Here’s a belated report from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Vehicle autonomy is still a big buzz, but much more restrained than last year. With cars, the accident in Arizona that left a pedestrian pushing a bike across the road fatally injured led to a large change in the public mood. Reportedly there have been as many as a hundred incidents of the cars being attacked subsequently in Arizona, in one case by a person with a gun who held up the human safety driver. It’s true that Lyft are operating up to 150 of the cars on the Las Vegas strip, but what’s not so well known until you hail one is that they each contain not one, but two human safety drivers.
In panel discussions the same feeling prevails, with panellists expressing scepticism that the cars will ever achieve ‘the last mile’, that part of the journey not on the freeway. And the vendors on the show floor are just as vague as ever about how the cars will deal with weather, mud, and third world (e.g. UK) road marking. Not a single one had any form of wiper, clear view disc or any other kind of cleaning, apart from a vain hope that ‘water jets’ will somehow stop the things clagging up like the back of my Land Rover.
And autonomous aircraft? Few and far between this year. Intel had no drone show (utterly spectacular at the Bellagio fountains last year) and the Volocopter (heavily branded by them last year) was not spoken of. The few panel discussions where FAA personnel turned up (The government is partly closed here) laboured on how these things will have to achieve some kind of certification. Along with the intractable battery problem, that pretty much wipes them out except in Dubai, where many people believe they are already in operation. (Or not).
Instead, we have the heavy brigade represented by Bell (formerly Bell helicopter) with a six tilt-rotor 5 place e-vtol mock up. This uses the best part of the electric quadcopter concept, the electric transmission, but is not actually battery powered, apart from a very small reserve equivalent to autorotation in a conventional helicopter. Instead, it has a small turbo-electric power unit which must be an interesting development in its own right. The six fan units tilt as in the Osprey and many of the engineers come from that background. Like the Osprey, it can make a run-on landing with maybe 45 deg tilt. The great attraction of the electric fans is the low tip speed, which together with the ducted design might make these things acceptable in urban environments. (The shattering noise of the Osprey at lift off has to be experienced from the cabin of a nearby Cessna to be fully appreciated).
However, none of that captures the importance of Bell’s business model. That can be summarised in one word: utilisation. The aircraft, which will carry all of the certification costs of a conventional helicopter, is designed for 2000 Hrs p.a.. This is possible because of the low maintenance of the electric drive, which might be limited to annual blade and elastomeric bearing replacement. Because it’s not battery powered, there’s none of the charge recharge cycle time limitation that true electric aircraft will have to overcome. Bell hope that overall operating costs might be much lower than traditional helicopters, making the ‘Uber air taxi’ mission feasible. A few snags remain to be resolved, like for instance anti-ice, which may be soluble with boots on the rotors.
Will this ambitious concept ever leave the ground? I don’t know, but it seems more likely than the current breed of human carrying autonomous quadcopters, especially now they are attracting the interest of the FAA.
So what of autonomy? This is very much a piloted aircraft. Bell hope that pilot training might be less arduous than traditional helicopter training, and autonomy is a distant goal, but not any time soon.
So there it is, the future of autonomous vehicles, at least as seen through the eyes of one long-term CES delegate.
Food for thought. Thanks !
Not really surprising since artificial intelligence has been progressing painfully slowly every since the earliest massive hopes in the 1960s, when the problem of representing a 3D world and working out which bit is in front of which bit, etc, was solved, resulting in all the optimism…
In the coldwar, there was more money pumped in the 60’s in AI than today in many research domains like aviation/defence that relies on voice/text/image processing…all has failed as you did not have internet (huge database, in the 70’s they call it skynet ;) ) and a cheap compute power
AI algorithms that people brag about are the same as those that failed in the 70’s (call them deep network instead of neural network), this has less to do with a 3D problem optimization but more to do with 5 billion tagged pictures that feed Facebook image servers or 2 million daily translation in Wikipedia….
Driverless cars and planes are the wet dream of bosses who would rather have companies without employees (and possibly customers) as they are too cumbersome and troublesome to manage. In other words, folks whose idea of business is an organisation where they can sit on their collective behinds while the money comes in without effort. Or, as it’s been described, the “Basil Fawlty Principle”.
From a social point of view I can not find anything positive about this development. Taxis without drivers, planes without pilots, parcel delivery without people, manufacturing without people, so who will buy all the goods if all those workers are out of work? Autopilots for driving on motorways, why not but as some Tesla and other drivers have found out at their or others expense, even with an AP a car needs constant vigilance, as much as autopilots in airplanes do, where no crew would go to sleep while the plane flies on AP.
Where this technology makes some sense is in dangerous environments.But even there, driverless is mostly not an option but rather remote control.
Ibra wrote:
AI algorithms that people brag about are the same as those that failed in the 70’s (call them deep network instead of neural network),
This is not true. There has been substantial scientific and practical development since the 70’s.
Could still be 50 years away.
It has been just around the corner for that long.
Airborne_Again wrote:
There has been substantial scientific and practical development since the 70’s.
Yes, a lot of actually but the current success mainly sits on “internet-style” data and cheap compute being available rather than how smart the math in that scientific research…
My point on AI performance after internet, this time it is very different, there is a big difference between teaching a single car to drive using complex algorithms versus operating a simple math on real-time sensor data from 5 million cars in all sort of driver/road scenarios, the latter will outperform humans in all tasks, including flying 
I bet Facebook computer vision and image recognition program with 5 billion pictures a day and enough compute heat to evaporate a small lake, that server have seen in the world yesterday more than all GA members combined during their entire life and we have some few who have seen a lot
IMO all what these AIs do is to search through GBs of data in a structured manner, lumping together similar data for later processing of new data into the same similar clusters. Then these clusters typically represent certain modes, for instance broken or OK. The speed and the amounts of data is staggering, the intelligence is not.
An autonomous car requires intent. Without it, it’s just like a train on rails. Nothing new, only different kind of rails. The intent thing is far into the future.
A guy I know just sold his company that had grown to include a substantial number European employees doing work in ‘mobility,’ very much including R&D on driverless vehicles for OEMs. With cash in hand he’s now looking at selling his current plane and buying a Mooney Ovation… obviously to fly himself for fun. So irony aside in that way I think driverless vehicles etc has worked out to be a very exciting field for him 
Maybe he sold at the right time to maximize his quality of life…
