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A podcast about drones and the people behind them. An educational and entertaining take on the current state of drones and what flies ahead in the drone world.
It was Christmas Eve. It was storming really hard, and a skier had got separated from his daughters who were snowshoeing. They were back in the backcountry of Seymour. Got the thermal drone up, and I just covered that area until I was, like, out of power, basically. I just flew and flew.
Grant Baldwin:But the reason why I didn't see him was
Mark Masterton:Today on Drone As The Future, we welcome Grant Baldwin into the studio. Listen in as we talk about his journey from documentary filmmaker, BBC Planet Earth drone cinematographer, and TV showrunner to founder of the Drone Division in the North Shore Search and Rescue program. He tells us how drones are revolutionizing the search and rescue space in British Columbia and beyond.
Grant Baldwin:I was filming a pro skier. Cloud goes through. It ices up. I see SC speed warning. He gets on the radio.
Grant Baldwin:I was like, yeah. The drone just skied my line. Bring closure's big. When a search is called off, it's never really called off the team members. For us, it's about extending the person on the ground.
Grant Baldwin:Even if it's not a rescue, recovery is still really important, I think. And what I see the future being is
Mark Masterton:Drone As The Future is made in partnership with Drone As A Service. Make your survey, mapping, or inspections safer, faster, and more efficient with the help of our team. Elevate what's possible with droneasaservice.com. Well, welcome to the drone As The Future podcast, Grant.
Grant Baldwin:Thanks for having me.
Mark Masterton:Thank you very much for taking the time out of you. Busy schedule?
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. No. It's great. I love talking drones.
Mark Masterton:Award winning filmmaker, composer, certified drone pilot, search and rescue member. Is there anything that you you're not doing at the minute?
Grant Baldwin:I'm also in a family band.
Mark Masterton:What? Really? Yeah. No way.
Grant Baldwin:We're not that good though. So that's as far as that goes.
Mark Masterton:What's your role in the band?
Grant Baldwin:Guitar and singer.
Mark Masterton:No way. You got pipes as well?
Grant Baldwin:Not really.
Mark Masterton:That's crazy. Wow. Well, very impressed and thank you for taking time out of your busy band schedule to to come and join us as well. You've been filmmaking for many years and involved with drones for many years. Can you tell us how you first got involved with drones?
Grant Baldwin:Well, I I mean, I remember the first time I saw a drone shot. This must have been 2012, 2013, something like that. Uh-huh. And I was just blown away. Like, I'm like I'm like at the time, you know, it was like camera jibs and all this work to get any shot of any elevation and to see these shots going from the ground to the air.
Grant Baldwin:And I was like, how do I do this? And I just started getting into drones right away, early days, before the cameras were good, before there's even any proper video feed, any any idea of flight time. You you would just set a timer.
Mark Masterton:No video feed. So I mean I
Grant Baldwin:mean, you get a low res radio video feed Uh-huh. With no telemetry. So you really didn't know your elevation. You didn't know how much most importantly, you didn't know how much flight time you had. You had like maybe voltage?
Grant Baldwin:And so you kinda did math. Oh
Mark Masterton:my god.
Grant Baldwin:And so Wow. So it was basically eight minutes was like a good long flight. Yeah.
Mark Masterton:Wow. Well, I mean, you can probably go up and go down.
Grant Baldwin:Well, yeah. Yeah. Well, there's, you know, I but the time it was before there are really any rules. Right? And I was, you know, I was a bit cowboy.
Grant Baldwin:I but I I sort of became the guy in the documentary scene that could get these shots because I adopted early. Right?
Mark Masterton:So Yeah.
Grant Baldwin:But I was basically getting GoPros modified with different lenses and things at the time because that's all the payload could handle before there are actually cameras built into drones and and
Mark Masterton:So sort of cowboying your own rig in the beginning.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. A little bit of that. Lost seven or eight drones probably in the early days and the tech got better, the redundancy got better. And that was sort of the early days drones. And then, you know, as the technology got better, everyone seemed to have one, but I still kept pushing to get high quality and and work on shows that and just got to work on some cool shows like Planet Earth and things like that, which was like kind of bucket list, you know, Battenborough narrating over your shot is
Mark Masterton:That's incredible.
Grant Baldwin:That's kind of it. Right? I'm done.
Mark Masterton:Yeah. Yeah. You can retire. Yeah. But you didn't start off in filmmaking and drone pilotry to begin with.
Mark Masterton:You you started off as a composer. Right? Can you take us back to how you first got involved in film and
Grant Baldwin:all that? I got into filmmaking from music. So I wanted to be like Theory Corporation or DJ Shadow. So I got into music production and got pretty good at it and then was living off music for a bit. Like TV shows were picking up songs.
Grant Baldwin:Nice. Low income, but living off music. But through there, was able to get into composing. A couple gigs came up. I did some music for like a ski commercial.
