First, they have few human-error crashes; they're both significantly safer than automobiles, so unless automation can do better-than-human disaster recovery (not likely yet) there's minimal safety advantage. You have to outperform well-trained humans instead of random people to save lives.
Second, they don't take much time per traveller to operate. Both often have 100+ passengers per operator, making it relatively cheap to employ skilled human labor. Cars average around 2:1, so there's a lot more time being wasted per passenger-hour.
Third, cars have highly flexible usage. Planes and trains are generally moving people or cargo to approximate destinations, and travel to places design to store them. Cars spend lots of time arriving in storage-free areas - what if your car dropped you off at work and drove to a garage outside the city? And they do lots of last-mile transit - what if your car could go pick up your groceries or dry-cleaning without you?
Broadly, I think there's way more safety and financial incentive for 100% driverless operation of cars than any other mode of travel.
Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not.
Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated though, here's an article with some more info: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-w...
Frankly having some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing. Chris Urmson saying it might take up to 30 years is far more convincing: http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...
But that's 30 years for the entire planet, not until it works at all. WayMo is already letting people ride their cars in Phoenix - presumably one of the places with good weather and easy roads, so I think metro-level deployment in the next 4 years seems about right.
[EDIT]: And on the topic of trains. The MTA in NYC can't even seem to handle basic technical projects, like upgrading signaling infrastructure, or just extending a rail line a few miles without spending billions of dollars, so there's probably a decent chance that some of these are not automated due to sheer incompetence.
[0] http://corporatenews.pressroom.toyota.com/article_display.cf...
> “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” Pratt said. “As wonderful as AI is, AI systems are inevitably flawed… We’re not even close to Level 5. It’ll take many years and many more miles, in simulated and real world testing, to achieve the perfection required for level 5 autonomy.”
I can believe that, but I also disagree that we need to be there for it to be useful. Level 4 is enough for large scale deployments.
I think it's far more likely that there would be a three step process for this technology to be adopted: first it's early adopters and everyone else is like "whoa that's too far" (I think this has already happened), then people start to uneasily use it, and when it's good enough they realize "oh holy crap, the machine can drive while I watch Netflix! this is awesome" and then they'll use it constantly. Soon, it just blends into the background. Maybe it isn't 100% safe, but what is?
I don't think you'll get the truth out of focus groups, either. Try to hold a focus group on self driving car adoption and 99% of the people will tell you "only when it's perfect." Probably if you ask the same focus group if they text/eat/put on makeup and drive, 99% of them would tell you "absolutely not" when I'm sure that 100% of them do. I think that once a somewhat good enough assist gets into peoples hands, it won't stop.
This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white sign, we have a very long time to go before the car can safely drive itself without a human observer to intervene when needed.
When it comes to automated driving, we need to keep our optimism in check and know that it can take decades before we have safe robotic taxis. They may become legal in countries with lower bars for safety before they are legal in the US.
The big problem, I think, will be when the drunks get into accidents because they will turn on autonomous driving, and don't get pulled over. Instead, they won't be sober enough to observe and intervene when the car screws up.
It's pretty clear that if a human can't even pay attention to a light directly pointed at them, we have a very long time to go before humans can safely drive cars without a computer to intervene when needed.
Of course, the road system is designed for humans' foibles, not computers' foibles, and computers will have to deal with that. But the bar is low.
Computers aren't really as consistent as you say, either. Obviously, a deterministic machine will produce the same outputs for the same inputs. But when your inputs are camera data from the real world, you'll never get the same input twice. For example, my car sometimes misreads or fails to read speed limit signs, but it'll usually read the exact same sign perfectly fine the next time I go past.
This is better for the environment, there is a lot of energy lost in a full stop for a stop sign that could be saved: less air pollution/CO2 to deal with.
I think you misread that article.
Someone built their own toy implementation of an CV sign recognizer. Then, with full access to the code, they reverse engineered visual distortions that could seem innocuous to humans but trip up their model.
It's not a real world issue as far as I'm aware (though obviously signs can be misread or missed, but not invisibly vandalized)
a) Humans can be fooled by vandalising a stop sign too. The difference here is that the change is imperceptible to humans... but does this matter?
b) A lot of self-driving work leans heavily on maps which will know to expect a stop sign.
