.48] Kyle Sanders: I imagine a 12-year-old learning to fly for the first time,
[1890.48] Kyle Sanders: they're bouncing it from the floor to ceiling, and these things stand up pretty well
[1894.48] Kyle Sanders: to some very novice pilots.
[1897.48] Kyle Sanders: And then once you gain more experience in the game,
[1900.48] Kyle Sanders: your flight becomes a lot more controlled,
[1902.48] Kyle Sanders: and you're balancing the risk you want to take of getting knocked out of the game
[1906.48] Kyle Sanders: versus how conservative you want to fly in.
[1910.48] Kyle Sanders: So there's always that delicate balance that in the sport right now, in the rulesets,
[1914.48] Kyle Sanders: if you get knocked out, you're just out for the rest of that three-minute set,
[1918.48] Kyle Sanders: and your team is flying short-handed.
[1920.48] Kyle Sanders: So if you're ramming a solid goal going as fast as you can,
[1925.48] Kyle Sanders: yeah, your drone might not survive it.
[1927.48] Kyle Sanders: So it's an interesting dynamic.
[1930.48] Stephen: You start them off a little bit rate-limited and power-limited,
[1934.48] Stephen: so they can't just go full tilt into stuff,
[1936.48] Stephen: and you work them up as their skill level increases, I assume.
[1940.48] Kyle Sanders: Yeah, we have a training wheels protocol.
[1942.48] Kyle Sanders: We brought the settings down to an absolute minimum for a brand-new pilot.
[1948.48] Kyle Sanders: It's still a challenge if they have no familiarity with it.
[1952.48] Kyle Sanders: It takes them a couple hours to really get the hang of it.
[1956.48] Kyle Sanders: But we had some student teams at a summer camp.
[1961.48] Kyle Sanders: They showed up on Tuesday for a four-hour-a-day summer camp,
[1966.48] Kyle Sanders: and on Saturday, we're competing in a state tournament and won the gold medal.
[1970.48] Kyle Sanders: So these kids can pick it up really fast,
[1974.48] Kyle Sanders: and they get to that level surprisingly quickly.
[1978.48] Stephen: They're learning a lot more than just buying a console on day of release
[1981.48] Stephen: and hiding away for 48 hours until they become wizards at it.
[1984.48] Stephen: It's a more of a life skill.
[1986.48] David Roberts: We see the future of the pilots flying from examples from our friends in Korea,
[1991.48] David Roberts: where they have balls that are going in a round robin in a defensive mode
[1996.48] David Roberts: where they're following each other.
[1998.48] David Roberts: It's really crazy to see how much time they must have spent,
[2001.48] David Roberts: but the skill level, and we see that our students will eventually grow
[2005.48] David Roberts: to have that similar approach where they're machines working together.
[2011.48] Stephen: Formation flying.
[2014.48] Stephen: You see a lot of people do information flying fixed-wing,
[2017.48] Stephen: but I mentioned when these kids get out there with multirotors in wide open spaces,
[2022.48] Stephen: they'll be able to do some really impressive things.
[2024.48] Stephen: Formation flying fixed-wing, by the way, is incredibly difficult.
[2027.48] Frank: This episode was recorded in front of a live online audience,
[2030.48] Frank: downloaded and edited to make sense when it played audio only,
[2033.48] Frank: censored to please the iTunes people, hosted on the internet,
[2036.48] Frank: forwarded through to your podcast provider,
[2038.48] Frank: downloaded, playing on your device, and is now playing in your ears.
[2042.48] Frank: All thanks to our Patreons.
[2044.48] Frank: Consider joining them and you'll also get other online benefits.
[2047.48] Frank: Find out more at patreon.com forward slash let's drone out.
[2052.48] Kyle Sanders: I wanted to answer a question in the chat, you know,
[2055.48] Kyle Sanders: is there a referee ball that's black and white?
[2057.48] Kyle Sanders: I did build a referee ball.
[2060.48] Kyle Sanders: This is just the frame, but I put my HD camera on it
[2063.48] Kyle Sanders: and we were using it to get in-game footage.
[2068.48] Stephen: I wasn't trying to denigrate formation flying fixed-wing, by the way,
[2071.48] Stephen: but just more saying that the interesting options
[2074.48] Stephen: with thrust vectoring with a multi-rotor
[2076.48] Stephen: could lead to some interesting fixed-wing flying.
[2079.48] Kyle Sanders: Sure, absolutely.
[2081.48] Kyle Sanders: Having done formation fixed-wing flying in the Air Force,
[2084.48] Kyle Sanders: I can tell you, honestly, it was the scariest,
[2087.48] Kyle Sanders: most intimidating thing I've ever done,
[2089.48] Kyle Sanders: you know, flying 10 feet away from another plane.
[2091.48] Kyle Sanders: Flown in combat, I've skydived.
[2094.48] Kyle Sanders: Formation flying was the most intense.
[2097.48] Frank: What aircraft were you flying formation?
[2100.48] Frank: We have some regular hosts who will be wetting themselves
[2104.48] Frank: not being able to speak to you about this
[2106.48] Frank: because they are massive formation flying fans.
[2110.48] Kyle Sanders: Oh, yeah.
