Originally Posted by
ZeroTT
I don’t think certified autonomous passenger aircraft are coming anytime soon… but self-driving cars are a red herring. Self driving cars are a vastly harder computational problem because roads are so non-standard let alone reacting to other drivers, pedestrians, animals and FOD. Airplane autonomy has a much narrower set of conditions to handle in normal ops and a vastly higher hardware budget per unit.
when airplanes fly themselves really isn’t related to when cars drive themselves.
Yes and no.
Aside from weather, the airplane's environment is more predictable, but you still do have to account for weather. Dumb AI can easily deal with that by strict avoidance but then you get a lot of diverts and cancellations... that's one of those things where human judgement is unmatched.
Also ground vehicles just have to not hit anything... that part's easy for airplanes and they can do it right now (ATC separation, TCAS, EGPWS). The big AI challenge for aircraft is systems failures and unanticipated UAS... a car can just pull off the road and auto-dial the tow-truck, but the airplane needs to keep flying, deal with the issue, and get on the ground safely.
It's the near-infinite possible permutations of failures, weather, geography, etc which make it really hard to program for... that's also the reason ground vehicle autonomy has stalled, they simply can't program for every possible collision avoidance permutation on the road. And they certainly don't have anything smart enough to figure it out for itself.
Remember, an autonomous airplane has to actually complete flights to be economical... it can't punt with a divert or cancellation every time it gets off the script.