That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as a second point of reference.
You wouldn't remove human sign identification from the algorithm, you just supplement it with the small QR code under the sign.
People can be dicks to each other in myriad ways, I don't find these arguments that you could trick self-driving cars super compelling.
Sure but is this because of capability or number of vehicles?
>at limited times,
Sure, because drivers don't want to work late at night.
>and presumably in limited weather conditions;
Why's that?
>and most importantly that there's still a human driver in the vehicle at all times.
Sure, but this isn't due to capability, but for regulatory reasons. As far as I know, the firefly vehicles (the cute little bubble ones) don't have steering wheels, and were in use 3 years ago. This argument doesn't make sense to me.
Because Phoenix has extremely low precipitation: http://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/phoenix/arizona/united-...
Similarly, opinions from those heavily invested aren't convincing.
Are there people with credible experience, but without bias either way, that are giving projections on when it might be viable?
e.g. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Driverless-car...
"I think that driving exposes fundamental issues in intelligence, fundamental issues in how the brain works. And we might be a very long way away.”
Having listened to Leonard speak, his skepticism seems to mostly be around how you deal with all the things like left hand turns in busy traffic, police waving people around an accident, etc. that happen on a daily basis.
Before automobiles it was normal for people to walk in the middle of the street, but we adapted (some would argue this was a bad thing ofc).
I don't think it's a prerequisite for autonomous systems to be the same as humans, the benefit is just too large for us to wait.
Actual aircraft can be fully automated for landing at least. In the US Army, I flew the Shadow 200 TUAV and it had a thing called the T.A.L.S. (Tactical Automated Landing System)[1] which does exactly what you'd assume it does by the acronymn. It is a monopulse radar tracking system on the ground with a transponder on the plane. You fly the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) into a small area at one end of the runway and click the "Land AV" button (A.V. == Aerial Vehicle) and the landing is 100% hands off. You have the option to cancel the landing if wind or the parameters are off down to 10ft, but below that it is land or crash trying!
For trains, the safest ones are automated, but Unions (in the US at least) prevent most of the autonomous technology from being deployed. Where I live, in Chicago, we had a train conductor fall asleep and the train went up the escalator and crashed into the turnstiles at terminal 2 of Ohare[2]. A computer would have prevented this from happening as a computer would neither have been speeding or sleeping. In that incident, the automated breaking systems had never been tested and in fact were configured / setup wrong, so they both failed. This has been rectified since and additional barriers have been constructed. That being said, there are lots of fully automated trains[3], you just might be unaware of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAI_RQ-7_Shadow#Design
[2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/g00/news/ct-ohare-blue-line-crash-ntsb-report-met-20150326-story.html?i10c.referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems#Grade_of_Automation_4_SystemsThat’s about the most reckless and grotesque characterization of an airline pilot’s job I’ve ever heard. To say that a 787, or any other airliner, can fly “unaided” and that pilots are on hand to “babysit the autopilot” isn’t just hyperbole or a poetic stretch of the facts. It isn’t just a little bit false. And that a highly respected technology magazine wouldn’t know better, and would allow such a statement to be published, shows you just how pervasive this mythology is. Similarly, in an article in the New York Times not long ago, you would have read how Boeing pilots spend “just seven minutes” piloting their planes during a typical flight. Airbus pilots, the story continued, spend even less time at the controls.
Confident assertions like these appear in the media all the time, to the point where they’re taken for granted. Reporters, most of whom have limited background knowledge of the topic, have a bad habit of taking at face value the claims of researchers and academics who, valuable as their work may be, often have little sense of the day-to-day operational realities of commercial flying. Cue yet another aeronautics professor or university scientist who will blithely assert that yes, without a doubt, a pilotless future is just around the corner. Consequently, travelers have come to have a vastly exaggerated sense of the capabilities of present-day cockpit technology, and they greatly misunderstand how pilots interface with that technology.
I’d like to see a remotely operated plane perform a high-speed takeoff abort after an engine failure, followed by a brake fire and the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see one troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring a diversion over mountainous terrain. I’d like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. The idea of trying to handle any one of these, from a room thousands of miles away, is about the scariest thing I can hardly imagine. Hell, even the simple things. Flying is very organic — complex, fluid, always changing — and decision-making is constant and critical. On any given flight, there are innumerable contingencies, large and small, requiring the attention and visceral appraisal of the crew.