[2111.48] Kyle Sanders: I mean, you know, everybody in the Air Force trains information
[2113.48] Kyle Sanders: flying in the T6 Texan II,
[2115.48] Kyle Sanders: which is kind of a modern P-51 Mustang.
[2118.48] Kyle Sanders: I went on to fly C-130s,
[2120.48] Kyle Sanders: which we do fly formation tactical low-level
[2123.48] Kyle Sanders: in a 300-foot wingspan aircraft.
[2125.48] Kyle Sanders: That's aggressive, yeah.
[2127.48] Kyle Sanders: It's a big plane.
[2128.48] Kyle Sanders: You've got to be careful when you're flying formation
[2130.48] Kyle Sanders: in a big plane.
[2132.48] Kyle Sanders: But, yeah, for me, the big element of drone racing
[2136.48] Kyle Sanders: that was missing was that team element for me.
[2139.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, I've always played team sports.
[2141.48] Kyle Sanders: That's what's fun for me.
[2143.48] Kyle Sanders: Flying formation is some of the most fun you'll ever have
[2146.48] Kyle Sanders: because you're interacting with other people in the air.
[2149.48] Kyle Sanders: And so drone soccer has that,
[2151.48] Kyle Sanders: and you can really get that experience.
[2155.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, there's that saying that, you know,
[2157.48] Kyle Sanders: it's a good...
[2158.48] Kyle Sanders: Everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.
[2160.48] Kyle Sanders: You know, flying a drone when somebody else is trying to hit you,
[2165.48] Kyle Sanders: it's a whole different experience.
[2167.48] Kyle Sanders: And it's now not about your individual skill level.
[2169.48] Kyle Sanders: You're trying to outsmart and outfly somebody in the head.
[2172.48] Kyle Sanders: It's exciting.
[2174.48] Jack: I found with, you know, modern aircraft,
[2177.48] Jack: if there's a lot of you up in the air
[2179.48] Jack: and you're trying to hit each other, you can never can.
[2182.48] Jack: As soon as there's just two of you...
[2185.48] Frank: Two of you in an empty field, you will crash.
[2188.48] Frank: 15-up flying combat, you can't hit anyone.
[2192.48] Jack: Yeah, I know. Yeah.
[2194.48] Jack: Like, five minutes, you know, just two of you,
[2196.48] Jack: you get very intimate.
[2198.48] Stephen: So, yeah, we had some people on doing an FPV combat system
[2202.48] Stephen: where they had LED-based guns and sensors that would fire
[2207.48] Stephen: and registering hits and things.
[2210.48] Stephen: Yeah, incredibly difficult to actually hit anything.
[2213.48] Stephen: It is.
[2215.48] Kyle Sanders: That's why we lock them in a very small space.
[2218.48] David Roberts: I want to talk about drone soccer again.
[2220.48] David Roberts: And it's just something I was thinking of,
[2222.48] David Roberts: that we really like drone racing. It's a blast.
[2224.48] David Roberts: You'll find us involved in other drone racing things in the future,
[2227.48] David Roberts: probably because it's an awesome community.
[2229.48] David Roberts: But within a drone race, it's difficult sometimes to see who's in the lead.
[2233.48] David Roberts: Who's winning and how that thing...
[2236.48] David Roberts: I've been to races all over the world.
[2239.48] David Roberts: For spectator, it's challenging.
[2241.48] David Roberts: For me, it's a blast because I think I know people,
[2243.48] David Roberts: I'm cheering for them, I'm thinking about what about the people
[2245.48] David Roberts: and the crowds are going, oh, this is really neat,
[2247.48] David Roberts: oh, but what's happening?
[2249.48] David Roberts: When we've had our test tournaments,
[2251.48] David Roberts: one of the things that shocked me,
[2253.48] David Roberts: just as I would go and everything was happening,
[2255.48] David Roberts: I'd sit down in the grandstands and watch the people.
[2258.48] David Roberts: The parents were rooting for their kids from that high school.
[2261.48] David Roberts: Go south, high school!
[2263.48] David Roberts: It was amazing because they could see right in front of them the action.
[2266.48] David Roberts: They knew what was happening.
[2268.48] Stephen: You constrain the action in a smaller space,
[2270.48] Stephen: and there's more action in that.
[2272.48] Stephen: There's not just one at a time tearing around a track.
[2274.48] Stephen: It's just much more interesting for a spectator, isn't it?
[2277.48] Stephen: They can easily focus on it.
[2279.48] David Roberts: It's incredible that we thought,
[2281.48] David Roberts: oh, sure, it's going to be much more spectator-friendly,
[2283.48] David Roberts: but to see the parents seeing what's happening and knowing,
[2285.48] David Roberts: oh, there was a good score! Oh, what a block!
[2288.48] David Roberts: It was a wonderful shock to the system to say,
[2290.48] David Roberts: everybody's into it, they can really see.
[2292.48] David Roberts: In the entire room, everybody was engaged.
[2295.48] Stephen: They can see it's a sport that they're familiar with.
[2297.48] Stephen: It's not some kind of angry wasp zipping around a track.
[2300.48] Stephen: It's familiar.
[2302.48] Kyle Sanders: Who doesn't like a hard hit?
[2306.48] Kyle Sanders: They go crazy, there's cheering.
