FedEx feeder plane takes flight without pilot in test for Reliable Robotics

Post by delfinom » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

sargun wrote: post #28

alfalfasprout wrote: post #5

Frankly the tech for autonomous aviation has been around for a while now. I expect even strong crosswind landings will soon be better handled by a computer than a pilot. But then here’s the problem... Autonomous systems are great when things are going well, but at the end of the day they fare very poorly in edge cases sometimes with catastrophic results. When you’re driving a car you usually follow traffic rules and…

So, NASA, is in the process of working on some of this. They’re trying to come up with a new ATC model which will work better for drones / eVTOL air taxis / etc. Some of the ideas are around “carving” out corridors, where you would be able to fly, and this corridor could be reasonably large (across multiple towers today). The other interesting thing is hierarchical ATC automation. So, normal ATC would still exist, bu…

Post by journeymanblue » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

wespiser_2018 wrote: post #110

Very cool! I wonder what the real economic benefit of removing a pilot from an airplane is, and what the dominant factors are? Assuming that a human pilot is better in some emergency scenarios, and might be able to save you from catastrophic loss: these events are exceedingly rare nowadays, and the savings from liability and scheduling constraints must be massive without a human in the pilot seat.

Post by outworlder » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #106

CommieBobDole wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the system is designed right, they could be even safer than piloted planes in the case of an emergency. Currently, if a pilot is flying and, say, the engines stop and can't be restarted, they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably. An autonomous system doesn't have to do that - if it decides that the situation is unrecoverable,…

> they're going to be thinking about trying to survive and get to a place where they can land or at least ditch the plane survivably. I think you immediately have to question how often this has been the source of a disaster. To me, this seems highly unlikely to have been a problem, or to be a problem at all. Most accidents happen near airports. Most airports are in populated areas, because an airport far removed from…

Post by outworlder » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #94

homero wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty incredible for those small planes that I doubt have all the sensors jets do

GPS gets you 99.9% of the way there. Runways are 100+ft wide. 10ft precision is fine.

Post by juliansimioni » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

whiddershins wrote: post #102

bronco21016 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The private airport idea is interesting. From a pilots perspective, one of the major roadblocks to these systems being widely integrated into the current infrastructure is managing traffic. If they’re largely operated separately from manned traffic that eliminates nearly all of those difficult problems. The comment about edge cases causes me to think about weather. I don’t think many non-pilots have a good appreciati…

Let’s say you have one virtual pilot for 10 planes. They won’t all be landing at the same time. So that pilot could guide each one down successively during inclement weather. I bet that would be way more fun than the bunches of sitting around that I imagine is currently part of the job.