IEEE Future Directions
Related Articles
Uber has just signed the agreement with NASA to cooperate in making flying cars (taxis in their case) a reality. The news has been taken by many newspaper and televisions around the world an this follows the announcement made few months ago in Dubai to prepare a taxi service that could start as soon as next Summer, 2018, in the Emirates. That announcement was followed by another one to initiate service in Dallas and more recently in Los Angeles.
However, what makes the present announcement much more interesting, and credible, is that cars cannot fly just because they are given “wings”. What is needed is an infrastructure that supports this new form of transportation.
If you look at airplanes you can see what a complex infrastructure is in place, in terms of regulation, procedures, control centres to make flight possible (and safe). Having cars flying requires that, and more. Indeed, the most complex part of flying is taking off and landing, because that is where the air traffic becomes “dense”. If you look at big international hubs you see planes landing two minutes apart (2.5 nautical miles is the minimum distance when approaching the airport) and as I noticed in a recent post a glitch (like a drone) can wreak havoc in this finely tuned mechanism.
Now think about a city with flying cars. There may be hundreds, thousands buzzing around The complexity of managing this traffic in 3 dimension is mind boggling. Uber is foreseen tens of thousands of flight a day in a city, that is at least an order of magnitude higher than what happens every day at Heathrow (650 flights in and out per day on average).
More than that. Airplanes may be circling around the airport waiting for a free slot to land, but that would not make sense for a flying car whose flight time is probably in the order of 10′ (and its battery is likely to work for some 30′).
The complexity is really huge and new strategies for air traffic management are required, also taking into account that there will be no pilot in those flying cars. This is what NASA is working on and this is what Uber needs to make its vision a reality.
One thing is to demonstrate a flying taxi in Dubai, taking off from a skyscraper, veering a few hundred meters to fly over the desert and then landing on the top of another skyscraper, still a stone throw from the desert. Quite a different story is to fly hundreds of taxis over Los Angeles intersecting their paths continuously.
These kind of challenges are being addressed in the IEEE FDC Symbiotic Autonomous Systems Initiative, stimulating studies in this area that is likely to require a new area of science.
