Boeing gets serious about self-flying planes with a new investment - Mashable
https://apple.news/AC-GnsWqZSJmyd6OhViaMDw

Boeing has invested in a startup that's trying to make autonomous flight the next big thing.
The company announced today that it has invested in Near Earth Autonomy, which develops technology for unmanned flying vehicles of all shapes and sizes -- from drones to flying cars to commercial planes.
The two companies have also announced a long-term product development partnership. Charles Toups, Boeing's vice president of Research and Technology, will join NEA's board.
Sanjiv Singh, NEA's CEO and co-founder, told Mashable that Boeing's investment is part of a broader effort to create and promote an industry-wide standard for for autonomous flight. In Boeing's ideal future, every flying machine meets three goals: fly safely, land safely, and navigate without GPS.


At the moment, Singh says, what makes a vehicle truly autonomous is the ability to make decisions. Commercial planes can already fly when set to autopilot, but still rely on GPS to orient themselves, and are unable to analyze surroundings and adjust to circumstances without the help of a pilot.

Since its foundation in 2011, NEA has pursued technology to aid vehicles in this decision-making process, including sensors for mapping and survey, collision identification, and landing zone assessment. Their work with Boeing will continue to center around tools to help vehicles synthesize data from its surroundings and output its own plan.
"In a power plant refinery or an oil rig, a storage container, you're looking for all kinds of different indications of the situation on the ground at the facility," Singh says. "You're looking for failure, is there an encroachment of vegetation, that kind of thing."
"The biggest challenge is to find a compact and affordable system that can find all this data and put it together in a quick fashion."

 

Your title is intellectually dishonest. Companies invest in start-ups all the time, especially tech giants. If, for any reason, sometimes much can be learned through R+D even if the original idea (“A.I” in the cockpit) doesn’t come to fruitition. This would hardly mean they are serious about it. Quite a leap to still produce 1950s technology 737s to autonomous airplanes.

 

Does the sand keep your head warm?

 

Autonomous this autonomous that...seems to be the big buzz at the moment.

C130 driver has a point,

Boeing and other companies can invest/research into this sort of stuff as much or as little as they wish. End of the day...they won't be the ones who decide if this stuff really takes off or not....Plenty of other factors to consider...Regulations, political and social factors all will have a influence.

Ultimately if people aren't comfortable with fully autonomous planes, Airlines won't be too keen on buying them, and r&d may take a different direction. Plenty of people worry about flying now...good luck trying to get them on some autonomous airliner. It would take a very brave airline to try it.


In my opinion, it would be wise to keep 1 person up front. Crashes tend to be expensive. But if the apparent "experts" are right in regards to a massive amount of jobs being automated in whatever amount of years ...I'd say the pilots job as it is currently would be more at risk of airlines losing sales, then layoffs due to a massive amount of the population being out of a income and unable to travel as opposed to being automated....Sometimes you have to wonder about the wisdom of all this automation and where it ends up...no point automating everything if no one has a income to buy stuff.


Who knows. Nobody has a crystal ball. Maybe one day, there will only be one pilot up front on short haul...Timeframe-anyones guess. But just because something is new, doesn't necessarily mean it is going to be the next big thing...Crystal Pepsi anyone?

 

Be careful what you ask for.... I agree with you 100%, but you may inadvertently be adding to the argument for universal basic income.

 

Boeing has owned Insitu for quite a while. They've been serious about UASs for a lot longer.

 

Oh man, thats another can of worms to open up...that could evolve into a endless thread.

Employment is a bit more than just earning a income....thats why i think a ubi is hardly the knight in shinning armour that some make it out to be.

 

Umm, it’s the EXACT title of the article.......

 

Eventually, maybe 50+ years from now (based on no facts whatsoever) there may be pilotless aircraft that transport people commercially. The technology is already there in the military to launch a plane and have it go somewhere and land safely. But, the reason my BS guesstimate would put the potential timeframe out there to a long ways away is that it will take a lot of proven successes and culture change to get your average grandma to board a plane flown by Hal 2000.

At what point would you trust technology without human oversight to fly your kids somewhere thousands of miles away at 35,000 ft where one glitch could turn the bird shiny side down and become a lawn dart? When working, the modern automated cockpit takes all of the room for error out of flying and improves safety greatly over traditional pilot only systems from back in the day. And yes, even today's sit back and relax flight systems on the Airbus' leave pilots pretty much babysitting a computer... but they're still there to use critical thinking to problem solve issues.

I will teach my kids to fly, but I will not be pushing them towards a commercial airline career whatsoever because for them, they may run into this issue eventually. I would guess single operator cargo flights are a decade or two away. Military will probably go to a pilotless (on-board at least) fighter aircraft in 20 years or so. Which is great that we've invested so much money into the F-35. Lol. I just hope Skynet doesn't become self-aware during my lifetime, those T1s are pretty fierce to deal with in a firefight.

Time will tell!

 

The thing that worries me is the (in)security of data uplinks.
Considering that no major company including the Government is safe from hacking how do we get the data link secure?
I’m sure initially ‘pilotless’ aircraft will be flown by ‘qualified’ pilots from a ground station rather then autonomous operation.