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Comment by prbuckley | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles.

Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the car all together. I would love to see a detailed analysis that compares these two approaches.

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Each approach has a different challenge.

For autonomous cars, the challenge is software. It's very difficult to build software that handles all the edge cases mentioned in the article. The hardware (cars) is a solved problem.

For autonomous personal flying machines, you're right that the software is easy, but the challenge is power density. The only VTOL machine that can carry humans a considerable distance without refueling is a helicopter. Helicopters are too large, disruptive, and expensive for everyone to have one. But no one has figured out how to shrink one down and still be able to carry a person.

If you compare the two approaches, one big difference is that software is improving much faster than power density. So my money would be that we solve the first one first.

Also, the software for autonomous flying machines would NOT be easy if suddenly we had tens of millions of them in the air.

If all flying cars had autopilot I don't think itd be that hard. They'd all follow the same autopilot guidlines. Ground cars will forever have to deal with the millions of "legacy" systems like lights, manual cars, stop signs, pedestrians.

A flying car system would be totally networked from day one. Id imagine it being like the cars from the minority report.

Why do you think this? Self-driving cars seem reasonably close whereas there doesn't seem to be anything resembling what you're proposing. Also, aren't autopilot systems successful in commercial air vehicles because they operate high up away from most everything other than a few birds and other commercial air vehicles and they maintain massive separation between vehicles (compared to roads)? This wouldn't seem to scale well to lots of small personal vehicles relatively close to the ground. Or are airborne autopilot systems also good in these situations and I'm just unaware?

In the air you have an entire 3rd dimension to play with. You can get far more density of vehicles per route. You can fly in a band lower then commercial air vehicles 300-1000 ft has hardly any vehicles flying. The self driving car always strikes me as a faster horse solution.

Being able to abstract away the 3rd dimension is a huge boon, which is why we're still doing self driving cars.

In the air you can't ignore the 3rd dimension. Every calculation your car AI was making before, will now have to grow by an order of magnitude. Even making a helicopter stay stationary in 3d space is a challenge.

It depends on how "reasonably close" they end up coming. If it ends up being a xeno's paradox of issues where it can handle 90% of situations, then 99%, then 99.9%, then 99.99%, etc, but each of those incremental improvements prove harder and harder to achieve, how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's make these things legal"?

The problem with emergent technology is that it's what people tend to be most afraid of, and if there ends up being situations a robotic car absolutely cannot handle that's known about, how long will it take for people to start abusing it?

And for unhandled exceptions...awhile back I was driving up 280 and a police officer pulled out in front of traffic, flipped his lights on, and started weaving back and forth across all lanes of traffic. All the drivers slowed down and kept behind the officer, obviously not sure what was going on. The officer stopped weaving at a couple points along about a one-mile stretch to get out of his car and pick up an item off the freeway, then got back in and resumed weaving, until he got up to a previously-pulled-over car and parked behind another officer.

That's definitely not something they covered in driver's ed, apart from "if something unusual is happening, slow down". But how long would it take for it to make the news if a smart car in that situation passed the car on a weave and struck a drunk guy that was stumbling along the freeway at 85mph, do you think? And do you really think every possible situation that occurs during driving will eventually be able to be handled by a smart car?

Another example, any point you run into a car or random other vehicle that's double-parked in the city. If the car can only figure out that pedestrians are blobs of pixels, does it have sufficient resolution to figure out how far away that oncoming car is, or will it just patiently sit behind that moving truck until they're done and start moving again?

There's a lot of edge cases for this tech, and most if not all of them have potentially fatal exception cases if you fail to handle them correctly.

At least now there are multiple companies and organizations working on these problems. I just hope, there will be some openness and sharing across all these teams.

how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's make these things legal"?

If they're actually thinking properly (doubtful), they'll look at the rate of catastrophic accidents with human drivers, and make a call based on whether or not self-driving cars are an improvement.

Yeah, hopefully. There are right near 200M licensed drivers in the US. That would be 200k catastrophic accidents!

I'm with you here. You could essentially build from scratch a traffic setup for autonomous vehicles, instead of retrofitting the autonomous vehicles to a current driving system. And by flying you get to avoid lots of complications that will prove very difficult to work around. No pedestrians, snow, signage, construction, etc etc.

On the other hand, traffic in the air might become a very messy problem. Last I heard autopilots are not used during takeoff and landing, so they barely deal with any traffic at all...

There were actually a bunch of vehicles designed for the army in the 1950s that were just to complicated for human pilots... http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piasecki_VZ-8_Airgeep

When air vehicles fail they fall from a great height. They also tend to be vastly less energy efficient, at least for a personal vehicle. Maybe the second is not an issue if you go far enough into the future though...

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