Grant Baldwin:And then I got to meet a couple of filmmakers that were making mountain bike movies. And I started doing custom music, which I hadn't really done before. They were just licensing music that I was making. And then I was got really interested in the footage. I'm like, how do you get that shot?
Grant Baldwin:Like, what camera did you use? And I basically started buying camera gear on the side of doing music. And then eventually it transitioned into just filmmaking because I you know, music's fine, but you're kinda stuck in the Mhmm. Studio basement and you don't meet many people. But the filmmaking has been an incredible journey.
Mark Masterton:You've seen some incredible places.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. Yeah. It's been awesome.
Mark Masterton:For people who are new to your work, mean, you've got quite an extensive filmography now. Yeah. But if people were new to you and discovering your work, where would you recommend they should begin?
Grant Baldwin:It depends what you're into. If you're into like a documentary that gets you fired up about an issue, then you can watch our earlier stuff because we were really into that. We we dove into food waste. That was kind of our biggest movie and called Just Eat It. And there's humor and like big messaging in there.
Grant Baldwin:And then we got into Search and Rescue by doing a TV series. Originally, it was gonna be one story in our documentary This Mountain Life. Yeah. Cover search and rescue. And we realized that you can't just cover search and rescue in a ten minute sequence.
Grant Baldwin:And so the broadcaster we worked with Knowledge Network said, could you develop a series? And like at the time I we didn't know how to make a series. Mhmm. Like, sounded really intimidating. But we we got to know the team, did some went on a couple calls with them and and we realized there was so much story and history with Search and Rescue and North Shore Rescue that that we basically got into making the show and we got the green light and four episodes turned into five pretty quickly after they saw footage.
Grant Baldwin:And yeah, it was kind of life changing really.
Mark Masterton:Particularly for yourself because you you were on call effectively for that entire year for the first season. And then since then, you've you've joined the team. Right?
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. So, like, to do the show, you're on call twenty four seven. We had a crew in the first season, I think we had a crew of about five camera operators that we kind of rotated through. But for myself, I kind of felt like as a director, I kind of felt like I was always on call. Mhmm.
Grant Baldwin:Because I kind of had to make sure everything was going right.
Mark Masterton:Yeah.
Grant Baldwin:It was a lot, you know, with young kids and stuff. So Jen, who's also the producer, my partner, you know, having the kids and like keeping that going while I was out on calls and, you know, making sure everything was done right. It was it was pretty tough, but it's super rewarding. And it was really inspiring to the point that myself and Ian Christie who's on the team also joined North Shore Rescue after the first season to assist with drone searches because they really didn't have anyone that was that was really proficient in in that area. And there was no safe operating procedure for drones.
Grant Baldwin:There was like nothing for search and rescue and drones. It was all pretty early, early stages. And we thought, well, we've got all these hours in. We're already advanced pilots. Well, let's just use our drones to help on calls.
Grant Baldwin:And eventually we convinced the team to buy some some drones that were more specific for search and rescue with thermal cameras.
Mark Masterton:So initially, in those first stages where you were introducing drones to North Shore Rescue, it was more for, like, recovery missions and such. Yeah. But the technology's advanced a little since then. Now we're you can you tell me about the importance of thermal imaging
Grant Baldwin:with drones? So thermal has been huge for us. I will say our last training day, we we we did see some problems with it, especially when sunlight starts coming. Even on a cold winter days, sunlight can really create an image that is very hard to decipher. So it's not the be all end all, but it definitely is the best tool at night in the shoulder seasons and in the winter.
Grant Baldwin:Mhmm. Because if a subject is responsive, they will show up if you're over them. And we've had two successful rescues of people that were in pretty bad way with the thermal imaging. We have not found someone with visual imaging yet.
Mark Masterton:Can you tell us a bit more about that that first instance where the where the imaging worked and you The first thing?
Grant Baldwin:Sure.
Mark Masterton:Yeah. Have you been able to utilize the drone tech to find someone? How did that feel and just tell us how it played out?
Grant Baldwin:Okay. Well, first I'll tell you the story of is that almost the exact same area where I where I didn't get it right. And that was when I was learning. We had a thermal camera up on the drone, and it was Christmas Eve. And a skier had gone, got separated from his daughters who were snowshoeing.
Grant Baldwin:They were back in the backcountry of Seymour. The the the daughters had arrived back at the car. The dad didn't show up. They figured he'd he just took a longer ski route and he'll be out and he a couple hours before I think we were even tasked. We had a pretty good idea that he was probably on the West Side Of Mount Seymour.
Grant Baldwin:And so by the time I got the drone up, it was storming really hard. No helis could fly. I don't think we even had night approval at that point to fly helicopters. So it was voice callouts and drones, and that was it. Got the thermal drone up, and I just covered that area until I was like out of power basically.
Grant Baldwin:I just flew and flew. And I thought I saw things. I wasn't sure. And I was flying completely in thermal imagery. And I basically just said that I didn't see anything down there.