[2309.48] Kyle Sanders: When they first started cheering,
[2312.48] Kyle Sanders: we were like, what?
[2314.48] Kyle Sanders: They're really into it. It was exciting to see.
[2316.48] David Roberts: That must have been a great day.
[2319.48] David Roberts: Yes, it was, and it continues to be
[2321.48] David Roberts: because it's a return each time we see this happening.
[2324.48] Frank: Like you said, you've tied the Behemoth
[2330.48] Frank: that is the US high school sports system
[2333.48] Frank: and you've got these contacts in China doing the hardware,
[2337.48] Frank: you've put some software together,
[2339.48] Frank: you've got it fitting within the FAI,
[2341.48] Frank: you've got the educational side of things lined up as well.
[2345.48] Frank: For someone who is drone inclined,
[2348.48] Frank: who's maybe got a kid in school and is thinking,
[2351.48] Frank: I would like to get my local school starting to do this.
[2356.48] Frank: What should they do to get in contact with you
[2359.48] Frank: and what should they expect to happen?
[2364.48] Kyle Sanders: That's a great question.
[2366.48] Kyle Sanders: This is a community sport in that you have to have teams to play.
[2371.48] Kyle Sanders: The most important piece of this is finding a community center,
[2375.48] Kyle Sanders: a university somewhere in that city to put an arena.
[2380.48] Kyle Sanders: We partner with nonprofit organizations primarily.
[2383.48] Kyle Sanders: They fundraise, bring the program into that town,
[2386.48] Kyle Sanders: and then we can begin enrolling schools and community teams.
[2390.48] Kyle Sanders: We've had success with air and space museums,
[2393.48] Kyle Sanders: with youth outreach programs, with community colleges,
[2398.48] Kyle Sanders: vocational universities in the UK, whatever you guys call them.
[2404.48] Kyle Sanders: They are really excited about what this means for young people
[2407.48] Kyle Sanders: and they're very eager to get it.
[2410.48] Kyle Sanders: Once we have that presence in the community,
[2414.48] Kyle Sanders: teams and programs can enroll directly.
[2417.48] Kyle Sanders: We bulk ship all the equipment to them to get them started.
[2420.48] Kyle Sanders: We train their staff in how to use FPV style drones
[2424.48] Kyle Sanders: if they're not familiar with it.
[2426.48] Kyle Sanders: We're really trying to hold the hands of those local leaders
[2430.48] Kyle Sanders: and educators to get into the program.
[2434.48] David Roberts: The key is having a venue that has an arena, the first arena,
[2438.48] David Roberts: so schools can come to that spot.
[2441.48] David Roberts: We found that an air and space museum is looking to bring more people by
[2446.48] David Roberts: to visit all things air and space.
[2449.48] Stephen: You've got a big net.
[2451.48] Stephen: You've got the goals.
[2452.48] Stephen: Is there a lot of extra apparatus to do sensing for the goals and things?
[2457.48] David Roberts: We need a 10 by 20 footprint for the arena.
[2462.48] David Roberts: Usually, you need some standoffs 6 to 12 feet all the way around
[2465.48] David Roberts: and everything should be able to be contained within that arena,
[2468.48] David Roberts: within that area.
[2469.48] David Roberts: The contraptions for the goals, the goals are self-contained.
[2472.48] David Roberts: You need power.
[2473.48] David Roberts: You need to be able to power them.
[2475.48] David Roberts: They work real well.
[2476.48] Kyle Sanders: The arena itself is a bit tall.
[2479.48] Kyle Sanders: You need four-meter ceilings or so, at least,
[2483.48] Kyle Sanders: just to fit it all in there, but if you have a space like that,
[2486.48] Stephen: you've got to hold your playing basketball in or something like that.
[2489.48] Stephen: Yeah, exactly.
[2491.48] David Roberts: You can put three of these arenas in a gymnasium, in a basketball court.
[2495.48] David Roberts: When we had our Rocky Mountain State Games tournament,
[2500.48] David Roberts: we had two arenas right next to each other.
[2503.48] David Roberts: You may have seen it from that radio show that you mentioned earlier.
[2507.48] David Roberts: They had some really nice video.
[2509.48] David Roberts: But there were two arenas next to each other,
[2510.48] David Roberts: so we were able to do a round round tournament
[2512.48] David Roberts: and really work quite a few games through.
[2516.48] David Roberts: A point of matter is, one game we found,
[2519.48] David Roberts: if you're in a tournament setting, is about 30 minutes.
[2522.48] David Roberts: They have three minutes on, three minutes sets,
[2526.48] David Roberts: but then a little bit of time to do a little repair
[2529.48] David Roberts: and then just the bookkeeping on the front end of the back end.
[2532.48] David Roberts: So about 30 minutes, we'll rotate through one game.
[2535.48] Stephen: I imagine that you've put safety measures around pretty much everything.
[2539.48] Stephen: It kind of leaves the battery charging, I guess,
[2542.48] Stephen: as the perennial problem around RC hobbies, right?
[2545.48] Stephen: You have to supervise all that stuff nice and closely.
[2548.48] David Roberts: You know, we really do, and I have a huge amount of respect for batteries.
