Boeing Studies Planes Without Human Pilots, Plans Experiments Next Year

Boeing is researching the possibility of commercial-passenger jets that will rely on artificial intelligence rather than pilots. Initial experimental flights, without passengers, are planned next year, with such systems taking over some of the pilot decisions.

Boeing has begun researching the possibility of commercial-passenger jets that will fly without pilots, using artificial intelligence guiding automated controls to make decisions in flight.

“The basic building blocks of the technology are clearly available,” said Mike Sinnett, former chief systems engineer on the 787 Dreamliner and now vice president at Boeing responsible for innovative future technologies, at a briefing before the Paris Air Show.

“There’s going to be a transition from the requirement to have a skilled aviator operate the airplane to having a system that operates the vehicle autonomously, if we can do that with the same level of safety,” Sinnett said.

“That’s a really big if,” he added.

It sure is. Think about a machine that could do what US Airways Capt. Chesley Sullenberger did in New York City in 2009.

When a flock of geese took out both engines on an Airbus A320 with 155 people on board as it took off out of La Guardia, Sullenberger communicated with ground controllers, rapidly sized up his limited options within two minutes and guided the plane to a safe ditching in the Hudson River.

Sinnett, who plans a June 21 presentation on the subject at the Paris Air Show, agreed that the Sullenberger scenario is the standard that has to be achieved. It also underscores the challenge Boeing faces in attempting to take the human out of the flight deck.

“We are not smart enough to preprogram all those things. The machine has to be capable of making the same set of decisions,” Sinnett said. “If it can’t, we cannot go there.”

Sinnett said his team will fly a simulator this year with an artificial-intelligence system making some of the piloting decisions.

Next year, he said, they’ll fly the system on a real plane. Those would be experimental flights, with engineers and pilots on board, but no passengers.

Go for zero

Wild as it sounds to consider a commercial jet flying without a pilot, the times are ripe for such thinking.

Sinnett said Boeing’s research is driven by the pilot shortage worldwide that is only going to become more acute.

In the next two decades, Boeing forecasts a demand for about 40,000 new commercial jets, roughly doubling the world fleet.

“Where will the experienced pilots come from?” Sinnett asked.

Meanwhile, small autonomous drones are flown by the military and are being tested by Amazon for package delivery. And the public increasingly accepts the notion of driverless cars navigating the public roads.

Yet Sinnett understands why it seems more radical to think of the same for a passenger jet. Last year 40,000 people died in road accidents in the U.S. — leaving lots of room for potential improvement by autonomous, driverless cars.

By contrast, Sinnett said, there were zero deaths in the U.S. last year on scheduled jet aircraft. To make autonomous aircraft as safe as flying commercial is today, “We’ve got to be as good as zero,” he said.

Autopilot systems

Some of the technological building blocks of autonomous flight are already embedded in today’s aircraft.

On long flights, airline pilots will switch to autopilot as they cruise for hours.

What’s less well known is that commercial jets often auto-land, which is what makes landing possible in conditions of very low visibility due to weather.

The auto-land is the closest thing today to autonomous flight because the system reacts to changes in the environment as it comes in, adjusting for small changes in the winds.

Sinnett said that when he was developing the 787, the eighth landing the aircraft made was an auto-land without pilot input.

Auto-takeoff is not allowed, but today’s airplanes can do that too.

“If you want to end your career, you could take a 777 out and do an automatic takeoff,” Sinnett said. “The airplane is capable of doing it, but not capable at the same levels of integrity we have today. So we have pilots in the loop.”

The pilots always are expected to monitor the functions of the automated systems.

Because of the multiple redundant systems on aircraft, airplane accidents are almost always the result of a series of mishaps, any one of which would not alone have caused the accident.

So, if say, an autopilot does something unexpected, a crucial function of the pilot is to step in and catch that first piece of unintended behavior before the next step in any chain that could lead to disaster.

Artificial intelligence

Could a machine do the same?

If a passenger has a heart attack, will it divert?

If one engine goes out, will it know the best response given its position?

What about both engines?

Sinnett points out that a primary requirement for certification of commercial jets today is that the systems operate deterministically: given a set of inputs you must always get the same result.

But he said because no one is likely to be able to predict all the potential things that could happen during all phases of a flight anywhere in the world, an autonomous flying machine has to be able to respond non-deterministically — to react to a situation that has not been preprogrammed into the software.

“So we are doing early exploration with machine learning and artificial intelligence,” Sinnett said.

