They also need to establish travel corridors for commercial drones and flying cars.
Wasn’t there something EU <-> UK?
Special licensing that is on-par with a helicopter license is needed immediately. They also need to establish travel corridors for commercial drones and flying cars. Delivery drones and flying cars without corridors just means debris fields.
The alternative is autonomous AI trafficked flying cars that is networked with all commercial drone traffic, but that is 5-10 years away from being reliable and possible.
Regardless, the big issue is safety, a helicopter can land without the engine running. A flying car can also land without power, but not as softly and with less survivability.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
50-100 years is more likely. The complexity of automated low altitude flight is exponentially more complex than driving on the ground.
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It isn’t that complex. The problem with current autonomous driving is the car can only infer what other cars are doing and what is around it, especially if we are talking about an autonomous car with idiotic vision mapping without lidar.
With a flying car that is directed by an AI that knows where every other flying object is, what every flying object is going to do, and the locations of every stationary object based on maps and lidar on the vehicle, you can keep collisions far less likely. Taking the human control out of the picture improves the conditions substantially.
I wouldn’t trust a flying car at all, but I would trust an autonomous one with AI ATC far more than an autonomous car going through a construction zone on a highway in a major city during rush hour.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You would have a point if the flying car didn’t have to take into account the wind, updrafts, downdrafts, wind sheer off buildings, and a ton of other flying related stuff that helicopter pilots need to take into account which are barely noticeable to cars the majority of the time.
Then there is landing, the most dangerous part of flying. Imagine if the emergency braking in a csr needed to stop the car without spilling a liquid from an open cup.
Being on the ground is far less complex than flying, otherwise getting a pilot’s license would be easier than a driver’s permit.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Spoken like someone from a culture where drivers are the only thing around because they have gotten so used to ignoring pedestrians, bicyclists, animals (wild or otherwise),… that might be found on the road and hasn’t considered what else might be in the air at all.
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
There are a whole lot less obstacles and unknowns in the air, as well as more planes (ha!) of separation available than a car.
When flying, you don’t really need to worry much about random pedestrians, for example.
If the entire system were completely automated, from the car all the way to ATC, and it’s essentially a taxi that you just tell what location to go to and it handles the rest… well that’s basically air traffic today minus the automated ATC part. (That isn’t to diminish pilots at all; just that I think it’d be a lot easier, in general, to replace a pilot than a taxi driver with automation. )
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If you ignore take off and landing, birds, weather conditions, and everything else that makes flying more complex and dangerous than driving on the ground, sure.
DrunkenPirate@feddit.org 3 days ago
And if you ignore construction sites with high cranes and not documented buildings. Or overland high voltag power cables, wind mills, hobby drones, and local variations of birds.
It‘s just taking the complex challenges of autonomous drivinf into the third dimension. Making it even more complex.
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Other than the takeoff and landing, cars have to deal with those obstacles as well.
A computer running a citywide automated traffic system for cars would have all the same complexity, without the ability to separate traffic in three dimensions.
superniceperson@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Drone swarms already exist. And they work better than self driving cars
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Drone swarms are groups of small, agile devices with no passengers.
superniceperson@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
And they communicate in real time while individually checking their collision centers for non swarm obstacles. The technology is 100% there, the flight capabilities do not matter nor the fact it’s a passenger vehicle; we have the algorithm and sensor packages right now to do what you think is a hundred years away.