[2551.48] David Roberts: I had about a $25,000 fire in my garage,
[2555.48] David Roberts: and I did not lose my house because of a great neighbor
[2558.48] David Roberts: and having to have a hose right there.
[2560.48] David Roberts: But there's going to be a fire eventually.
[2562.48] David Roberts: We really respect that.
[2564.48] David Roberts: And so battery care and safety is part of our training,
[2568.48] David Roberts: what we teach the students, that responsibility.
[2570.48] David Roberts: We have fantastic battery chargers that we're working with,
[2573.48] David Roberts: the Toolkit RC and 4Qs.
[2575.48] David Roberts: We love them because of how great they charge.
[2578.48] David Roberts: The key to this, though, is that in a three-minute set,
[2582.48] David Roberts: we're using a 450 milliamp or maybe even a 550 milliamp hour battery.
[2586.48] David Roberts: We're only draining it down about 30%.
[2589.48] David Roberts: There's a lot more juice, so we're not beating the tar out of the batteries.
[2592.48] David Roberts: We're not taking them.
[2594.48] David Roberts: It's not a drone race where we're, you know, going full throttle.
[2597.48] David Roberts: We go, wow, it's managed flight.
[2600.48] David Roberts: And so we're not, we're really pleased about what we're finding
[2603.48] David Roberts: with the performance of the batteries that they don't get beat up.
[2607.48] David Roberts: And they're not getting slapped around.
[2610.48] David Roberts: You know, it's falling around 10 feet,
[2612.48] David Roberts: so you're not going to smash them too bad.
[2614.48] David Roberts: Yeah.
[2615.48] David Roberts: So...
[2616.48] Jack: Go ahead.
[2617.48] Jack: I was going to say, if you guys...
[2619.48] Jack: I've got two questions.
[2621.48] Jack: Have you guys...
[2623.48] Jack: Have you heard about BatSafe,
[2625.48] Jack: little BatSafe battery boxes with the filter,
[2629.48] Jack: the vent to atmosphere?
[2630.48] Jack: That might be something that you could incorporate.
[2633.48] David Roberts: We do include safe bags with the aircraft,
[2637.48] David Roberts: the batteries, the chargers.
[2639.48] David Roberts: It's part of our overall program.
[2640.48] David Roberts: Absolutely.
[2641.48] David Roberts: Yeah.
[2642.48] Jack: I just wondered for storage, you know, it might be even better.
[2645.48] David Roberts: We need storage safe bags.
[2648.48] Jack: Yeah.
[2649.48] Jack: My other question, have you guys considered or if you...
[2651.48] Jack: Oh, very good, Steve.
[2654.48] Jack: He's holding one up.
[2657.48] Jack: Yeah.
[2658.48] Jack: Frank owns two and I own the extra large one, I think.
[2662.48] Jack: Yeah.
[2663.48] Stephen: What is that?
[2664.48] Stephen: Fireproof box.
[2665.48] Stephen: So, this is basically a fire retardant charging case
[2668.48] Stephen: and they've put a little rubber grommet on.
[2670.48] Stephen: So, you feed all the cables through a rubber grommet.
[2673.48] Stephen: It's got a little rest to put your charger on there
[2676.48] Stephen: and a latch to close it.
[2678.48] Stephen: So, you do all the charging in a fireproof box.
[2681.48] Stephen: No, that's fantastic.
[2682.48] Stephen: I like that a lot.
[2684.48] David Roberts: It's hard not to love something like that,
[2686.48] David Roberts: especially the frequency of magic smoke
[2688.48] David Roberts: come blowing out of it.
[2689.48] David Roberts: Yeah.
[2690.48] Stephen: They've done some tests where they actually,
[2692.48] Stephen: like, overcharged a battery.
[2694.48] Stephen: They put the charger on lead acid profile
[2696.48] Stephen: and blew a battery up in here and it let out a bit of smoke
[2700.48] Stephen: but it all stayed in the box and that's the main thing.
[2703.48] Jack: Yeah.
[2704.48] Jack: And my other question is,
[2706.48] Jack: I wondered if you guys have spoken to anyone
[2708.48] Jack: who can, like, implement drone football.
[2711.48] Jack: drone football digitally so that you guys could, like,
[2714.48] Jack: have a bit of a simulation.
[2716.48] David Roberts: No one.
[2717.48] David Roberts: It's on our roadmap.
[2719.48] David Roberts: Yeah.
[2720.48] David Roberts: Between 40 centimeter and a simulator.
[2722.48] David Roberts: I don't know which one is more of a winner.
[2723.48] David Roberts: Kyle's been pushing for it.
[2725.48] David Roberts: We agree that being able to simulate this.
[2727.48] David Roberts: And we have conversations going on with a couple of different
[2730.48] David Roberts: companies or people.
[2732.48] David Roberts: That's all that we really want to say.
[2733.48] David Roberts: But, yeah, it is definitely something that we have in our works.
[2738.48] Kyle Sanders: We have a physics problem with modeling the collisions.
[2742.48] Kyle Sanders: So hopefully there is a flight simulator that can handle that.
[2746.48] Kyle Sanders: But that's super important as we roll this out.
[2749.48] Kyle Sanders: The key to us is accessibility.