When safety regulators tell him that they cannot certify non-deterministic systems — as they have — he responds that yes they can, because they certify pilots.

Humans inevitably react differently to one another. An individual may even react differently to the same circumstances at different times.

Still, don’t expect pilotless passenger jets anytime soon.

Sinnett sees this problem of building a system — a machine — capable of intelligent, non-deterministic behavior as the toughest challenge.

“I have no idea how we’ll do that,” he said, with a laugh. “But we are studying it right now and developing those algorithms.”

Hyperloop One Reveals its Plans for Connecting Europe

As reported by Engadget: One of Hyperloop One's smartest ideas was the Global Challenge, a "competition" where cities could pitch for the honor of hosting a Hyperloop. From the suggestions, the company then produced a shortlist of routes that were both technically feasible and economically viable. We've already seen the candidate cities in the US, and now the company has revealed its thinking for Hyperloop corridors across Europe.

There are nine potential routes being considered on that side of the Atlantic, running from a 90km hop to connect Estonia and Finland, through to a 1,991km pan-German route. The UK, which has a love /hate relationship with rail travel, gets three proposed routes: one to connect its Northern Cities, one to connect the North and South, and one to connect Scotland with Wales.

Even bolder plans entail linking the world together via Hyperloops:

Faraday Future Will Test its Electric SUV by Climbing Pikes Peak

As reported by Engadget: Faraday Future announced that one of its FF 91 pre-production vehicleswill be participating in the 2017 Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The company says the race will be the first in a series public tests of the high-end electric SUV.

Faraday says that the test vehicle will be production weight and specifications. While the company has been widely touting the vehicle's speed (zero to 60 mph in 2.39 seconds), this event will be highlighting the car's all-wheel steering that it says gives the vehicle better handling than a typical SUV.

The automaker has had its share of troubles. Including reports of unpaid bills and an exodus of high-level executives. It's currently searching for a CEO.

Faraday says the FF 91 will go into production in 2018.

Intel Predicts a $7 Trillion Self-Driving Future

Over half a million lives will be part of the ‘passenger economy’

A $7 trillion annual revenue stream, according to a study released Thursday by Intel. The companies that don’t prepare for self-driving risk failure or extinction, Intel says. The report also finds that over half a million lives could be saved by self-driving over just one decade.

The study, prepared by Strategy Analytics, predicts autonomous vehicles will create a massive economic opportunity that will scale from $800 billion in 2035 (the base year of the study) to $7 trillion by 2050. An estimated 585,000 lives could be saved due to autonomous vehicles between 2035 and 2045, the study predicts.

BY 2050, BUSINESS USE OF MOBILITY AS A SERVICE WILL GENERATE ABOUT $3 TRILLION IN REVENUE

This “passenger economy,” as Intel is calling it, includes the value of the products and services derived from fully autonomous vehicles as well as indirect savings such as time.

This is hardly the first attempt to place value on autonomous vehicles, nor will it be the last. However, Intel’s study offers a few interesting predictions for autonomous vehicles and how a combination of mobile connectivity, population density in cities, traffic congestion and subsequent regulation, and the rise of on-demand ride-hailing and car-sharing services will be the catalysts in this new economic era.

Of course, Intel has a vested interest in rosy predictions about the future of autonomous transportation. The chipmaker has promised to spend $250 million over the next two years to develop self-driving technology, and recently acquired Jerusalem-based auto vision company Mobileye for an eye-popping $15 billion. And Intel is working with BMW to put self-driving cars on the road later this year. So when Intel pays for a study that predicts self-driving cars will cause cash to rain from the sky, it should be seen as equal parts industry analysis and wishful thinking.

Autonomous technology will drive change across a range of industries, the study predicts, the first green shoots of which will appear in the business-to-business sector. These autonomous vehicles will first appear in developed markets and will reinvent the package delivery and long-haul transportation sectors, says Strategy Analytics president Harvey Cohen, who co-authored the study. This will relieve driver shortages, a chronic problem in the industry, and account for two-thirds of initial projected revenues.

One of the bolder predictions is that public transportation as we know it today — trains, subways, light rails, and buses — will be supplanted, or at least radically changed, by the rise of on-demand autonomous vehicle fleets.

PEOPLE WILL FLOCK TO SUBURBS AS POPULATION DENSITY RISES IN CITY

The study argues that people will flock to suburbs as population density rises in city centers, pushing commute times higher and “outstripping the ability of public transport infrastructure to fully meet consumer mobility needs.”