Grant Baldwin:And I came back and the family was there and I was like, oh. And the rest of the team is still going out doing voice calls. They eventually got a voice contact with him at like early hours in the morning. And due to the avalanche conditions, they had to wait till light to find a safe route and to get him. And he was fine.
Grant Baldwin:He was like super cold, but he was fine. So he got home like Christmas, time for Christmas dinner basically, which is awesome. Yeah. But I felt terrible because he said, a drone was hovering over me quite a bit last night. And he said, the good thing he said was that, thank God, he said, I saw the drone.
Grant Baldwin:I knew they were looking in the right spot. So that was a positive from it. But the reason why I didn't see him was because I was not flying in dual mode. Basically, visual camera and thermal at the same time.
Mark Masterton:Okay.
Grant Baldwin:And I would have seen him because he would have had his phone light, which he said he was pointing at the drone, which would not show up in thermal. So that was a big learning lesson. And it was a good learning lesson because the guy's fine. Right. So the next time, next time we get another call.
Grant Baldwin:This time it's a hiker got separated from his hiking group. Thought he was the rest of the hiking group was too slow. Once they got to the summit of Seymour, took off and just like stormed off, like kind of in a huff. Oh, no. And it's a pretty easy place to kind of miss the boot pack because there's kind of sometimes there's like on trees, you know, that snow kind of can unload and melt a little bit, and it looks like footprints so you could easily get pulled in the wrong direction.
Mark Masterton:Oh, okay.
Grant Baldwin:And so he got pulled into the East Side Of Seymour. We didn't know that at the time. We just knew that that the rest hiking group got back to the parking lot. He never showed up. So it was pretty dark by the time that we got tasked and got out there.
Grant Baldwin:And I just started flying the West Side, kind of the same side where the guy was lost in Christmas time. And I could there was just not no clues. It was like perfect conditions for thermal. It was minus six degrees, pretty clear, and snow on the ground. Like, this is this is Primo.
Grant Baldwin:I'm like, I'm gonna find this guy. We were lighting off bear bangers, which are pretty loud to sort of get any sort of response, vocal response.
Mark Masterton:What is a bear banger? Sorry.
Grant Baldwin:It's basically something to scare a bear away if you're hiking or working in the forest, I
Mark Masterton:guess. Okay.
Grant Baldwin:But we use them to to get initiate a response from someone. And we lit a couple off and we did hear something. Kinda it's very hard to tell exactly where it was coming from because there's bit of an amphitheater on both sides. There's rock. So it kinda bounces around.
Grant Baldwin:We thought we maybe heard them on the east side. Right. And there was a field team further ahead of me and I got the drone up again. And the field team thought they saw some footprints kind of going off off the main route. They started following that.
Grant Baldwin:And then I just started combing the east Side and I'm on my last battery and I'm just coming back up the slope and I see this hotspot under the this under the canopy, like under the branch. And sure enough, like, I get closer and he, like, kinda comes out from under the tree and he's like, oh, man, I found him. It's like, I was so excited. I was like, the guys I was with where I was flying, I was like, quick, like, take a photo of the coordinates, like, you know, like, with the quickest thing was just take a photo of the screen Yeah. With the waypoint and, like, send it to the service manager and he can put it on the map for us.
Grant Baldwin:And that's what we did. And the field team was able to, like, traverse directly over to him, or else they would have been going up and down waterfalls. And this guy had had actually fallen in the water. So it's snow on the ground and there's still water running. So it's kinda like shoulder season.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. And he was like hypothermic and like he was lying down under that tree to like go to sleep and probably not wake up. And so like, yeah, coming out and he had got the footage of him like waving at the guy. It was so awesome. And I was the fact that it was on my last battery too.
Grant Baldwin:I just creamed so many batteries. Wow. And I was so excited. And I think that's the first time that like volunteer SAR has found someone with a drone. I'm pretty sure there's been like a drone company that did in the interior found some skiers before Uh-huh.
Grant Baldwin:As a, like, a private kind of hire. But this is the first time internally. So that was amazing. And it wasn't long after that we had our second find Wow. With Thermal, and that was in the Canyon.
Grant Baldwin:And that was he was found in fifteen seconds, which was crazy because this it was luck because basically the search manager sent a bunch of people out to look in this canyon. The guy had been missing for two days and someone thought they had seen, like, there's public it's seen someone of that description in that area. Yeah. And, yeah, pop pop he it was sent by the search manager to one part of the canyon, popped the drone up, Ian flies up, runs into a branch, but doesn't crash it.
Mark Masterton:Oh, it's Ian, your colleague. Same guy. Don't remember. This is his
Grant Baldwin:then and then, like, right down the drain, you can see this, like, warm spot, and it was the guy, and he was kinda curled up. He had injured, I think, his arm or his leg, and he was down in the canyon. It was deep in the canyon too. So this was actually the first time we were able to use a speaker unit on the drone.
