From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2000 - 17:45:53 MST
Michael S. Lorrey writes:
> The Moller skycar uses automatic ejected parachutes as a safety system, so the fear
> of skycars falling out of the sky is an erroneous fear. Most all car accidents occur
Well, they all _have_ to come down eventually. But with six
independent engines (rotary type, redundant airborne capacity), the
parachute emergency and large extent of automation these things are
probably safer than a helicopter, or even a small private airplane. In
this case I would use them, if given the opportunity.
What is still missing is swarm collision avoidance. With digital pulse
radio (plus 3..6-axis MEMS accelerometry and GPS) one could do very
accurate realtime mutual measurements in a swarm of airborne machines,
and feed that into the thrust vector/trajectory predictor to compute
the optimal trajectory (the one which doesn't end in a small crater/in
other skycars). Also there is SAR and lidar, to find where the ground
is.
In theory, the system could be very safe. In practice, it will depend
on implementation/legislation. Primarily legislation.
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