Autonomous passenger drones are not Sci-Fi anymore

<span property="schema:name">Autonomous passenger drones are not Sci-Fi anymore</span>
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Autonomous passenger drones are not Sci-Fi anymore

    • Author Name
      Masha Rademakers
    • Author Twitter Handle
      @MashaRademakers

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    No way! Heavy traffic jam in front of your door and you need to go to a meeting. You’re never going to be on time. No worries, with one click on your drone service-app, a little drone picks you up and takes you in ten minutes to your destination, without any headaches and with an amazing view of the city.

    Is this reality or just a futuristic scene from a sci-fi movie?  In a time where the selfie drone is a hit and you can have your pizza delivered by a drone, the development of a passenger drone is not far from reality anymore.

    Testing

    Passenger drone development is in full swing and the first drones have already reached the sky. The Ehang 184 can fly with a passenger for 23 straight minutes on one charge. The Chinese firm EHang presented the drone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and is now testing in the Nevada skies. This makes Nevada one of the first US states to permit autonomous drones in its airspace.

    The business is booming. Uber revealed ambitious plans for Uber Elevate Stations, taxi stations all over town that fly with multi-passenger drones. Amazon started testing its Prime Air vehicles in the US, UK, Austria and Israel. The drones can carry small packages up to five pounds and bring them to the clients. In addition, drone developer Flirtey is cooperating with Dominos Pizza by delivering pizzas in New Zealand. And the European firm Atomico invested 10 million euros in plane developer Lilium Aviation to build a passenger drone. These entrepreneurs all discovered that the use of drones highly accelerates package delivery and facilitates access to remote areas. Besides delivery and taxi services, its use can also facilitate the military, engineering, and emergency services.

    Autonomous

    All current passenger and delivery drones are developed as autonomous flyers, which is the most efficient choice for future development. It is simply not efficient to let everyone get a Private Pilot license to fly a passenger drone, which requires at least 40 hours of flying experience. Most of the people would not even be able to qualify for the license.

    On top of that, autonomous vehicles are more reliable drivers than a human being. Autonomous systems in cars and drones use GPS to track their location, while using sensors, learning algorithm software, and cameras to recognize signs and other traffic. Based on this information, the car or drone itself decides on a safe speed, acceleration, braking and turning while the passenger can just sit back and relax. Compared to an autonomous car, flying in a drone is even safer, because there is more space to evade obstacles in the sky.

    Ehang 184

    To produce the Ehang 184, developers combined the best of autonomous driving technologies and drone development into a vehicle that can now autonomously fly itself with one passenger inside. The company ensures a “comfortable cabin environment and a smooth and steady flight even in windy condition”. The drone might look unsteady, but its light structure is made from the same material NASA uses for space craft.

    During the flight, the drone connects to a command centre that provides essential information to the drone system. In bad weather conditions, for instance, the command centre will prohibit the drone from take-off and in an emergency, it will show the drone the nearest landing spots.