Mark Masterton:Yeah. Tell me about that. I've never seen that until basically you just had to
Grant Baldwin:use speaker. You could like this version of the drone, the older one, you could only kinda have a spotlight or a speaker. So we had the speaker on and went down to him and we can't he can't respond back. Right. Like, can't pick up any audio, but we can broadcast.
Grant Baldwin:Mhmm. And because he's by the river, it's super loud down there. Even though we were above him on the cliff, we couldn't communicate with him because of the noise. Right. And so we were able to ask him questions and he could respond with his arm.
Grant Baldwin:Like, put your arm up if you're injured and things like that. And then we explained the helicopter's coming in about thirty minutes. And we were able to send all these images of the situation he was in to the heli crew. So they had an idea of how long a line they would need. Like where he was on the slope and what kind of like, when the when the rescuer comes down, they need to stand somewhere, and they just need to know if there's somewhere they can actually get into a situation to get him in a harness.
Grant Baldwin:Right? Without having to, like, come up with some kind of anchor safety. Right? So all this information was that we were able to relay. The guy and the guy was out with him, like like, the whole thing was done in, an hour.
Grant Baldwin:It's crazy. Wow. Yeah. And he was he was injured, but he turned out he was fine.
Mark Masterton:But yeah. So that's like clear actionable evidence of, like, the drones being a huge help in the search and rescue efforts.
Grant Baldwin:But, like, it's also like, there's a lot of times where it's helpful where it it's not as glorious because it's it's checking off areas, which is like 90% of what we end up doing is that FPV drone has been really helpful for flying over like cliff edges and into gullies and areas where it's like really thick canopy. And you just wanna check under there to make sure no one's fallen. Smaller drone. Right? Yes.
Grant Baldwin:Small FBB with goggles. Okay. You're just flying kind of under the cliff bands, really tight spaces, just checking out those areas because when you're flying with a bit like the thermal, even though the lens is really like 200 millimeter lens, great lens, but it's not seeing under things.
Mark Masterton:Right? Right. The canopy is so vast here.
Grant Baldwin:The problem with the FBV though is limited range. Like you're you're working within really a kilometer, 1.5 kilometers max range before you're losing
Mark Masterton:Is the flight time shorter on those as well?
Grant Baldwin:Flight time's way shorter, but, you know, we just have, like, piles of batteries. They're really lightweight. Yeah. The problem with those is that they do rely on daylight to hold position because we're usually flying in non GPS lock areas. Like, we're in such deep canyons and stuff that you just you're not ever gonna get a lock.
Grant Baldwin:And so it's using visual cameras to hold position. So even with that, like, if it locks on position on a river, it starts going down the river because he thinks that's that's it doesn't know what water is. It's not smart enough.
Mark Masterton:Drones and rivers. They just attract
Grant Baldwin:Oh, yeah. Just wanna go in.
Mark Masterton:Because when I've crashed a drone in in the past, it's been emergency landing itself in the middle of a river.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah.
Mark Masterton:And I had to, like, take over the auto landing and ditch it into the side of riverbed.
Grant Baldwin:And it goes in anyway.
Mark Masterton:And then I'm in, like, life threatening situation trying to cross a river barefoot to get my expensive DJI back. Yeah. Exactly. You end up in all sorts of situations. But back to the the FPV, that's like extending someone's footprint effectively like Exactly.
Grant Baldwin:And that's kinda how we approach the drones anyway, is that in no way are they ever gonna replace a helicopter. They can't take anyone out. Right. They they can't bring that much gear in. Like, there's all these things that hell is on and range.
Grant Baldwin:Like, the amount of range that helicopter has and time.
Mark Masterton:So in So
Grant Baldwin:but yeah. It's an extension of of the the ground search and rescue member.
Mark Masterton:So in the beginning, it was initially yourself and Ian Yeah. Came on board as as drone specialists for North Shore Rescue.
Grant Baldwin:Sure. Yeah.
Mark Masterton:In the following years, it's grown now, the team that specializes in drones. And it's can you tell me how it's grown and how you train people up to Yeah.
Grant Baldwin:We a local drone company called Can Drone offered their services to kinda get some more members event certified. So they they provided a lot of their study material and they they did the exams for us like pro bono basically, which was really cool. And so we ended up getting now there's seven of us that have advanced, but more time is needed with everyone to like get comfortable with drones. And so like we're constantly training and I'm kind of running that with Ian and we have a lot of fun with it. Like, you know, hiding people in the woods and like, and then they're on the radio.
Grant Baldwin:Can you make it a little bit easier for us? Just trying to get people comfortable, like really the best drone operator, someone probably grew up playing some kind of video game. Right. Because you get a sense of what's behind you without having to know what's behind you or you have a memory of what you've just seen. And that's not that doesn't seem to come naturally to everyone I've noticed.
Grant Baldwin:So really though with the volunteer team, it's like, who's available? Like, do we have enough people available? Do you live close? Do you live on the North Shore? You gotta be close.