[2751.48] Kyle Sanders: Something that teachers can use, families can use right away.
[2755.48] Kyle Sanders: You can train on the computer.
[2757.48] Kyle Sanders: You can charge it at home in a battery bag so it's safe.
[2761.48] Kyle Sanders: It's a big part of what we're trying to roll out to families.
[2765.48] David Roberts: Kyle, you're saying roll out to families.
[2767.48] David Roberts: You're saying you can't do that.
[2769.48] David Roberts: You're saying you can't do that.
[2771.48] David Roberts: You can't do that.
[2772.48] David Roberts: You can't do that.
[2774.48] David Roberts: This is the conversation we had early on.
[2776.48] David Roberts: We agreed on something really quickly.
[2778.48] David Roberts: This is about the kids.
[2779.48] David Roberts: This is so much about the students.
[2781.48] David Roberts: As we've talked to different people and the feedback we've received
[2784.48] David Roberts: from the teachers, the students that are in the tougher neighborhoods
[2787.48] David Roberts: that are going to the boys and girls club to escape.
[2791.48] David Roberts: They have a nice place.
[2792.48] David Roberts: They're playing drone soccer.
[2794.48] David Roberts: It's such an amazing thing to see.
[2796.48] David Roberts: Social emotional wellness.
[2798.48] David Roberts: These kids are getting inspired to work harder.
[2801.48] David Roberts: When we look at this, we're so excited about what this is about.
[2805.48] David Roberts: Again, these are the kinds of programs that we want to be.
[2808.48] David Roberts: Everybody should be stopping and looking at it.
[2810.48] David Roberts: We should be promoting it.
[2811.48] David Roberts: We should be involved in it because of the impact on the kids.
[2814.48] David Roberts: It's really exciting to see what it's going to do for them.
[2818.48] David Roberts: The first group in Colorado, we can tell already that they're aspiring
[2824.48] David Roberts: to become engineers, to be not necessarily pilots.
[2828.48] David Roberts: That's not a bit to approach a much more technical approach to their school.
[2833.48] Stephen: It's very difficult to get into applied engineering.
[2835.48] Stephen: In the classroom, it's traditionally all theoretical.
[2837.48] Stephen: You've got your mathematics and languages, English literature and things.
[2842.48] Stephen: But to actually get applied engineering is very difficult
[2845.48] Stephen: until you get to the point where you can be trusted around a car.
[2848.48] Stephen: That's a pretty senior student, really.
[2850.48] Stephen: Up until then, you don't really feel you're doing anything applied.
[2854.48] Stephen: It gives you so much satisfaction as someone who's worked in IT for years
[2857.48] Stephen: to actually put something together and see it do something.
[2860.48] Stephen: Absolutely.
[2861.48] Stephen: That is the reward.
[2863.48] Stephen: It's a celebration, but it doesn't.
[2865.48] Stephen: Yes, it works.
[2867.48] Kyle Sanders: The other piece of accessibility is the cost.
[2871.48] Kyle Sanders: It is something that is prohibitive in this community, in this hobby.
[2876.48] Kyle Sanders: It costs a lot to get into high-performance drones or industrial drones.
[2881.48] Kyle Sanders: We work real hard that everything a student needs for the entire season,
[2886.48] Kyle Sanders: all the spare parts, tools, charger, batteries, everything is under $500.
[2892.48] Kyle Sanders: We're working with not only educational systems who will fund this program,
[2896.48] Kyle Sanders: but also the athletic departments to form an athletic club to pay for this for schools.
[2902.48] Kyle Sanders: This is an international sport.
[2905.48] Kyle Sanders: Pretty soon, this will be a varsity sport at the school level
[2910.48] Kyle Sanders: that they'll be competing in their school systems with.
[2913.48] Kyle Sanders: By finding avenues of funding to support these kids,
[2918.48] Kyle Sanders: we can get them in without them having to go out and spend $1,000 over their own money.
[2922.48] Stephen: Are you helping the school purchasing programs?
[2924.48] Stephen: One thing in the UK that always stuck out to me as a kid
[2927.48] Stephen: was how little the school manages to get for their money.
[2930.48] Stephen: Where does that money go?
[2932.48] Stephen: It always seems like when you hear they spent X amount of money
[2935.48] Stephen: and you look at what they've got, there's always a few eyebrows raised.
[2939.48] Stephen: Can you help them out with that and make sure they don't make any bad purchases?
[2943.48] Kyle Sanders: A lot of school systems have been burned on bad drones.
[2948.48] Kyle Sanders: They all want to see this and beat it up first.
[2951.48] Kyle Sanders: But the response has been really great.
[2953.48] Kyle Sanders: We work mostly with the district and state level here in the US.
[2957.48] Kyle Sanders: There are massive funds set aside for career training.
[2961.48] Kyle Sanders: Everybody sees that the drone industry is a booming, high-skill industry.
[2967.48] Kyle Sanders: The aviation industry, to go be a mechanic on a plane,
[2971.48] Kyle Sanders: or a technician, or a pilot, has a massive shortage here in the US.
[2975.48] Kyle Sanders: The entire educational system recognises the value
[2979.48] Kyle Sanders: of getting students into something like this.
[2981.48] Kyle Sanders: We've been successful at getting those funds for the schools.
