Inspiration for the Star Wars landspeeders? I find it pretty amazing how much of the visual language of science fiction is a digested and recombined medley of the popular science and industrial research of its day.

Actually, this[1] is the original concept. Pretty close! I coincidentally saw it in a documentary yesterday. They changed the design so they could easily make the prop based on an existing small car.

[1] https://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11...

Jet-based hovering vehicles like this and the Flyboard Air suffer from a pair of difficulties: inherent instability and the inability of their turbines to throttle up and down fast enough for basic computer control to keep them stable. Such vehicles are today manual-fly only and require a high degree of skill and talent to operate safely. I wonder if machine learning could be applied predictively to achieve a degree of stability beyond normal "tilting left, apply thrust left" programming.

I understand this is a non linear control problem with a well known model. How would machine learning help there?

Third problem is if your neighbors have them.