Grant Baldwin:Are you available? Are you close? And do you have you done your training and you know, how capable are you? But still like just getting a camera up sometimes on a target area just to check it off. That's that's super helpful for the the ground team, not putting people in on ropes.
Grant Baldwin:Not only is it increased the risk of the search member, but it's just so much slower, like to like put people down to check below a bluff and then like climb back out. Yeah. Which like FPV could sweep that whole drainage in like three minutes, which is awesome.
Mark Masterton:You've been working with drones since like, you say 2012? Sort of Yeah. Beginning when you were first dabbling, making your own rigs and things. How much have you seen Drone Tech evolve in that time from then till now? Like, now we're using light to have some imaging.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. Evolution, I think the biggest thing is the capacity of lenses in smaller packages is huge. Like to be able to have a focal length of, you know, 20 millimeters to two equivalent of almost 200 millimeters is in something that fits in the top of my backpack as opposed to like taking up the entire backpack. That's amazing.
Mark Masterton:Especially when you're traveling into these places on foot.
Grant Baldwin:Yes. Flight time. Mhmm. Stability in wind is huge. They used to be basically a big white sail that just got pushed around.
Grant Baldwin:I've been in like 35 knots with with modern drones. And as long as the gimbal can level itself, the drone will just fly like that. It's unbelievable.
Mark Masterton:Wow. You said flight time briefly though. It started off at like what? Eight minutes? So you had a time
Grant Baldwin:on your phone? Really, really, in the mountains, we're getting thirty to thirty five minutes.
Mark Masterton:And that must be a game changer in
Grant Baldwin:the field. Yeah. I mean, basically, our kit carry we carry about six batteries per kit. And we usually have, like, depending on the scale of the call, like, we can have up to three drones up in the air at once. And we've done it concurrently with a helicopter in the air too.
Grant Baldwin:So we're just like on the radio making sure everyone knows where everyone is. We have maps with like basically polygons of where we are. We stay within that. You stay at a certain elevation.
Mark Masterton:Having multiple drones in the air, does that ever cause any issues? Because I've tried filming a drone with a drone and it's there's some communication.
Grant Baldwin:No. That's fine. No? Yeah. That's generally good.
Mark Masterton:That's why you do it and I don't.
Grant Baldwin:The the biggest risk to drones is especially where we are is icing. Which Like is the if a helicopter is scared to go in, the drone's probably gonna fall out the sky too. Cause the icing of the rotors. Right? So we we've had older drones just fall out of the sky, but new the new ones do give you a speed warning now.
Grant Baldwin:They say that the motors are having trouble with speed and that's a good indication.
Mark Masterton:Right.
Grant Baldwin:If it's foggy and it's around zero degrees, that you're icing up and you better get get down.
Mark Masterton:What are the most crazy conditions that you've had to fly a drone in?
Grant Baldwin:Well, that Christmas Eve one was that was like the thickest thickest snow.
Mark Masterton:Because no helicopters were allowed that night, but you still managed
Grant Baldwin:to At that time, I don't think we were even night certified, but Right. There's no way the hell he would have gone in. It yeah. Just super thick snow, but it's amazing that the thermal could penetrate it pretty good. Mhmm.
Grant Baldwin:Fog is is out for everything. Like fog is the worst. A for icing, b for thermal imagery is completely blocked. And then visual cameras are yeah. Fog is the hardest it's to it's almost like not even worth it unless you're just doing FBV under the canopy.
Mark Masterton:If you had to give like a a public warning for people who hobbyists who are going out with drones and stuff, when would you say not to take it up? Because that can lead to more issues as well.
Grant Baldwin:Find moist conditions around zero. You'll probably freeze up. And a good way to test is to launch a drone, go up 10 feet, count for ten seconds and land and look at the rotors and you will see very faint ice if it's bad conditions, which just builds upon itself. Right? So you can catch it early.
Grant Baldwin:It usually wisps off the end of the rotor and you can you can go, okay. This is not like a no fly. But also you could be in a sunny day in the mountains, say springtime, and a clag cloud. It's like a it's like a pocket of moisture, like a really thick cloud will blow through the mountains. Uh-huh.
Grant Baldwin:And that that could ice you up too. I've had that happen. Oh. Basically, was filming a pro skier, and I was like parked. He's at the top of this ridge.
Grant Baldwin:He's looking down his line and this clad comes like, I gotta hold for the cloud. Cloud goes through and like it ices off. I see ESC speed warning. And then I just see this on my display And he gets on the radio and is like, yeah, the drone just skied my line. And I'm like, when you get to the bottom, if you can try and find that drone because it has some footage on it from today, that's really we wanna get back.
Grant Baldwin:And he found it. So Wow. Yeah. Recovery. A drone was done, though.
Mark Masterton:Has the have the use the wider use of drones in the North Shore for, like, hobbyists and things like that led to more rescue calls related to drones?
Grant Baldwin:No. No? There's been no, no, no, no. I don't think so. Most most of the, you know, the calls we get are either someone lost the trail, someone gets injured.