[2985.48] Kyle Sanders: Schools aren't paying for it themselves, really.
[2988.48] Frank: You're providing these kits as well.
[2992.48] Frank: There's the economy of scale from you
[2995.48] Frank: getting these systems together and working with the manufacturers,
[2999.48] Frank: but also presumably as well.
[3001.48] Frank: A school unit, a school club, isn't going to buy one kit.
[3006.48] Frank: They're going to buy 10, 15.
[3009.48] David Roberts: As a matter of fact, we are not making these available as a single kit.
[3013.48] David Roberts: You won't be able to go to your local hobby store and buy one of these.
[3017.48] David Roberts: It's strictly for the education.
[3019.48] David Roberts: We have classroom packs of 6-pack and 12-pack.
[3021.48] David Roberts: We can have 6-pack, 3 on 3,
[3023.48] David Roberts: or 2 on 6 on 5 versus 5 versus another school.
[3028.48] Kyle Sanders: If you want to get your hands on one of these,
[3031.48] Kyle Sanders: you would need to go through your local arena, join a team,
[3035.48] Kyle Sanders: and order your kit like you would on any other sports team.
[3040.48] Kyle Sanders: It's a bit of a way to encourage the community.
[3044.48] Kyle Sanders: I think that's something that the drone community has struggled with,
[3047.48] Kyle Sanders: is attracting and bringing in new pilots.
[3050.48] Kyle Sanders: This is a way to start building that foundation,
[3053.48] Kyle Sanders: giving the community centers a way to bring people in.
[3056.48] Kyle Sanders: It also keeps the cost low because we ship directly to the arena locations
[3061.48] Kyle Sanders: instead of double paying shipping for every single person.
[3065.48] Frank: I was thinking maybe a school or community club or whatever it is,
[3072.48] Frank: maybe we'd want to get maybe the drones first
[3076.48] Frank: because then you can actually have something that's going on.
[3079.48] Frank: You can get the kids interested and you can get things happening
[3082.48] Frank: on a regular basis and then build up to the arena.
[3085.48] Frank: I guess what you're saying is in a larger area,
[3088.48] Frank: you want an arena there so that you can get the kits there
[3093.48] Frank: and have a central hub of presumably not just the shipping,
[3098.48] Frank: but also knowledge and contacts.
[3102.48] Frank: It's no good if there's one person in a school who knows it
[3107.48] Frank: and then they move to the next school over.
[3110.48] Frank: Whereas if you've got an arena there and you've got that commitment there,
[3114.48] Frank: presumably that makes sure that that investment in those kits
[3118.48] Frank: is going to carry on regardless.
[3121.48] David Roberts: We mentioned that it's really important to have a central arena for a group of schools.
[3126.48] David Roberts: Let's go back to how do you bring this into your community.
[3128.48] David Roberts: It's a three-step process.
[3131.48] David Roberts: First off, the arena that has to be there and ready to go.
[3134.48] David Roberts: The second is that person, a hero, a local person who says,
[3138.48] David Roberts: I'm going to carry the torch. This is something we need to have.
[3141.48] David Roberts: It's a career and technical education teacher.
[3143.48] David Roberts: It's the administrator, the principal of the school.
[3145.48] David Roberts: It's a local parent who's like, oh my gosh, this is great.
[3148.48] David Roberts: I know my teachers at the school.
[3150.48] David Roberts: It's a local hero that's going to do it.
[3152.48] David Roberts: The third is go to dronesocker.world and sign up.
[3156.48] David Roberts: We have an application form for you to fill out,
[3159.48] David Roberts: dronesocker.us or dronesocker.world.
[3161.48] David Roberts: We take the information.
[3163.48] David Roberts: We're going to reach out to that hero, that local person and say,
[3166.48] David Roberts: what's going on? How can we work together?
[3168.48] David Roberts: Then we begin that conversation.
[3170.48] David Roberts: As a matter of fact, we then begin connecting the dots.
[3173.48] David Roberts: Because there's a lot of dots in that we have interests popping up in the UK.
[3177.48] David Roberts: There's three or four organizations already that we're talking to
[3180.48] David Roberts: that are reaching out to us from funding sources
[3183.48] David Roberts: to working with the army in the UK.
[3187.48] David Roberts: I was actually saying, speaking of funding sources.
[3190.48] David Roberts: I had an email from that group this morning.
[3192.48] David Roberts: That's how we need to answer those questions for our buddy's meal.
[3195.48] David Roberts: If you reach out to us at dronesocker.world,
[3198.48] David Roberts: we're going to connect your dots and say,
[3200.48] David Roberts: you know what's already happening in the UK?
[3202.48] David Roberts: It's already happening in Spain.
[3204.48] David Roberts: Here's our friends in Germany.
[3206.48] David Roberts: Unfortunately, we have not done very much marketing at all.
[3209.48] David Roberts: We've just been doing the testing and talking about this.
[3212.48] David Roberts: We keep getting people asking questions, what else is happening?
[3215.48] David Roberts: We're getting out and people are reaching out already saying,
[3219.48] David Roberts: how do we bring this into our community?
[3221.48] David Roberts: I'm a local leader.
[3223.48] David Roberts: How do I put an arena in?