[1] http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/automation-myths/
Factually, autopilots are what actually fly the overwhelming flight hours in commercial aviation. The pilot takes off, gets to altitude, sets the heading with the assistance of tech like a VOR[1], sets the autopilot, and then just scans the instrument panels for the duration of the flight. They then take over for the approach and landing. I strongly doubt any commercial pilot would disagree with this (I've got several in my family, but am not one myself). The fact is that the number one cause of aircraft crashes is pilot error. So for the 1-5% where a human would indeed prevent a crash as mentioned in your article, over 50% [2] of the fatal crashes are in fact due to human error.
Regarding the last paragraph, I was the pilot on a mission over the Sinjar Mountain[3] range and had my altimeter go haywire and think I was at 20,000ft AGL (above ground level) when I was in fact more like 7500ft AGL. The troubleshooting for a remote plane is exactly the same as any IFR (instrument flight rating aka you can't see outside of the cockpit due to weather) rated plane when you have zero visibility. You trust your instincts and the sensors / instruments. I knew the altimeter was totally full of lies as the plane started descending below the tops of the mountains thereby killing my signal. So I set the camera to "nose" which means straight forward and when I regained communications, I managed to switch it to manual roll ("roll knobs as they call it") and did a turn left as hard as feasible to miss the tip of one of the mountains. Totally ignoring the altimeter, I flew it home with the aid of the camera to gauge rough altitude and safely landed the plane. Do they crash occasionally? Sure. However, none of these were designed with safety critical autopilot and that could certainly be developed with today's software and hardware. That pilot is arguing "computers can't replace me!!!", but in reality if they did, the majority of the crashes[1] that are fatal would not happen in the first place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range
1. Pilot sets takeoff conditions (throttles, flaps)
2. Pilot signals deck crew
3. Catapult accelerates the plane off the deck
4. The plane's fly by wire control system pitches the plane for optimal Angle of Attack for the wings (IIRC - 8.1* without flaps).
Once the aggressive acceleration of the catapult is complete, the pilot takes control again and begins flying - this is less than 1 second after catapult release.
Here's an example catapult launch from a USN F-18 pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9D1Ls-_JM
If you look at the stick directly in between the pilot's legs, you'll see him put his right hand on it at ~4.5 seconds. His left hand is on the throttles.
There's no autopilot which could have successfully landed an Airbus A320 in the Hudson River.
These edge-cases are uninteresting IMO.
On the contrary, these edge cases are by far the most interesting thing. Not just tabloid-interesting, but in terms of generating usable data.
You can argue that autonomous flight doesn't yet have Nine Nines. I would probably agree. But "Miracle on the Hudson" was just that, and extremely rare situations should not be a standard-bearer for allowing autonomous flight. In the same way that suicidal/homicidal humans shouldn't be the standard-bearer for allowing human flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
That doesn't sound like it's just because "unpopular", in fact, that sounds like a technical reason. It sounds like you're really saying "they are limited, but people are bad too, so it shouldn't matter."
There was enough pressure to engineer away flight engineers, navigators, and radio operators in cockpits. I wouldn't expect them to pass on potential savings in the low-margin world of airlines.
> "With a net profit margin of just 2.4%, airlines only retain $5.42 per passenger carried," said Tony Tyler CEO of International Air Transport Association (IATA) at the group's 70th AGM in Doha, Qatar.
I suspect they're interested in single-digit cost reductions.
Driver salary is 26% of the cost of trucking.
Driver salary is 52% of the cost of a taxi.
Those numbers are in the single digits for aircraft and trains.
We could replace pilots and train operators, technologically speaking. But the incentives are not (yet) large enough to overcome the regulatory and cultural barriers. We'd rather have that extra order of magnitude of safety, because it costs so little compared to other expenses.
The cost/benefit calculation for drivers is fundamentally different.
If you drop the utilization, the cost of the driver as a percentage probably goes up a bit. But here's the thing about those numbers.
Yes, driver salary is a big chunk of taxi cost but flip things around. It's only about half the cost. In other words, there's this widespread assumption that autonomy totally changes the nature of automobiles and automobile ownership even though it only cuts the cost in half.