Grant Baldwin:And it's one of those two. And a lot of the calls are people are quite close to the trail, but you know, not being able to read their GPS on their phone, not really understanding that. It's fine. Just don't move. We'll come get you.
Grant Baldwin:Those are easy ones. Or injuries, which could happen to anyone, you know.
Mark Masterton:While we're on this Yeah. I know you're all about education when it comes to traveling outdoors. Yeah. Just a PSA for everybody who's wanting to go over on a hike in the North Shore. What would you say before you head out?
Mark Masterton:You've you've made a really impressive video game that people should play
Grant Baldwin:Yeah.
Mark Masterton:As well. It's like a turn based game. If you ever watch Bandersnatch on Netflix, it's kinda like that. You pick you choose your adventure. Yeah.
Mark Masterton:It's really good at telling you
Grant Baldwin:what you should and shouldn't do before heading out. But in a nutshell. Well, I mean, the the best thing you can do is actually the easiest. Like, I could sit here and I could list off all the stuff that you carry in your bag to keep you safe out there.
Mark Masterton:Which is fine. So much time.
Grant Baldwin:It's fine. But really, the the most important thing for us to find you is to know where you went. Like like it's and the easiest thing to do is just text someone and say, I'm going to do X Trail. Like even mountain biking, mountain bikers in here, just say what trailer zone you're in. Right?
Grant Baldwin:Because if you're unconscious and you, and you know, you smashed your phone or whatever it is like, you know, we we just we did it's a needle in a haystack at that point. Like, we really don't know. So just yeah. Let someone know where you're going and what time you'll be back. That's that's basically it.
Mark Masterton:It's two things?
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. That's the simplest.
Mark Masterton:Drone As The Future is made in partnership with Drone As A Service. Make your survey, mapping, or inspections safer, faster, and more efficient with the help of our team. Elevate what's possible with droneasaservice.com. In the in those initial stages when you were first just offering up drones as as a useful thing for search and rescue, what was the main value you were adding in the in the beginning did you feel?
Grant Baldwin:Well, actually, like, our drones that we're using for filming the show aren't actually really good search and rescue drones at all. They're really good, beautiful images of can't find find anyone, basically. Right. Because they didn't have the tools on board. So we actually, like, my I'm gonna throw Ian under the bus.
Grant Baldwin:Ian put my Inspire two up in a tree on the one of the first searches. He's just using the long lens in the drainage and didn't pay attention to the tree canopy and just stuck it in a tree. And, like, basically, we packed up the drone and we're like, okay. I guess, packed up the remote and everything. I'm like, I guess we lost it.
Grant Baldwin:Like, it's like kilometer up the drainage. You can't even climb up that waterfall.
Mark Masterton:Drones as well.
Grant Baldwin:And we're packing up, and we're starting to hike down to where the helipad pickup is, and we hear this drone. Like, what? We look up, and it got itself out of the tree somehow and came back and was, like, at 0% battery. And it was self landing into the river. Like, was just going into the river.
Mark Masterton:Been there.
Grant Baldwin:So I had to unpack the RC, power it up, and I just throttled up as it was just about to dip into the river. And I couldn't believe it. And the cool thing is that we actually had a GoPro attached to that Inspire filming kind of behind the camera
Mark Masterton:Right.
Grant Baldwin:For for the show. Mhmm. And so we actually got the whole sequence of how it got itself out of the tree. Like it was kind of hooked on a branch and still powered up, and you could see it was just working working its way out.
Mark Masterton:AI before AI.
Grant Baldwin:Kinda. Yeah. I mean, it's using its external cameras to, like, figure out what's going on, but it was it was incredible. I think it came back. That drone's been awesome.
Mark Masterton:In those early days, I feel like obstacle avoidance was more of Yeah. A selling point than an actual useful thing. Unless you were heading into a concrete wall Yeah. It wasn't
Grant Baldwin:really useful. Probably won't work when you expect it to. When you don't expect it to, it does, I guess, is
Mark Masterton:Yeah. And I I feel for Ian particularly in that he was focused on his shot and then lost track of the drone because I myself have been
Grant Baldwin:Oh, totally. Well, I think he was on an 80 mil lens. So he's like down in the drainage looking for we were looking for people that have been missing for over a year. So we thought that they were their remains might be in this drainage.
Mark Masterton:Like a recovery mission.
Grant Baldwin:It was a recovery mission. Thought we could some articles of their clothes were found down the bottom of that drainage. So we wanna bring closure to family. It's a big part of the the team. Like, when a search is called off, it's never really called off the team members.
Grant Baldwin:Because you're you're disappointed that you didn't find somebody. And first thing you wanna do is get back and try something you didn't do before. But there's only so many hours of tasks that we can do under search and rescue until they actually the RCP calls it off. Right. Until a new clue comes up.
