Airbus Experiments with More Control for Autopilot

 Airbus Experiments with More Control for Autopilot

BBC News

Shiona McCallum; Ashleigh Swan

June 19, 2023

French aerospace company Airbus' recently completed Project Dragonfly aimed to extend the scope of control of aircraft autopilot technology. The researchers experimented on an Airbus A350-1000 aircraft to enhance automatic landing, taxi assistance, and automated emergency diversion. The automatic emergency descent system assumes control of the aircraft’s descent and landing while identifying other aircraft, weather, and terrain if the pilots are incapacitated. The system can communicate with air traffic control using an artificial intelligence-generated voice via radio, and can provide the crew with audio alerts should the airplane encounter obstacles during taxiing, displaying the path to the runway and advising pilots on speed.  ... '

Tesla Autopilots Still a Problem

Seems a fundamental are of their autopilot system.  No resulting injuries known. 

Tesla recalls 363,000 cars over self-driving software  in the BBC

Tesla is updating its self-driving software after US safety officials raised concerns that it could allow drivers to exceed speed limits or travel through intersections unsafely.

The recall affects nearly 363,000 vehicles in the US, according to filings with the US government.

Tesla said it was not aware of any injuries or deaths related to the issues.

US authorities have been investigating the firm's autopilot system.

Officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) met with Tesla in January to raise concerns about the "full self-driving beta" software, according to the recall notice.

NHTSA said the system allowed behaviour that could "infringe" on local laws or customs such as driving through a yellow light, travelling straight through an intersection from a turn-only lane or not coming to full stop at a stop sign.

"FSD Beta software that allows a vehicle to exceed speed limits or travel through intersections in an unlawful or unpredictable manner increases the risk of a crash," it said. ... ' 

Putting Limits to Vehicle Tech

Limits of autonomous vehicle tech?

Carmakers Are Pushing Autonomous Tech. This Engineer Wants Limits.   By The New York Times.February 16, 2023

Systems like General Motors Super Cruise can steer, brake and accelerate vehicles on their own.

Companies sometimes market these systems as if they made cars autonomous. But their legal fine print requires drivers to stay alert and be ready to take control of the vehicle at any time.

Last fall, Missy Cummings sent a document to her colleagues at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that revealed a surprising trend: When people using advanced driver-assistance systems die or are injured in a car crash, they are more likely to have been speeding than people driving cars on their own.

The two-page analysis of nearly 400 crashes involving systems like Tesla's Autopilot and General Motors' Super Cruise is far from conclusive. But it raises fresh questions about the technologies that have been installed in hundreds of thousands of cars on U.S. roads. Dr. Cummings said the data indicated that drivers were becoming too confident in the systems' abilities and that automakers and regulators should restrict when and how the technology was used.

People "are over-trusting the technology," she said. "They are letting the cars speed. And they are getting into accidents that are seriously injuring them or killing them."

From The New York Times

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Pilotless Cargo Carrying Planes

 With Drones everywhere, inevitable.   Emerging Market

The cargo hauling aircraft with no pilots on board

Published  4 days ago

A scaled-down version of the Black Swan at an airfield in Bulgaria

By Michael Dempsey  Reporter  in the BBC

Svilen Rangelov sports an impressive beard. It's eight years' worth of growth he says.   The beard dates back to when he and his younger brother, an aerospace engineer by training, formed Dronamics as Europe's answer to the emerging market for cargo drones.

He agreed with his brother Konstantin that they would shave their beards only after the first flight of the drone they've been building in their native Bulgaria.

At the time he established Dronamics big tech giants like Amazon were experimenting with drone deliveries to domestic addresses. But Mr Rangelov never believed in the concept of personal goods delivered by the drone.

The practical difficulties of flying a drone right up to someone's front door were obvious to Mr Rangelov. "We couldn't buy into the concept of small drones. We took a different approach."

This take on drone delivery will bear fruit when the prototype cargo aircraft takes to the air.  ... ' 

Who is Responsible? Autopilot?

 More such events to follow and to be analyzed. 

Manslaughter Case Has a Strange Twist: Tesla That Killed Couple Was on Autopilot

By Futurism, November 2, 2022

A provocative manslaughter case is about to kick off in Los Angeles later this month, involving a fatal crash caused by a Tesla vehicle that had the company's controversial Autopilot feature turned on.

It's the first case of its kind, and one that could set a precedent for future crashes involving cars and driver-assistance software, Reuters reports.

We won't know the exact defense until the case gets under way, but the crux is that the man who was behind the wheel of the Tesla is facing manslaughter charges — but has pleaded not guilty, setting up potentially novel legal arguments about culpability in a deadly collision when, technically speaking, it wasn't a human driving the car.

From Futurism

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AI Fighter Aircraft

 With some interesting autopilot history, and here with some DARPA experience:

The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots  By The New Yorker, January 21, 2022

In a cloudless morning last May, a pilot took off from the Niagara Falls International Airport, heading for restricted military airspace over Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore the insignia of the United States Air Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a private defense contractor. The bay in front of the cockpit was filled with sensors and computer processors that recorded the aircraft's performance. For two hours, the pilot flew counterclockwise around the lake. Engineers on the ground, under contract with DARPA, the Defense Department's research agency, had choreographed every turn, every pitch and roll, in an attempt to do something unprecedented: design a plane that can fly and engage in aerial combat—dogfighting—without a human pilot operating it.

The exercise was an early step in the agency's Air Combat Evolution program, known as ACE, one of more than six hundred Department of Defense projects that are incorporating artificial intelligence into war-fighting. This year, the Pentagon plans to spend close to a billion dollars on A.I.-related technology. The Navy is building unmanned vessels that can stay at sea for months; the Army is developing a fleet of robotic combat vehicles. Artificial intelligence is being designed to improve supply logistics, intelligence gathering, and a category of wearable technology, sensors, and auxiliary robots that the military calls the Internet of Battlefield Things.

Algorithms are already good at flying planes. The first autopilot system, which involved connecting a gyroscope to the wings and tail of a plane, débuted in 1914, about a decade after the Wright brothers took flight. And a number of current military technologies, such as underwater mine detectors and laser-guided bombs, are autonomous once they are launched by humans. But few aspects of warfare are as complex as aerial combat. Paul Schifferle, the vice-president of flight research at Calspan, the company that's modifying the L-39 for DARPA, said, "The dogfight is probably the most dynamic flight profile in aviation, period."

From The New Yorker

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