Fly to work on your own personal electric plane

Will future rush hour traffic jams be happening in the sky? 😃

"... the AIR ONE from Israeli startup AIR,  which began taking pre-orders this week for its eVTOL – electric vertical takeoff and landing car. ...
Most other eVTOL makers, like fellow Israeli flying carmaker Urban Aeronautics, have targeted more commercial functionality, such as emergency medical response, for their initial deployments. ...
AIR’s big reveal follows four years of development. The company’s initial model will be a two-seater that can fly for 110 miles at 155 miles an hour.  ..."

Fly to work on your own personal electric plane - ISRAEL21c An Israeli startup has developed a personal electric plane, that can take off and land vertically. It’s already taking pre-orders.

Quadrotors: Learning autonomous high-speed flight in the wild with purely onboard sensing and computing

Good news! Fascinating research conducted by researchers from University of Zurich and Intel Munich!

From the abstract:

"... To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with onboard sensing and computation has been limited to low speeds. State-of-the-art methods generally separate the navigation problem into subtasks: sensing, mapping, and planning. Although this approach has proven successful at low speeds, the separation it builds upon can be problematic for high-speed navigation in cluttered environments. The subtasks are executed sequentially, leading to increased processing latency and a compounding of errors through the pipeline. Here, we propose an end-to-end approach that can autonomously fly quadrotors through complex natural and human-made environments at high speeds with purely onboard sensing and computation. The key principle is to directly map noisy sensory observations to collision-free trajectories in a receding-horizon fashion. This direct mapping drastically reduces processing latency and increases robustness to noisy and incomplete perception. The sensorimotor mapping is performed by a convolutional network that is trained exclusively in simulation via privileged learning: imitating an expert with access to privileged information. ..."

Learning high-speed flight in the wild (no public access)

Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wild (arxiv, open access)