Grant Baldwin:But members will always, like, when they're out on their own hiking, we're always looking for new clues. And, you know, that happened to us last last fall. We couldn't find a guy in Grosse, and we're waiting for the spring to go back out and when snow melts to have another go. Wow. Yeah.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. So anyways, the brain closure is big. Like, it's the the families is not knowing. Yeah. It's tough.
Grant Baldwin:So even if it's not a rescue, a recovery is still really important, I think.
Mark Masterton:Back on the the drone tech, as well as thermal imaging, I've read that you also sort of using AI a little bit to to pick up anomalies in the Yeah. Images that you get?
Grant Baldwin:Tried some
Mark Masterton:AI that as well? EagleEyes?
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. Eyes I wouldn't call EagleEyes AI. I would just call it like I think everyone calls everything AI right now because it's
Mark Masterton:It's a buzzy word.
Grant Baldwin:It's just like a computer doing something. Yeah. But yeah, EagleEyes is great. The local company, which is even cooler. We were actually hoping the guy I was talking about on gross that we didn't find us hoping that we would pick them up with Eagle Eyes because they detect color and this subject actually had colorful gloves on.
Grant Baldwin:We were hoping that we would pick up those gloves.
Mark Masterton:You just tell us in a nutshell what it does.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. Basically you, it will say you're flying over a park, for example, it's seeing brown, green, grays, all these colors throughout the spectrum and anything that's an anomaly, it will highlight to you. Like something doesn't quite fit in the scene. It will basically put a circle around it and tell you the color that it's seeing on that. And then you can then put your finger over and it will blow it up really quickly.
Grant Baldwin:And this runs sort of concurrently. I guess you could fly just just on Google eyes, but with the DGI software is running and Eagle eyes is running and you just kind of switch between the apps.
Mark Masterton:Okay.
Grant Baldwin:It also has some integration with our mapping system for search and rescue where you can live update where the drone is flying right now, which is great for, you know, the search manager and the pilots to get an idea of where you're covering and where the drone is, which does require good connection, which is usually never. Like it's worked once because we've had three gs or whatever or four gs, but mostly it's the color detection. And so like we, we basically on that search, we use that almost exclusively. And then we also took the footage that we recorded all day, and we're monitoring live and reprocessed it again with their desktop software to just make sure. And then basically, you can just say, process all this footage for a few hours.
Grant Baldwin:And you come back and say, show me all the all the basically images of anomalies. Mhmm. And you can put like by most rare or color. Okay. So specifically, I always put punching the guy's gloves
Mark Masterton:Right.
Grant Baldwin:Palette to scan that footage again just to make sure that we didn't pass them. And so I was very disappointed that that we didn't get them. I don't blame the software. I blame that we're just not looking in the right spot yet, but but great tool for situations where it's daytime situations where thermal is no good summertime, thermal is useless. The rocks, the trees, registering warmer than people.
Grant Baldwin:That's good for color detection. Problem is everyone wears gray and black.
Mark Masterton:I was gonna say, is that another hot tip we could hand out? People wear a garish color when you go in hiking?
Grant Baldwin:We went out and we did a we did a day with our Terex team from like New York and stuff. They all came in. I'm like, who does your colorways here? Like, oh, we do. I'm like, okay.
Grant Baldwin:And I've set my drone up and I pointed back at them. I'm like, where are you guys? And they're like, oh, oh, I'm like, we our colorways are inspired by nature colors right now. That's the whole marketing is like nature. I'm like, guys, just let's go back to the, like, don't I know, it was like 2 thousands and stuff.
Grant Baldwin:When it started getting bright again, like, this is great.
Mark Masterton:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's bring it back. I mean, it's it's helpful for you.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. It's so good. Yeah.
Mark Masterton:Yeah. You you were just alluding to it there how signal is is a tough thing when you're using the new technology. Is that you spoke earlier about some software, some technology that you some students are working on
Grant Baldwin:that could help? There's some UBC students in the interior that are building us a VTOL drone as part of a student project. So they basically we had an initial meeting and they wanted to make us just like a camera drone like we already have. I'm like, well, our problem is when we're in the field is is transmission. Like we're so limited on range, you know, say if I flew from a beach over the ocean, I could go like eight kilometers, no problem.
Grant Baldwin:Right? Cause they've got line of sight. As soon as you get in the mountains, you've got terrain trees, you're going around bluffs and we just lose signal. And most importantly, we start losing the, not the control of the drone right away, but we lose the visual transmission of the drone. And so we get like a low resolution image back because it's trying to compress that video to send it to us.
Grant Baldwin:So basically they're just developing a drone that will have a repeater on it, an RTK repeater that then we can then connect to and fly through that repeater. So we can park this VTOL is like vertical takeoff and then it turns into a glider. Okay. So it has four rotors that take it up and one front drive motor. So it's super efficient once after it takes off.
Grant Baldwin:Like really battery efficient. And that will then glide and stay in a targeted area above the search area so that then we have a clean signal, no matter where we go. We don't want to go down into that Creek and have a little sniff down there and see what we can see and come back out. And I'm standing over here and there's a bluff here. It's not gonna be a problem.
