What’s next after autonomous ride service, well its gotta be self flying air-rides of course!

There has much discussion but yet to hear any big corporation making serious announcement, but that is about to change. Airbus is working on a project to make self piloting airtaxi’s a reality and we know when a big company like this makes a statement its already in beta. The autonomous division at Airbus known as Airbus A3 (pronounced “A-cubed”), the Silicon Valley-based advanced products and partnerships outpost of Airbus Group is working on A3’s Vahana project, which aims to bring a self-piloted air taxi to the Bay Area’s skies.

The all-electric aircraft will feature rotating wings that allow propellers to be aligned vertically for takeoff and landing, and horizontally for flight eliminating the need for airports. It’s designed to fly a single passenger or load of cargo over short distances. Each aircraft requires a landing area the size of two parking spaces.

A flight that could take up to 90 minutes by train would last just 15 minutes with the cost of operating an air taxi is likely to be about $175 per flying hour, or a third that of operating modern helicopters. The total flight range will be about 110 kilometers.

Arne Stoschek head of the division at Airbus, expects a market-ready demo aircraft be ready by 2020. Challenges facing the self flying taxi’s are similar to issues the self-driving car industry which is obstacle avoidance. While there are far fewer objects in the air, both the air taxi and the objects it must avoid are moving much faster. So autonomous flying machines will need to detect objects from much longer distances. For onboard system to calculate every permutation of objects to avoid is a big challenge, which makes it an ideal problem for AI and GPU to solve.