China gives Ehang the first industry approval for fully autonomous passenger-carrying air taxis::Ehang shares have nearly doubled in price this year, before trading was temporarily halted Monday pending a significant announcement.
China gives Ehang the first industry approval for fully autonomous passenger-carrying air taxis::Ehang shares have nearly doubled in price this year, before trading was temporarily halted Monday pending a significant announcement.
To be clear, I definitely agree that this is a bad idea.
However, one of the hardest things about making autonomous cars work is avoiding traffic and pedestrians. If air traffic control can be managed such that these avoid other aircraft (and things like buildings and cell towers, obviously) I could actually see this as easier to get the software working.
There’s less air traffic now. But if you approve the first autonomous air taxi, you’ll soon approve the second and third and before you know it there are thousands of those things whirring through every major city and then you have just as much traffic and one more dimension to worry about.
Specially if things are built from the ground up (pun intended). A new system relying in communication between software and sensors should be relatively easier to deal than the fuzziness of reading signs and reacting to random elements around you.
I hope they have excellent navigation system which at least won’t crash the aircraft if the gps/glonass/etc signals suddenly got disrupted (bad weather, interference, military activity, etc). Having a big taxi drone suddenly trying to emergency autoland on your roof due to gps failure would be horrible.
I can see how the autonomous control part might be simpler due to there being fewer objects to avoid colliding with, but there’s the no-small-matters of the additional dimension to navigate combined with managing complex avionics vs the simpler control mechanisms of a car. Dealing with takeoff, landings, crosswinds, and many other things are much more complicated than driving a car.