Ask yourself. If you own a car today, would getting a 50% discount on taxi rides completely change your behavior. Maybe it would for some at the margins but only at the margins.
Look longer term.
Parking spaces in cities cost ~30k. (And in some cities, a lot more than that). Included with a house, they are still part of the price (no free lunch).
Over a 30 year mortgage, that is 1k a year.
In California, car insurance is almost 2k a year. (Oddly enough, 1.1k in New York State!)
So 3k a year just to have the privilege of driving a car.
Apparently an average new car now days cost 31k. (Which seems insane to me, but that is what people are buying).
Being generous and rounding down a bit, that is another 5k a year.
So now 8k a year, before gas, before maintenance, before any warranty problems, before screws in tires, etc.
If mass transit can replace commuting to work, then weekend outings with automated taxis become very doable. If you give $5 per ride (on par with UberPool, though I realize that isn't profitable), it is 1600 rides a year to break even with owning a car. (Though ownership goes down after the car is paid off, 600 rides a year to break even!)
2) Especially since amortization cost is also reduced, you might as well electrify the vehicle (this requires some sort of robot arm for fast charging, but I suppose you could pay someone like $0.50 per cycle to plug and unplug a bunch of vehicles in the interim). That reduces fuel costs by a factor of 2 and maintenance costs even more.
3) No driver means room for more people or ability to shrink the car, reducing all the above costs.
So you've now reduced all the other costs by a factor of 2. That means your overall costs are now reduced by 75% or more. Yeah, that's starting to look pretty attractive.
IMO the killer app is in freight anyways.
On top of that, the space and interfaces for the driver is a substantial part of the cost and weight of the vehicle itself.
To give an example, my friend has to memorize the required speeds for each different section and turn in every train he runs, and has to manually adjust the train's speed accordingly.
Literally all of that can and should be done automatically, but the industry hasn't caught up with what is technologically possible.
The white glove pointing is all about being on time, it is a discipline and hitting those exactly on time arrival-departures comes down to train drivers knowing what speed they are doing without looking at instruments, which are covered during training.
Maybe the Danes have their own variation of this obsessive stop-watch training. A system that works efficiently does not have to be computerised, fantastic teamwork and dedicated professionalism can suffice.
In other endeavours, we still have not fully automated coffee, instead of a perfectly adequate beverage from a machine some prefer a human operator to operate the machine as if it was some rocket-surgery skill/craft. I don't think train operation is like that, a faux professionalism, maybe programming is nearer the mark, some programmers use a text editor which is ridiculous when they could use an IDE. Furthermore some programmers roll their own code rather than just re-use some existing module.
I thought both were already highly automated?
There's a fundamental difference between the two. Airplane autopilots are basically scripted, and operate fully within the parameters set by the pilot. There is almost no intelligence, and very little adaptivity there. The pilot needs to reprogram the autopilot manually when the flight plan changes, for example. Flight conditions can change in many ways that require the autopilot to be reprogrammed, reconfigured, or even switched off. Airplanes have actually crashed more than once because the pilot configured the autopilot incorrectly.
I don't know much about trains, except that fully automating without adapting all the rail infrastructure is more difficult than you would imagine, for example because there is basically no standardization in how semaphores are placed, for example.
This is a long way off from the world of "Enter the destination from my garage, take a nap, and wake up an hour later at my destination," of "Full Autonomy." There is a distinct inflection point of utility where Autonomous vehicles require you to be paying attention to take over in emergency, and the point at which that is no longer required.
Well, there's ACAS/TCAS (airborne collision avoidance system / traffic collision avoidance system) and certainly we are moving towards ASAS (airborne separation assurance system), based mainly in transponder / ADS-B radio signals. But as others have commented, there are other reasons (psychological, economic, etc.).
Also, if I recall correctly, he said in certain conditions it's against regulations for a pilot to be manually controlling the aircraft, such as landings in high winds.
"land totally on its own" suggests autonomy. In reality it's a three part certification: pilot, plane (autopilot), and runway. There is only one zero visibility landing system, and that's the ILS CAT IIIc.[1] If there's no ground capability for the runway (does not exist or is down for maintenance) then the plane can't do a CAT IIIc landing.
