^ Therein lies the problem, then. Most of the general rider population won't want flying cars that are small planes, they want ones like Bruce Willis drove in The Fifth Element. If we can't have that, I wonder why even bother.
Is this the future of technology?
- Thread starter farmkid
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Why wouldn't people want small planes? Sure, they're expensive (the cheapest start around the price of a BMW), but heck---they're airplanes. Being able to fly your own plane is cool, plain and simple. If they could be made more affordable, I think the practice would pick up.
^ I am not a pilot but I can only assume it's more difficult to fly a plane than drive a car. And people want to park as close to home as possible. If they can't park in their own garages, they'd have to walk all the way back home...
Marginally. Most of the difficulty is in the planning and the preparedness for problems, and the complication of instrument operations. The actual operations are pretty simple in visual cruise.
Certainly, I'm not suggesting people give up their normal cars! But there is the "last mile" problem, as you say, especially at airports that aren't your home base and you don't have a car waiting. I have seen several approaches to solving that, from the Terrafugia Transition on the one hand (expensive) to a fold-up electric bicycle on the other which can do 50 miles on a charge or 100 miles with assisted pedaling, and can fit in the back of many small planes.
Yeah, I think part of the appeal of "flying cars" is that they would work like ground cars and be able to get you from point-to-point: work to home, home to work, etc. Whereas planes can only take off and land at airports (at least under normal use, excluding emergencies.)
The idea posted earlier about centrally-controlled personal transport vehicles was interesting, though. I think I've heard about that before. Given that most people follow the same routine every day, it could be really effective and more efficient than current ground transportation.
I think this thread has demonstrated that "flying cars," as conceived in popular science fiction, introduce far more problems than they solve. More efficient ground transit systems--or even underground transit systems--solve traffic/congestion problems better while being much safer and more practical. Maybe one day we'll have "flying cars," but at that point we're talking about a technology so advanced it is not even human-operated and has multitudes of failsafes built into it.
The idea posted earlier about centrally-controlled personal transport vehicles was interesting, though. I think I've heard about that before. Given that most people follow the same routine every day, it could be really effective and more efficient than current ground transportation.
I think this thread has demonstrated that "flying cars," as conceived in popular science fiction, introduce far more problems than they solve. More efficient ground transit systems--or even underground transit systems--solve traffic/congestion problems better while being much safer and more practical. Maybe one day we'll have "flying cars," but at that point we're talking about a technology so advanced it is not even human-operated and has multitudes of failsafes built into it.
I'm going to very slightly modify this----many planes are perfectly capable of landing on grass runways, and from there it's a relatively short step to getting a particularly flat field designated as a private airstrip.
In any event, airports aren't rare enough for it to be a major inconvenience to get to one for most people.
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Relevant to the topic:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400400,00.asp
Nevada has approved the rules allowing autonomous vehicles on its roads. This is important for both self-driving cars and private flight vehicles – a self-driving car would eventually be able to take you to the airport, and drive itself* back home. And they could lead to a reduction of cab prices by merging rented cars with cabs – you go the airport on the other side and rent a car which comes on its own to drive you where you want.
If those things happen, a flying car would become even less practical. It's not that big of a deal to switch vehicles if you can have those vehicles available for you.
* Obviously, the rules are only for autonomous cars with a driver.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400400,00.asp
Nevada has approved the rules allowing autonomous vehicles on its roads. This is important for both self-driving cars and private flight vehicles – a self-driving car would eventually be able to take you to the airport, and drive itself* back home. And they could lead to a reduction of cab prices by merging rented cars with cabs – you go the airport on the other side and rent a car which comes on its own to drive you where you want.
If those things happen, a flying car would become even less practical. It's not that big of a deal to switch vehicles if you can have those vehicles available for you.
* Obviously, the rules are only for autonomous cars with a driver.
Yeah, I really like the idea of autonomous cars. Although I know they won't be perfect, I think they could easily be safer than human-driven cars. Computers don't get angry, or in a hurry, or distracted by cell phones and passengers, and they'll know how not to run red lights and stop signs, and to merge effectively, etc. Driving is a process so perfect for automation it's amazing we haven't done it before now, but I suppose it's taken a long time for sensing technology to get to the point where it's adequate for the level of situational awareness a moving car needs.
Believe it or not, that's why companies like Google have gone around and mapped the locations of wi-fi networks and access points. It helps improve the resolution of location information where a GPS signal may not work. Actually, I wasn't worrying much about GPS at all, because a car wouldn't need to use GPS to figure out where it is all the time, just occasionally. Since it knows exactly how far it has traveled and in what directions, it would have very little difficulty figuring out where it is on the map even if it hasn't had a good GPS lock in a while.
Knowledge of things like where cell phone towers and wi-fi access points are can help compensate for areas with poor GPS signal. You could also just put sensors in the road that the car can read which will tell it where it is (think RFID chips set every few meters that report the lat/long coordinates of the chip when scanned.)
Knowledge of things like where cell phone towers and wi-fi access points are can help compensate for areas with poor GPS signal. You could also just put sensors in the road that the car can read which will tell it where it is (think RFID chips set every few meters that report the lat/long coordinates of the chip when scanned.)
A lot of cars these days have backup cameras. There's no reason these couldn't also be leveraged for navigation purposes, especially since they have fewer degrees of freedom than an arbitrary camera would. The fact that they're facing backwards is not as much of a limitation as you might think....
An autonomous car is already aware of its own surroundings, it could simply use that as more information to confirm the position. It doesn't need additional cameras – it's going to know when it passes through an intersection, exactly what we use to discover where we are.
But I think that QR code-like machine-readable road signs should/will be introduced at some point.
But I think that QR code-like machine-readable road signs should/will be introduced at some point.
Reading the road sign is a lot easier than identifying that a particular group of pixels is a road sign.
Yup. That's exactly why QR codes are effective: they have a very predictable visual format that's not typically found anywhere else, so it tends to be pretty obvious (even to a computer) when you're looking at a QR code.
That's true for the standardised regulatory and warning signs, but not for the street name and direction signs. Character recognition is still suboptimal and offers little redundancy if the sign be damaged, obscured or otherwise not completely readable by the computer. Not to mention that something as simple as a font change could completely mess with it.
Yeah, street signs are pretty shit for a computer to read. Let's not even talk about the ones that get stolen or run over or something.
Applies to QR coded signs as well.
Applies to QR coded signs as well.
Most road signs are as unique as logos and use minimal text. Street signs, yeah text may be an issue, but for the level of sophistication we're talking about, I think the level of OCR coupled with other data input and a street database/mapping system would be a non issue.
If we want street signs to be computer-readable, why not just attach a RFID chip or some type of transponder to the sign? That would also solve the problem of the sign not being readable in snow/fog/dark/etc. or if it's damaged or covered with mud or something. Of course, there would need to be some system for the car to know which lane/direction of traffic the sign is for, but that can be solved easily.
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