The pressures of mounting traffic congestion and the correlated emissions will drive regulators to include autonomous vehicles as a part of their larger public transportation plans. Some cities may choose to own the vehicle networks not unlike existing public transportation, the study says.

The bulk of the revenue generated in the new economy will be driven by this “mobility-as-a-service.”

By 2050, business use of mobility as a service will generate about $3 trillion in revenues, or 43 percent of the total passenger economy. Consumer use will account for $3.7 trillion, or 53 percent, the study predicts.

The remaining $200 billion in revenue (of the $7 trillion total) will be generated by new applications and services as driverless vehicle services expand. A key opportunity will be how to capitalize on all of this saved time people will have once they no longer have to drive a car.

VEHICLES COULD BECOME “EXPERIENCE PODS”

Self-driving vehicles are expected to free more than 250 million hours of consumers’ commuting time per year in the most congested cities in the world, the study says. That’s a lot of time that could be filled with streaming video, news, and other content delivered to a captured audience.

It could also change the way cars are used. Vehicles could become “experience pods,” places where people can have their hair styled and cut, conduct a meeting, or receive a health screening.

Keep in mind, that this reimagined future doesn’t mean people will necessarily spend less time in cars. One of the great promises of self-driving cars is a reduction in congestion because these vehicles will be able share real-time traffic data and optimize tasks like finding parking.

However, in a more densely populated world, where cities rely on shared autonomous vehicles for public transit, there will be more traffic than ever before. The question is: how do people want to spend their time?

Rocket Lab Nails First Orbital Rocket Launch from a Private Pad

Rocket Lab has successfully launched its 56-foot-tall Electron rocket for the first time. The relatively tiny vehicle, designed to ferry small payloads to orbit, reached outer space around 20 minutes past midnight (Eastern time) on May 25th. Rocket Lab opened its 10-day launch window on May 21st and had to scrub three times due to poor weather conditions. Now that Electron was finally able to head outside our planet's atmosphere, the company also became the first to launch an orbital-class rocket from a private facility.

Rocket Lab chief Peter Beck said in a statement:

"It has been an incredible day and I'm immensely proud of our talented team. We're one of a few companies to ever develop a rocket from scratch and we did it in under four years. We've worked tirelessly to get to this point. We've developed everything in house, built the world's first private orbital launch range [in New Zealand], and we've done it with a small team."

The Electron has a carbon-composite shell and uses the company's proprietary Rutherford engines, which has 3D-printed primary components. It can carry up to 330 pounds worth of cargo to orbit, so its main payloads will mostly be small satellites like CubeSats. The company expects to stage a lift off 50 times a year, though it's legally allowed to launch up to 120 times. That's probably more than what it can realistically book at this point in time -- as Wired points out, there were only 85 overall launches in 2016.

Rocket Lab believes it can eventually do more launches than other aerospace companies, though, since it will offer cheaper services to customers who typically have to pay big money to hitch a ride on larger rockets. It already has clients lined up, including NASA, but before it can officially fulfill their order, it still has to successfully complete its next two test flights. The Rocket Lab team plans to use what it learns from this round to plan for its second flight, which will send an Electron to orbit.

Boeing Will Make the Military’s New Hypersonic Spaceplane

As reported by The Verge: For the last few years, the US military has been looking to make an entirely new hypersonic spaceplane — one that can be reused frequently over a short period of time to deliver multiple satellites into orbit. And now the Department of Defense has picked Boeing to turn that spaceplane into a reality. DARPA, the agency that tests new advanced technologies for the military, has picked Boeing’s design concept, called the Phantom Express, to move forward as part of the agency’s Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program. That means DARPA will work together with Boeing to build and test out the company’s vehicle.

The goal of DARPA’s XS-1 program is to create a spacecraft that’s something of a hybrid between an airplane and a traditional vertical rocket. The spaceplane is meant to take off vertically and fly uncrewed to high altitudes above Earth. From there, the vehicle will release a mini-rocket — a booster with an engine that can propel a satellite weighing up to 3,000 pounds into orbit. As the booster deploys the satellite, the spaceplane will then land back on Earth horizontally just like a normal airplane — and then be fueled up for its next mission. DARPA wants the turnaround time between flights to last just a few hours.