[3225.48] David Roberts: There's different people, there's arena people,
[3227.48] David Roberts: and then there's people, local leaders.
[3229.48] David Roberts: We want to talk about those.
[3230.48] Kyle Sanders: By the way, you don't have to be a school system.
[3232.48] Kyle Sanders: If you are a drone business owner,
[3235.48] Kyle Sanders: if you have a retail space that you could put this in,
[3237.48] Kyle Sanders: if you have a racetrack that people are doing racing in your space,
[3242.48] Kyle Sanders: if you have about 30 by 40 feet,
[3246.48] Kyle Sanders: I don't know what that is in meters,
[3248.48] Kyle Sanders: but if you have enough room for an arena,
[3250.48] Stephen: you can play basketball and play drone soccer.
[3253.48] Kyle Sanders: Right.
[3254.48] Kyle Sanders: If you can fit it in your venue,
[3256.48] Kyle Sanders: you could be that local arena that begins bringing everybody into that space.
[3262.48] Stephen: Great.
[3263.48] Stephen: That's wonderful.
[3265.48] Stephen: I was wondering if you've got any interest in sponsorship from,
[3268.48] Stephen: you mentioned the army there,
[3269.48] Stephen: the kind of people that might benefit from kids going into STEM in this angle,
[3273.48] Stephen: doing applied engineering,
[3274.48] Stephen: whether it's doing mapping stuff or going out doing agricultural,
[3278.48] Stephen: 101 different things that people are finding uses for drones in the modern world.
[3282.48] Stephen: It seems like every month there's someone testing the water
[3285.48] Stephen: with a new way to use drones.
[3287.48] Stephen: Are any of those people approaching you and getting interest in and pushing the sport forward?
[3291.48] David Roberts: We had some interest from some companies that probably best not talk about it yet.
[3296.48] David Roberts: Kyle might want to be able to address something,
[3299.48] David Roberts: but again, we're getting started on this,
[3302.48] David Roberts: and we expect to have interest from those.
[3306.48] David Roberts: Kyle, do you want to spill any beans?
[3309.48] Kyle Sanders: Primarily, it's a lot of organizations that are already doing robotics education
[3314.48] Kyle Sanders: that are a little bit bored with the traditional robotics.
[3319.48] Kyle Sanders: We're getting a lot of universities that really see the value for their college students,
[3324.48] Kyle Sanders: but also bringing in the high school students on the campus.
[3328.48] Kyle Sanders: That translates to some military type people who do like ROTC,
[3335.48] Kyle Sanders: cadet stuff at the university, museums, other places like that are very eager.
[3341.48] Kyle Sanders: Any place that they want to bring in young people for STEM is pretty excited about it,
[3346.48] Kyle Sanders: including some international NGOs that are helping us bring this to other countries.
[3353.48] Kyle Sanders: Kyle, will you speak more about that soon?
[3356.48] David Roberts: Do you want to tell about that, what's going on in Africa, and what that might lead to?
[3363.48] Kyle Sanders: We have a program, it's a partnership with a nonprofit, the Global Air Drone Academy.
[3372.48] Kyle Sanders: They're out of Baltimore, but they've been working really closely in Lagos, Nigeria with the U.S. Embassy.
[3378.48] Kyle Sanders: We're part of a U.S. Embassy funded program to go train eight schools in drone soccer
[3384.48] Kyle Sanders: and have the first African drone soccer tournament in January.
[3388.48] Kyle Sanders: It hasn't been announced yet, but it's all coming.
[3393.48] Kyle Sanders: That's just an example of taking drones and drone technology to an area
[3398.48] Kyle Sanders: where these students would never have an opportunity to engage with it,
[3401.48] Kyle Sanders: getting them in a team environment.
[3404.48] Kyle Sanders: Because of how exciting it is for local leaders, you get this one in
[3410.48] Kyle Sanders: and now you start to see the rest of the area is like, well, how can we compete?
[3415.48] Kyle Sanders: It's exciting.
[3417.48] David Roberts: On those schools, we'll have five young men and five young women that would be competing.
[3423.48] David Roberts: We will go there and have a tournament where we'll determine the winner of that first initial tournament.
[3429.48] David Roberts: We have a goal of then bringing that team to the United States
[3433.48] David Roberts: to compete in an international tournament that we'll be putting together,
[3437.48] David Roberts: talking more about somewhere in July.
[3442.48] Frank: We'll watch this space.
[3449.48] Stephen: If people want to keep an eye on this and watch out for headlines,
[3452.48] Stephen: watch out for drone soccer news, where can they go?
[3456.48] Kyle Sanders: Dronesocker.us right now is the best place.
[3459.48] Kyle Sanders: We're working on international websites.
[3461.48] Kyle Sanders: Dronesocker.us is a great source for it.
[3466.48] Kyle Sanders: We're working with iFlight and the AMA in the next two or three weeks
[3471.48] Kyle Sanders: to kind of start that campaign.
[3475.48] Kyle Sanders: Right now, we've been very quiet, and we're ready to start telling people about it.
[3480.48] David Roberts: I will say on that, Lagos Nigeria program,
[3483.48] David Roberts: one of the leaders towards bringing that into Africa and across Africa and to Nigeria,
[3490.48] David Roberts: one of those leaders is from the UK.
