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What about autonomous cars that can fly? Or planes?

When we talk about the future of transportation these days, self-driving vehicles is the first thing that comes to mind, and aerospace is no different.  When the discussion starts, relative to cars, the first question is, like we’ve discussed before, the machine’s reaction to an emergency situation. The same thing happens in aerospace again.

The discussion might seem very similar, and it is, however small nuances might give some food for thought that will feed into the discussion regarding cars. There is a common idea that pilots have a lot of experience and are seen as entirely reliable and that is what keeps us safe up there, but the truth is more complex than that. Pilots are indeed very experienced and can save our lives, like Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger who landed US Airways Flight 1549, an Airbus A320-214, on the Hudson River after a bird-strike as it took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport in January 2009. On the other hand we have Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, that has crashed in the Alps in March 2015 with the human factor as a main reason.

Across innumerous articles there is a feeling that people do not trust self-driving planes but the truth is, that some of the accidents are human error.  We all know that by now, most of aircraft controls are automatic40 and it is possible to do take-off and landing with no pilot interaction, however, we return to the first question: “what about in case of emergency?”. The discussion might never end, but from our perspective pilots do more than just “driving” a plane (pre-flight checks for example) so we think that the discussion with planes will take longer than cars.

We would like to go through the history of “amount of people on the cockpit”, maybe another time, but for now bear in mind that Boeing is thinking about reducing to one single pilot41 and Airbus is actually working in flying cars so like the cars42,43, this is happening.

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Why now?

The idea of AV was presented for the first time in 1939 by Norman Geddes. And despite it has been only developed by universities and motor companies, was never seen as the “future of transportation” for more than 60 years. What has changed in this century then?

(1) Data storage capacity: in 1956, IBM was launching the first hard drive that stored 5 MB, at a value of 10,000 $/MB35.  A quick search at the internet shows us that today it is possible to rent a space on the cloud by 0.007 $/GB/month36.

(2) Network: in 1969 was sent the first message by ARPANET, between the UCLA host (California University, Los Angeles) and SRI host (Stanford Research Institute). In 1981, the number of computers connected to the “internet” was 213. Last year, more than 1,000 million hosts accessed internet by DNS37.

(3) Information processing (CPU): computer costs has been decreasing while its performance increases. In 1961, the IBM unit 1620 was the most evolved one and the cost by GFLOP (operations per second) was around 1.1×10^12 $/GFLOPS; in 2015, the Intel Celeron G1830 costed just about 0.08 $/GFLOPS38.

(4) Bandwidth: the price of bandwidth has been decreasing over the years. In 1998, the price at the USA was around 1,200 $/Mbps; in 2015, price was around 0.63 $/Mbps, that results on an average of 35% price decrease each year39.

We consider that exponential evolution of technology was the biggest impulse for the introduction of AV in our vocabulary. But along this, the funding for AV development by the government, the introduction of new technological companies on the automotive market or events, like DARPA Challenge, that promote visibility to the subject, were also important for the opening of the Pandora box. Do you remember anymore reasons?

(A big thank you to Prof. Luis Bento for his presentation on the subject)

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Transform Lisbon city center

Autonomous vehicles promise to reinvigorate city centers. Areas that now live with congestion and noise from the vehicles, could be transform in green areas, large sidewalks and unique spaces to sit and enjoy. But how?

Imagine a visit to Lisbon downtown, get in to the car and drive to the fashion restaurant. On top of having to drive through all the city center confusion, we need to find a place to park, what can be one of the most boring exercises of this trip. An English research says that 30% of the traffic in city centers are due to drivers searching for a parking spot34.

AV’s, due to their capacity to connect to the parking infrastructure (V2I) and to other vehicles (V2V), are capable to access information that allow to choose where to go. The efficiency of this search and routes, avoiding road congestion, allowing to make the trip shorter. This reduction helps energy efficiency and air quality.

But why does the AV needs to be parked in city center? Can the vehicle drop the passengers at their destiny and get away of the center, since it’s autonomous? The pressure to park in the city center is high due to the lack of available spaces, what is reflected on the absurd prices. The AV can park outside the city center taking advantage of the lower prices there, or even at home, where the parking is free.

This way, the space that is now used to park could be converted in places to be enjoyed in the city. We hope that Lisbon, in the future, could be greener, with space to walk, cycle or even play in the street like the old days.