Skip to main content

Uber in deal with NASA to build flying taxi air control software


LISBON: Uber is taking part in a joint industry and government push with NASA to develop software which the company aims to use to manage “flying taxi” routes that could work like ride-hailing services it has popularised on the ground.
Uber said on Wednesday it was the first formal services contract by the US National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) covering low-altitude airspace rather than outer space. NASA has used such contracts to develop rockets since the late 1950s.
Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden also said Uber would begin testing proposed four-passenger, 200-miles-per-hour (322-km-per-hour) flying taxi services across Los Angeles in 2020, its second planned test market after Dallas/Fort Worth.
Uber has faced regulatory and legal battles around the world since it launched taxi-hailing services earlier this decade, including in London where it is appealing against a decision to strip it of its licence due to safety concerns.
Holden described Uber’s latest air taxi plans at Web Summit, an internet conference in Lisbon, where he emphasised it was working to win approval from aviation regulators well ahead of introducing such services.
“There is a reality that Uber has grown up a lot as a company,” Holden said in an interview ahead of his speech. “We are now a major company on the world stage and you can’t do things the same way where you are a large-scale, global company that you can do when you are a small, scrappy startup.”
NASA said in a statement it had signed a generic agreement in January with Uber that enables the company to join a variety of industry partners working with NASA to develop a range of driverless air traffic management systems.
That deal calls for Uber to be involved during phase 4 of this work, which is scheduled to begin in March 2019, NASA said.
Phase 1, completed in 2015, involved field tests and ongoing testing at a US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) site for drones used in agriculture, fire-fighting and pipeline monitoring, NASA has said. Phase 2 in 2016 considered long distance uses in sparsely populated regions, while Phase 3 in 2018 will test services over moderately populated areas, leading to Phase 4 testing in high-density urban areas in 2019.
Uber is looking to speed development of a new industry of electric, on-demand, urban air taxis, Holden said, which customers could order up via smartphone in ways that parallel the ground-based taxi alternatives it has popularised while expanding into more than 600 cites since 2011.
Uber plans to introduce paid, intra-city flying taxi services from 2023 and is working with aviation regulators in the United States and Europe to win approvals toward that end, Holden told Reuters.
“We are very much embracing the regulatory bodies and starting very early in discussions about this and getting everyone aligned with the vision,” he said of Uber’s plans to introduce what he called “ride-sharing in the sky”.
MAKING TAXIS FLY
Earlier this year, Uber hired NASA veterans Mark Moore and Tom Prevot to run, respectively, its aircraft vehicle design team and its air traffic management software programme.
During a 32-year career at NASA, Moore pioneered its electric jet propulsion project which Uber considers to be the core technology for making urban air transportation possible.
The agreement with NASA aims to solve issues involved in operating hundreds or even thousands of driverless aircraft over urban areas and allow them to co-exist with existing air traffic control systems as well as in and around busy airports.
Uber envisions a fleet of electric jet-powered vehicles – part helicopter, part drone and part fixed-wing aircraft – running multiple small rotors capable of both vertical take off and landing and rapid horizontal flight.
Uber is building software to manage networks in the sky of flying taxis and working with manufacturers including Aurora Flight Sciences, which was acquired by Boeing last month.
It has also signed up Embraer, Mooney, Bell Helicopter, and Pipistrel Aircraft to develop new vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for the service.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Acharya appointed to NOC’s top post

The government has given the responsibility of the executive director of Nepal Oil Corporation (NOC) to Joint Secretary at Ministry of Supplies (MoS), Prem Prasad Acharya.A ministerial-level meeting at MoS today decided to give the responsibility of NOC’s top post to Acharya until further notice, according to Urmila KC, undersecretary at MoS. The post of executive director at NOC had become vacant after the government, on Monday, sacked the then executive director of the corporation Gopal Bahadur Khadka for his alleged involvement in financial irregularities while procuring land for the development of petroleum infrastructure.
Post a Comment
Read more

‘Clean India’ mission not ending manual scavenging, activists say

MUMBAI:  A flagship government program to modernise India’s sanitation has failed to tackle the practice of low caste women clearing faeces by hand, and has even exacerbated the problem by building toilets not connected to water supplies, campaigners say. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission, with much fanfare after he took office in 2014, sweeping a Delhi street with a broom. Since then, thousands of toilets have been built across the country.But Dalit communities, especially women, are still forced to be manual scavengers, a euphemism for clearing faeces from dry toilets and open drains by hand, despite laws to end the practice. The workers have it harder now, activists said. “Swachh Bharat has diverted attention from ending manual scavenging, and makes it seem like the whole country is cleaning. But if that’s the case, then why are people still dying in septic tanks,” said activist Bezwada Wilson. “There is also no dis...
Post a Comment
Read more

US trio win Nobel for finding Einstein’s gravitational waves

STOCKHOLM/LONDON:  Three US scientists won the 2017 Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday for opening up a new era of astronomy by detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time foreseen by Albert Einstein a century ago. The work of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne crowned half a century of experimental efforts by scientists and engineers.Measuring gravitational waves offers a new way to observe the cosmos, helping scientists explore the nature of mysterious objects including black holes and neutron stars. It may also provide insight into the universe’s very earliest moments. The first detection of the waves created a scientific sensation when it was announced early last year and the teams involved in the discovery had been widely seen as favourites for Tuesday’s prize. “We now witness the dawn of a new field: gravitational wave astronomy,” Nils Martensson, acting chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told reporters. “This will teach us about the ...
Post a Comment
Read more