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China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed

(engineerine.com)
78 points JumpCrisscross | 2 comments | 12 Apr 25 18:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.42s | source
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not_your_vase ◴[12 Apr 25 18:30 UTC] No.43666830[source]▶
I definitely don't want to belittle the achievement, but I would imagine that creating safe self-driving helicopters is much easier than creating safe self-driving cars. (At least as long as the skies are just as empty as they are today. Once it's full of things like the roads, that will be a different topic)
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pryelluw ◴[12 Apr 25 18:44 UTC] No.43666943[source]▶
Can you expand on how you reason it would be easier?
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ein0p ◴[12 Apr 25 18:48 UTC] No.43666967[source]▶
More degrees of freedom, easier collision avoidance. The mechanical part is a lot harder, of course, but the "self driving" part is a lot easier. We had autopilot and auto-land in planes well before we had anything of the sort in cars.
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1. wat10000 ◴[12 Apr 25 19:01 UTC] No.43667053[source]▶
A self driving car needs to be able to reliably drive within ~1 foot of arbitrary obstacles, recognize junk in the road, recognize people in the road, obey vague hand signals from random cops, obey every weird traffic sign in the world, obey every traffic law, and disobey signs and laws when convention requires it.

Helicopters don’t have to deal with any of that. There won’t be any random obstacles. No human drivers to contend with. No conflict between legality and practice to navigate.

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2. ◴[12 Apr 25 19:05 UTC] No.43667085[source]▶