China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed

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)

No they are not.

I get what you are thinking. Detection, maneuvering and trajectory planning are all much easier than on a road. If you mandate built in transponders collision avoidance is also easy.

But what you are forgetting is everything that isn't normal operations. What do you do if anything fails? A car can just stop, break failures, even steering failures can all be reasonably mitigated. This is not the case when you are in the air. Any failure mode needs fast and accurate reactions, even when critical systems have failed. That is why a passenger plane has two pilots. A modern passenger plane can do most of the flying by itself, yet the pilots need to be there.

Aerospace standards are higher and more difficult to adhere to, ensuring any kind of reasonable safety is extremely difficult. How many of these flying into sky scrapers are acceptable?

This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.

>This thing has 8 motors. It’s easy to imagine that it could have 8 independent batteries and could be able to perform a controlled descent if two fail. Similarly, it could have redundant sensors and use commodity “majority rules” logic circuits where all calculations are run three times. On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

Most of these are a total nightmare to implement. There is no such thing as a "controlled descent" into a dense urban center. Even keeping maneuverability with a single defective motor is a hard task, you need to develop and test for this.

>On top of that, they can already cut over to ground control if the computer can’t proceed.

So ground control can do what? The only reasonable way these could ever safely operate is with a high degree of sensor fusion, information about nearby crafts, their trajectories, obstacles, etc. combined together. You can not put a human into that system and have him make split-second decisions.

>With all that, it’s “just” a software problem.

Passenger plane automation is also "just" a software problem. It is just an enormously difficult software problem with exceedingly high stakes. The problem is not that it is "impossible", but that it is extremely difficult and not worth the risk getting it wrong.

Again, what is the acceptable failure rate for these things crashing into sky scrapers? If it is zero, we are very far away from them being able to take flight.

If it’s fewer fatalities per mile than cars, they’re probably ready today!