[3492.48] David Roberts: He's talked to us like, I can't wait to have this go into place
[3495.48] David Roberts: and then we can talk about bringing this into the UK.
[3497.48] David Roberts: So we actually expect to be working with you guys in the United Kingdom
[3503.48] David Roberts: in the next six months. We expect to see drones.
[3506.48] Stephen: Where is dronesocker.co.uk? Where is it?
[3509.48] David Roberts: Well, it's in the wings.
[3511.48] David Roberts: Probably we will see it.
[3513.48] David Roberts: We'll keep an eye out.
[3515.48] David Roberts: We're connecting those lots of different organizations that are wanting to be involved with this.
[3519.48] David Roberts: It happens to be that the UK is rather like the state of New York here in the United States.
[3523.48] David Roberts: There's a lot of things happening, and we're about ready to put dronesocker there.
[3526.48] David Roberts: We'll see it happen into our pockets around the US.
[3529.48] David Roberts: The UK is one of those wonderful regions in the world.
[3533.48] Frank: I'm very much looking forward to hearing more about that in the UK,
[3537.48] Frank: because I mean, we've struggled, let's say, to get a drone rating.
[3544.48] Frank: We've struggled to make STEM interesting.
[3546.48] Frank: Going around the UK before now.
[3549.48] Frank: But hopefully that's now all the politics of that has all worked out, and we'll get into that.
[3554.48] Frank: We've also got the giant drone racing, the X-Class.
[3559.48] Frank: That's going to be starting next week, next week weekend, the 16th of October.
[3564.48] Frank: That is going to be our first X-Class race in the UK.
[3568.48] David Roberts: Have you seen one of those beasts fly? They are awesome.
[3572.48] Frank: There's been some friendly matches, I should say, at some various events.
[3578.48] Frank: But this will be the first proper competitive timed race,
[3583.48] Frank: and there will also be the beginnings of some wing racing in the UK as well at that event.
[3590.48] Frank: That's been put on by Fossil Staff and the British drone fliers,
[3596.48] Frank: and it's being done at Popham Airfield.
[3599.48] Frank: So anyone in the UK who wants to go on to that, that's Popham Airfield on the 16th of October.
[3606.48] Frank: You can find more by getting in touch with Fossil Staff, I believe.
[3612.48] Frank: But yes, I'm really looking forward to hearing where and when drone soccer reaches the UK.
[3621.48] Frank: Up until July, never even heard of it.
[3625.48] David Roberts: We like to reach out to you when we get there and say, hey, let's talk again.
[3630.48] Stephen: Absolutely. Let's keep the lines of communication open.
[3633.48] Stephen: It's going to be very exciting to hear you go into your next season by the sound of it.
[3637.48] Stephen: It's all getting up to speed. Good stuff.
[3640.48] Jack: Thank you.
[3643.48] Jack: Thank you guys so much. That was really interesting.
[3648.48] Jack: It might even be time to start up Team Poop again, maybe, Frank?
[3655.48] Jack: The most professional teams.
[3657.48] Jack: The British, sponsored by the British Poop Museum, which is fantastic.
[3663.48] Jack: Kyle, I've got a personal question to ask you.
[3666.48] Jack: Can I borrow you one evening so that I can get you on a Discord call?
[3670.48] Jack: Have you ever heard of DCS, Digital Combat Simulator?
[3674.48] Jack: So these other people that are familiar with the show like to sit there and play it.
[3682.48] Jack: I will pay you to just come on and just be like, you're doing it wrong.
[3686.48] Jack: You can't fly formation. You suck.
[3692.48] Kyle Sanders: So I am a bit of a gamer on the side.
[3696.48] Kyle Sanders: I have a Hotass and I like to play flying games because I have 11 years of training in it.
[3702.48] Kyle Sanders: It's a bit of an unfair advantage, but it's a lot of fun for me.
[3705.48] Jack: Oh, please school.
[3707.48] Kyle Sanders: I haven't seen this one, but yeah, I'd be happy to talk with you guys about some basic tactics.
[3715.48] Stephen: You don't know what you've started.
[3717.48] Jack: Oh, mate. Just watching enjoy sweat would be amazing.
[3722.48] Jack: Oh, this is fun for me. I like this kind of stuff.
[3726.48] Frank: And then just quickly before you sign off.
[3729.48] Frank: So ifpv.co.uk slash events slash one eight four is the link for the sign up for the X class and wing racing at Poppam Airfield on the 16th of October.
[3741.48] Jack: You've been listening to Let's Drone Out.
[3743.48] Jack: And we've been talking all about drone soccer.
[3748.48] Jack: So you've been joined by Andrew Stashfrank.
[3751.48] Frank: Bye.
[3752.48] Jack: Stephen.
[3754.48] Jack: Goodbye.
[3756.48] Jack: Myself.
[3757.48] Jack: Kyle Sanders.
[3760.48] Jack: We'll see you next time.
[3762.48] Jack: And you're the VP and the president David Roberts.
[3766.48] David Roberts: Thank you very much for your time. It's really been fun sharing.
[3769.48] David Roberts: Thanks very much.
[3770.48] David Roberts: Telemetry loss.