In practice there is no such thing as landing without an explicit clearance to land. Clearance is given by ATC to the pilot via AM radio. The autopilot has no language listening or speaking skills at all. Numerous clearance modifications happen during a flight, given verbally.[2]
The plane also doesn't taxi itself into position, and it doesn't retract or subsequently deploy landing gear. Many tasks aren't available to the autopilot, nor are many transitions between tasks.
About the last statement, FAR 91.3(a) The pilot in command of an aircraft is directly responsible for, and is the final authority as to, the operation of that aircraft. You could construe FAR 91.13(a)No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another. as requiring the pilot to use automation if the aircraft manufacturer requires it in certain situations. Otherwise, no, and I have only ever heard of autopilots needing to be disabled in high wind situations.
[1] Example instrument approach procedure. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see it explicitly requires ground navaids and a certified crew. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077I35RC2_3.PDF
[2] Example STAR which most airports don't have, but when they do you'll even see these are really just designed to allow ATC to "plug in" a smaller subset of data like an altitude or speed, without having to recite the entire arrival instructions. Can it be automated? No, because the variables are delivered by voice. The STAR is useless without the variables, and variables are useless without the STAR. http://155.178.201.160/d-tpp/1709/09077POWDR.PDF
The other part sounds improbable - quite the opposite, a pilot always needs to be able to take over in case the automatic systems fail.
Planes are mostly automated, except for liftoff and landing. They can probably automate those too ... but there's no point. You'll still need a pilot. Would you get into a plane flown entirely by computer with no pilot available to take over?
Trains are entirely automated. At least, the ones where there isn't a union enforcing some form of employment. I've been on a number of trains in airports that don't have any kind of operator.
So, if it costs a billion dollars to make a good AI driver, then if you put it in a million cars then it's costs 1000 dollars each and you could eliminate lots of jobs where the main cost is the human (delivery, taxi) so providing a ready sales avenue for your self-driving car (or tech). If you put it in trains then you can maybe drive thousands of trains, and the human is a relatively low cost element of a train service so there's less room to expand.
I don't know if this is true, or even if the logic I outlined above pencils out with real data but it probably contributes in some way.
All of that work to support a small rail line? It might never pay off.
2. Why would you need to avoid crossings with roads just because it's autonomous? Trains use signals that only turn green when the section ahead is clear of other trains or vehicles. It's not like train conductors check road crossings by sight to decide whether to drive or brake.
I've been on an automated city train as well, I believe in China.
The space shuttle's only system that absolutely required human intervention was the landing gears, and that was to ensure that humans were always necessarily in the loop. That doesn't mean that the shuttle wasn't _MOSTLY_ automated.
>If those checkpoints were automated
If there were unicorns...
>the plane could indeed fly and land on its own.
No, and its annoying that you're asserting things you clearly don't understand.
As I mention elsewhere, the only technology we currently have for precision instrument landings in zero weather visibility (the only 100% autoland) is the ILS CAT IIIc approach. The overwhelming majority of airports in the country do not have that infrastructure, nor do most airplanes.
I'm a pilot, you clearly aren't. There are numerous other factors here, but just the fact you can't land wherever you want, at most airports with most aircraft, is enough to prove your assertion false.
Denver International Airport has 10 runways. Only three have ILS CAT IIIc approaches, and that is the only instrument approach procedure that permits full autoland in zero visibility. So you're saying it's completely OK to have 1/3 utilization of the airport's runways for automated landings.
Oh and, those three runways? 34L, 34R, 35R. They all point north. So you can't do auto landings to the east, west, or south. Due to wind direction, your planes won't be able to land on quite a few days out of the year, at all. And in fact the wind could shift while a flight is enroute and now where does it go? All of a sudden the required alternate may be insufficient because a simple wind shift, rather than a change in visibility, becomes the new metric for whether a plane can land or not, and whether the alternate is legal.
This is one logical flaw. There are thousands of these. Totally surmountable, with metric tons of money. But you said no investments necessary.
Some investment will certainly be needed. ADS-B is only beginning to be rolled out, and it will be essential for pilotless planes. But the technical issues for automating planes are mostly solved. Aircraft automation is an engineering problem; not a research problem. The investments still needed are engineering investments.
In contrast, getting to Level 5 automation in cars is very much still a research problem, and as such, orders of magnitude greater resources of money and time will be required to solve it.