Grant Baldwin:Right? Because I've got this connection.
Mark Masterton:So effectively using the drone to make like a a vast network.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. It's it's no different from like our radios. We have repeaters on all the mountains in there. I actually talked to the team like, can we get like drone repeaters on our repeaters? And the guy's like, it's like way too much power.
Grant Baldwin:Like you right now they're running off solar. Right? So it's
Mark Masterton:like there's
Grant Baldwin:no way.
Mark Masterton:So it's like an antenna almost.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. It's basically an antenna that transmits the telemetry and the controls. We'll see how it works. I mean, they're really smart. So hopefully it's good.
Grant Baldwin:I'm just concerned about the weather we get and wind and this foam glider having one flight in its life, you know.
Mark Masterton:A lot of rebuilding. Yeah. Maybe. Back to North Shore Rescue and how it's changed now with the drone team. It's it's grown.
Mark Masterton:It's got bigger. How do you see it changing in the future? And how will it how has it become useful for North Shore Rescue? There's no going back now, guess. They
Grant Baldwin:they found it useful. I think I think drones are part of Search and Rescue and like all the teams that I've spoke to in BC, we've had a meetup. Everyone's kind of using them differently. Some are really interested in the idea of using them to bring equipment to places like staging areas. Some are about having like the van with all the controls and massive antennas because they live in an area where there's lots of logging roads that they usually search off.
Grant Baldwin:You know, it depends on where you are to like what's useful. You know, if you think about search and rescue in Back East where there's like deciduous trees and then you have like in the fall and the winter, you can see through the entire canopy. Mhmm. Like you could do just automated grid searching there. That works there.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. For us, it's about extending the person on the ground. And what I see the future being is that we're flying through a network everywhere like a Starlink. So we don't have to worry about transmission issues. And they will have like solid state batteries that will run the drones for like two hours ago, and they'll be super light.
Grant Baldwin:And like, they'll be in everyone's bag. That's kinda where I
Mark Masterton:see it. That would be nice. Yeah. Are there any limiting factors for drones being used in search and rescue? Is there anything you have to get over to get there?
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. I mean, you do need to be advanced certified to get a drone that's of any use. I mean, you could fly a mini drone, but with a super wide lens, I mean, maybe that works. Like I said, in those places that you can see through the canopy, but here it's almost useless unless you're running a software like a, like an EagleEyes on a, on a Pro RC, then those would make sense. Cause they are lightweight and you can get you can get into the game without having to go through the the advanced certification, which is it's little much.
Mark Masterton:It's a lot.
Grant Baldwin:Yeah. It's a little much.
Mark Masterton:In the future, do you see them being used more and more in helicopters as still a vital part, but drones increasing in their use?
Grant Baldwin:I just think they're both gonna be needed all the time. I mean, one day maybe a drone can do a hoist of a person, bring them back. God, that first person that does that is I guess they're not gonna worry. They're already gonna be injured. They're gonna be like, okay, let's go.
Grant Baldwin:One day.
Mark Masterton:Yeah. Amazing. Thank you very much for taking all the time to tell us everything about Drone Tech and North Shore Rescue and all your films and everything. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Grant Baldwin:No problem. It's really fun to chat about this stuff. Hello?
Mark Masterton:Hey, Drone As The Future. Longtime listener, first time caller from The Future. I was wondering if there was one drone function or attachment that you wish you had access to in your time. 2127. What would it be?
Mark Masterton:Quite ahead.
Grant Baldwin:I think we've got the speaker now, but it would be nice to be able to receive dialogue back to the drone from subjects.
Mark Masterton:Would that be like a Am I done to the phone? Feel free to carry on your conversation with the future. How would you think that would that would work?
Grant Baldwin:Kinda like how your noise counseling works with your earbuds. Right. So if it could it could it could decipher what the rotor sound is and then have a mini shotgun mic in it that would could would be follow the gimbal so that it would point at the person.
Mark Masterton:Right. Same way the cameras per facing.
Grant Baldwin:Yes. So just like it's isolating. Okay. Well No one's done that yet. Go on.
Grant Baldwin:Be the first.
Mark Masterton:Can you ask him what what they're eating these days?
Grant Baldwin:What are you eating these days? In the future. Soylent green. Okay.
Mark Masterton:This has been the Drone As The Future podcast. Today's episode has been produced by Ryan Witten, coordinated by Samantha Holomey, filmed by John Rawlinson, and features original intro music by Josh Santos. Thank you very much for tuning in. And if you'd like to follow along our journey, fly over to that subscribe button wherever you're listening so you can be updated to hear what flies ahead. Drone As The Future is made in partnership with Drone As A Service.
Mark Masterton:Make your survey, mapping, or inspections safer, faster, and more efficient with the help of our team. Elevate what's possible with droneasaservice.com.