TRACY, Calif. — Final week, at a tiny airport within the dusty flatlands east of San Francisco, a red-and-white helicopter lifted gently into the air, hovering a couple of ft over the tarmac. It regarded like every other helicopter, aside from the small black dice hooked up to its nostril.
Native officers spent the week testing this plane for a brand new emergency service, due for launch in January, that can reply to 911 calls through the air. However as this helicopter strikes cops and medical employees over the San Joaquin Valley, it’s going to feed a extra bold undertaking. That black dice is a part of a rising effort to construct small passenger plane that may fly on their very own.
At this time, the helicopter is flown by seasoned pilots. However the brand new emergency service will probably be operated by SkyRyse, a Silicon Valley start-up that intends to reinforce small helicopters and different passenger plane with and software program that enable for autonomous flight, leaning on lots of the identical applied sciences that energy driverless vehicles. These embody the 360-degree cameras and radar sensors constructed into the nostril of the plane.
“There are a lot of issues that should come to fruition earlier than autonomous plane begin flying individuals,” stated Mark Groden, a co-founder and the chief govt of SkyRyse. “However we’re creating the expertise that may take us there.”
Sikorsky, a subsidiary of the protection contractor Lockheed Martin, and Xwing, one other Silicon Valley start-up, are fashioning related expertise. Others, together with Aurora, an organization now owned by Boeing, are exploring autonomous flight as they construct a brand new sort of electrical plane for “flying taxi services.” The initial business plan for Uber’s air taxi service, which it hopes to start in five to 10 years, said it would eventually remove pilots from the aircraft.
The motivation is obvious: Pilots are expensive, and they need rest between flights. Autonomous flight can drive new kinds of passenger services or even change the economics of today’s airlines. As companies like Aurora build aircraft for autonomous flight, entrepreneurs like Mr. Groden believe that adapting existing aircraft is more realistic. But any path will take a while, for technical and cultural reasons.
“This is not just about building something that can fly by itself,” said Dan Patt, the chief executive of the robotics company Vecna, who previously worked on autonomous flying with Sikorsky and other companies while he was at Darpa, a research arm of the Defense Department. “It is about building a body of evidence that this is a safe way to fly.”
Government and industry have long worked to automate portions of passenger flight — “autopilot” is part of the American vernacular — and in some ways, building an autonomous aircraft is easier than building driverless cars, which have long been tested on public roads. Aircraft operate in wide-open spaces, as opposed to narrow roads teeming with pedestrians and other vehicles. And piloting a plane or helicopter is the kind of highly procedural task that computers are typically good at.
Tiny drones have already shown the possibilities of autonomous flight. Skydio, a Silicon Valley start-up founded by former Google engineers, sells a $2,500 drone that can follow you through a forest as you bob and weave between the trees. Adam Bry, the company’s chief executive, who also worked on Google’s delivery drone project, said the same general technology — based on digital cameras and mathematical systems that analyze images in real time — was suited to passenger aircraft.
“The technical challenge is simpler in a lot of ways,” Mr. Bry said. “Nobody wants these things whipping through the forest as fast as they can go. They just want them to fly reliably, carry people from point A to point B, and deal with takeoff and landing.”
But dealing with the uncertainty that comes during takeoff and landing, not to mention the rare and random events that cause crashes in the middle of a flight, can be extremely difficult.
Passenger flight is also highly regulated. Even if they build systems that fly reliably, companies may have trouble moving the technology into public airspace.
That is why SkyRyse, backed by $25 million in funding, including investments from the Silicon Valley venture firms Venrock and Eclipse, is working with the City of Tracy. The Tracy emergency service will operate under current federal rules, and it takes only a step toward autonomy.
The helicopter includes sensors that it would need for autonomous navigation. The radar, for example, is similar to the laser sensors on driverless cars, providing a detailed view of the surroundings even in heavy weather. But at this point, these sensors operate in tandem with pilots. Mr. Patt calls it “a way of building trust” with regulators.
At the same time, these sensors capture enormous amounts of data describing what the helicopter encounters from takeoff to landing — and how the pilot responds.
Using this data, engineers at SkyRyse are recreating flight conditions in a kind of virtual reality, and they’re fashioning systems that can navigate these simulations. Driverless carmakers rely on similar techniques.
“We can simulate puffs of wind, engine failure, even birds digested into the tail rudder,” Mr. Groden said.
But shifting this work into emergency services like the one in Tracy will take years. Moving it into flying taxi services may take even longer.
The helicopters used by SkyRyse — the four-seat Robinson R44 — are small and quiet by existing standards, and in relatively wide use (about 6,000 have been built). But if used in large numbers, they may not be suited to densely populated areas. This is why companies like Aurora and the Silicon Valley start-up Kitty Hawk are building a new kind of aircraft.
Still, the biggest hurdle may be convincing regulators and the public that autonomous flight is safe.
“There are a lot of start-ups doing this,” Igor Cherepinsky, director of autonomy programs at Sikorsky, said. “Quite a few of them are naïve about what it will take.”
Follow Cade Metz on Twitter: @CadeMetz.
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