It sounds like you think most commercial aviation flights in the U.S. autoland. Almost none of them do. Most flights are landed by pilots. Some portion of the approach is done by autopilot but the landing is done by a pilot. Many airports in the country have mandatory noise abatement. Are you aware that ILS approaches are incompatible with noise abatement? These approaches and landings are hand flown in visual conditions. So your plane can't just use instrument landings designed for bad weather flying. You have to R&D a whole new approach to landing method that's noise abatement compatible, to be able to have pilotless planes doing autolandings. Unsolved problem. Seems significant research related to me, not merely an engineering problem.
Why will it take orders of magnitude greater resources and time to solve the auto driving problem, and yet all such research problems for auto flying are solved? What data do you have that causes you to conclude that one is solved and the other is far from solved? What's the difference in cognition and judgement requirements between the two? What's the relevance of experience? Why do you suppose there are so much more substantial knowledge and experience requirements in pilot certification than driver licensing? Why does it take so long to learn how to become an airline transport pilot? Why have gradations of certification? If it's so much simpler of a system to automate as you state, then it should be a simpler system for a human to learn and just plug into, than learning to drive. But it's the exact opposite, it's much more complex than driving, despite automation.
And yet you're saying no, it's simpler and solved, to just replace all of that cognition and judgement with computers and automation. No more research required, just go built it, according to you. Strikes me as a lot of hubris.
Additionally, air traffic controllers are part of this cognitive and judging process of making planes move around. They train for years as well. But despite every flight requiring two human brains in flight, and part of a human brain involved on the ground, you're claiming that driving cars is more cognitively complicated to automate. Why? What's the basis? A single person does this in a car, and they almost always can multitask totally unrelated things like listening to music, or conversing with passengers.
CAT III landings do not incluce runway egress. Unsolved problem to do without a pilot. Sounds like massive R&D is needed, not just engineering or it'd already be automated.
Autopilots don't do turbulence or icing conditions well. They're disabled in severe cases, and such conditions aren't always predictable or even known until the moment they're encountered. Sounds like an R&D problem, not just an engineering problem. Landing on ice, snow, and heavy rain? Pilots do that by hand, not autopilots. AGain, more R&D needed, not just engineering. For reasons unknown you want us to believe that for planes these are solved problems, or easily solved problems, while identical situations for autonomous cars are still difficult unsolved problems. Why? Sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
The term autopilot is idiotic. The most sophisticated autopilot follows a defined path, the path is defined by a pilot. It effectively maintains altitude, heading, and speed. That's it. There is no code that enables the autopilot to think like a pilot and redefine the path, which happens in all flights. Clearance changes are common place for many reasons. So you need to design a pilotless version of the current ATC to pilot to autopilot carrier pigeon system. Is it an engineering problem? Or a research problem? Seems like both to me because there's no plan for it right now, no design.
Why is ADS-B essential? It's merely scaled out secondary radar. It solves a very vertical problem. It doesn't have sufficient precision to help with landing. It says nothing about how to utilize this information. Humans do that. Seems to me it's a research problem to create an AI that replaces the evaluation and judgement of a pilot, not just engineering.
sigh
Gusty takeoffs and landings? Autopilots don't do that right now. Sounds like a research problem, not an engineering one.
Emergency procedures? This is 100% the domain of human pilots right now. Code that for the pilotless aircraft. Seems R&D related, not merely an engineering task.
The autopilot needs to meet the functional equivalent of competency for the applicable parts of pilot certification in FAR 61. It needs to be able to conform with all or at least some substantial subset of aviation regulations FAR 91, 135, and 121 as right now a huge amount of this conformance is done by pilots. Otherwise, you're redesigning the entire aviation system from the ground up. Either way this sounds to me like a massive research problem, not just an engineering problem.
This list goes on and I pretty much think you're an idiot, not because you're ignorant, but because you're ignorant, deny it, and then handwave bullshit that all the seriousl research problems are solved and all that remains is building things. It's just - it's really stupid and condescending.
Cars will be automated because cars have to be automated.
These are self interested business people. There are real issues around self driving cars like safety, autonomy, rent seeking, corporate control, individual freedom and surveillance that self interested tunnel vision advocates simply cannot comprehend.