But perhaps the most audacious goal is the price DARPA wants for each flight. The agency is aiming for the spaceplane to cost $5 million per mission, a significant bargain considering most orbital rockets cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to launch. And Boeing says it’s up to the task. “Phantom Express is designed to disrupt and transform the satellite launch process as we know it today, creating a new, on-demand space-launch capability that can be achieved more affordably and with less risk,” Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works, said in a statement.

Boeing was one of three companies vying for the chance to build a spaceplane for XS-1. The other two contenders included Northrop Grumman Corporation and Masten Space Systems. The three companies had all been awarded contracts through Phase 1 of the XS-1 program to determine the feasibility and methods needed to make such a frequently reused spaceplane possible. The three companies each paired up with a commercial launch provider to come up with their designs: Northrop paired with Virgin Galactic, Masten with XCOR Aerospace, and Boeing with Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin.

Though it looks like Boeing has decided to go with a different company to make the propulsion system for its spaceplane. The vehicle will use an AR-22 engine, manufactured by Aerojet Rocketdyne, instead of an engine from Blue Origin. The AR-22 is roughly the same type of engine used to power the Space Shuttle, according to Aerojet. “This engine has a demonstrated track record of solid performance and proven reusability,” Eileen Drake, president and CEO of Aerojet Rocketdyne, said in a statement.

Now that Boeing has been selected by DARPA, the company is moving forward into Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the XS-1 program. Phase 2 includes the manufacture and testing of the vehicle’s technologies on the ground through 2019. In Phase 3, which is suppose to begin in 2020, the spaceplane will do 12 to 15 flight tests. A big objective of this phase is to fly the plane 10 times over a 10-day period, to demonstrate that the vehicle can do quick turnarounds. The first of these flights won’t include payloads, but the spaceplane will eventually test out sending payloads weighing 900 and 3,000 pounds into lower Earth orbit.

DARPA says the XS-1 will meet a critical need for the military by decreasing the amount of time it takes to get a satellite into orbit. That could be important if the US needs to get a satellite up in a pinch, perhaps if a crucial satellite in space is suddenly lost. But DARPA also hopes that the technologies created through the XS-1 program will eventually be adopted by the commercial spaceflight industry, to make getting satellites to space a potentially faster and cheaper endeavor.

“We’re delighted to see this truly futuristic capability coming closer to reality,” Brad Tousley, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO), which oversees XS-1, said in a statement. “Demonstration of aircraft-like, on-demand, and routine access to space is important for meeting critical Defense Department needs and could help open the door to a range of next-generation commercial opportunities.”

Uber Freight Is the First Step to Automating Away Truckers

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Want to move truckloads of stuff across the country? There’s now an app for that.

Uber has finally unveiled the much-anticipated freight-hauling counterpart to its regular ride-hailing service. Uber Freight, as it’s known, will pair commercial shippers with independent truck drivers looking for a job, just like riders find drivers in so many cities.

Much like the taxi service before it, Uber’s promise here is to remove friction from the current system. In a blog post announcing the new service, the firm bleats about how drivers will be able to pick up jobs with a simple search and some button presses, rather than spending “several hours and multiple phone calls” trying to achieve the same end in the past.

Uber will also determine fees—and, yes, it will use surge charging—which in the past truckers have usually done for themselves. Drivers will no doubt be happy to hear that they’ll get paid faster this way—within seven days, rather than 30 or more, which is common right now. But it remains to be seen if drivers will be satisfied with the pay they manage to take home when working for Uber. If the company's track record in the ride-hailing business is anything to go by, tensions may arise.

But there is a larger narrative at play here. Uber’s move into shipping came after it acquired the autonomous truck company Otto last summer. And that sector is maturing quickly: while the trucks make use of similar technology to that being used by the autonomous cars being developed by Uber and Waymo for robotic taxi fleets, they also only have to contended with highways. That's far easier than inner-city driving.  

Otto even made its first delivery—a 120-mile dash along Interstate 25 carrying 2,000 cases of Budweiser—last year. In fact, we made self-driving trucks one of our 10 breakthrough technologies of 2017, because they look set to beat autonomous cars to the asphalt in large numbers.

First: matching haulers to jobs. Next: leveraging that network to build out fleets of autonomous 18-wheelers.

For now, Uber Freight will be busy coordinating swift, competitively priced deliveries in an attempt to make itself as invaluable to people that shift freight as regular Uber is to city-dwellers. Once the trucking network is established and Otto's robots are ready, who will notice when Uber simply waves goodbye to the human drivers behind its 18-wheelers? Apart from the estimated 1.7 million truckers working U.S. roads, that is.