'Reliable Robotics' Startup Wants To Fill the Skies With Cargo-Filled Robot Planes (bloomberg.com) 51
nickwinlund77 shares a report from Bloomberg: There's nothing unusual looking about the 38-foot-long cargo plane that's been flying around Northern California for the past month. But the insides of the Cessna 208 have undergone a sci-fi makeover, resulting in a plane that's been taxiing, taking off, maneuvering in the air, and landing without a pilot. The machinery and software that let it fly on its own come from a startup called Reliable Robotics Corp., which has spent four years working on autonomous flight. The company has a grand total of two planes, but its long-term plan is to fill the sky with pilotless aircraft transporting cargo and passengers.
Reliable's story begins with the self-doubt of its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Robert Rose. His attempt to become a pilot in college ended for lack of money, but by 2016 he'd earned enough to give the cockpit another shot. Rose, who'd spent his career building autonomous cars and spacecraft for Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, expected that planes would have modernized since he last hopped in a cockpit. But the one he took up had decades-old technology. The shock of how much the flight still relied on a human pilot hit Rose midair as he contemplated his rusty skills and mortality. "My first thought was, 'Wow, it's insane that a private person is allowed to do this,'" he says. "You have all this navigation that you need to manage and all the communications you have to do between other planes and taking instructions from air traffic control. There's layers and layers of stuff. All the while, you are one mistake away from a fatal accident. I kept thinking, 'How is this OK?'"
Rose founded Reliable in 2017 with Juerg Frefel, an old buddy from SpaceX. The pair set up shop in Rose's garage in Los Altos, Calif., planning to make improved autopilot technology. They hoped to tap into the mechanical and positioning systems available on most planes, buy a couple of off-the-shelf sensors, and tie everything together with clever software that could make the types of decisions usually expected of pilots. Each step of the way, however, they discovered the existing gear for sale wasn't resilient enough for the job. "You just could not have a serious conversation about removing the human from the plane with these parts," Rose says. "That meant we had to build."
Reliable's story begins with the self-doubt of its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Robert Rose. His attempt to become a pilot in college ended for lack of money, but by 2016 he'd earned enough to give the cockpit another shot. Rose, who'd spent his career building autonomous cars and spacecraft for Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, expected that planes would have modernized since he last hopped in a cockpit. But the one he took up had decades-old technology. The shock of how much the flight still relied on a human pilot hit Rose midair as he contemplated his rusty skills and mortality. "My first thought was, 'Wow, it's insane that a private person is allowed to do this,'" he says. "You have all this navigation that you need to manage and all the communications you have to do between other planes and taking instructions from air traffic control. There's layers and layers of stuff. All the while, you are one mistake away from a fatal accident. I kept thinking, 'How is this OK?'"
Rose founded Reliable in 2017 with Juerg Frefel, an old buddy from SpaceX. The pair set up shop in Rose's garage in Los Altos, Calif., planning to make improved autopilot technology. They hoped to tap into the mechanical and positioning systems available on most planes, buy a couple of off-the-shelf sensors, and tie everything together with clever software that could make the types of decisions usually expected of pilots. Each step of the way, however, they discovered the existing gear for sale wasn't resilient enough for the job. "You just could not have a serious conversation about removing the human from the plane with these parts," Rose says. "That meant we had to build."
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A 38 foot cargo plane makes sense for delivering to remote villages in Alaska. This comes off like a weird stunt project.
Well there goes another nice, middle class job (Score:3)
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People need to realise, one of their planes gets hacked, just once and used to kill, the company is dead, the executives charged with terrorism until they can prove it was hacked and those that hacked it actually prosecuted. Until the executives and owners and liable for what ever crimes the plane commits WHEN it gets hacked. That includes accessing the people with the passwords and getting those passwords. Any successful hack is the death of the company. Really really wildly dangerous investment, the hack,
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You mean like how they were charged after 9/11 ?
Surely having nothing between pax and the cockpit is the very definition of carelessness.
The very definition of carelessness is the private company at Logan Airport who didn't bother to do their job and look at the x-rays of the bags the terrorists used or they would have seen the knives and box cutters.
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Re:Well there goes another nice, middle class job (Score:5, Informative)
Here we go:
https://skyrefund.com/en/blog/... [skyrefund.com]
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The issue isnt the normal costs of having a pilot in charge of the aircraft, its things like “is the pilot available and do they have hours left to do this trip today?” and so on - having to cancel a flight with 200 plus passengers on board just because your pilot timed out of available flight hours that day (maybe because weather caused delays, or an inbound flight was delayed etc etc) can cost airlines a lot of money...
Then theres fleet ops issues with new aircraft and training (which was one
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etc.
A fully automated piloting system would avoid all of that.
Boeing took all the programmers that worked on MCAS, and they working on autonomous piloting software right now. This will be great, considering their successful rollout of MCAS.
I know who I would hire (Score:2)
When given the choice between somebody green and somebody who has been bitten hard and had to work through it, I'll take the seasoned person unless there's a really good reason not to.
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When given the choice between somebody green and somebody who has been bitten hard and had to work through it, I'll take the seasoned person unless there's a really good reason not to.
As I remind people all the time - incompetent people gain experience at the exact same rate as savants.
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On the opposite end of the spectrum, Airbus has been extremely successful with high levels of automation in their aircraft since 1988, and while many people have tried to disparage Airbuses fly-by-wire system over the decades, its never caused the FAA to ground an Airbus fleet...
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On the opposite end of the spectrum, Airbus has been extremely successful with high levels of automation in their aircraft since 1988, and while many people have tried to disparage Airbuses fly-by-wire system over the decades, its never caused the FAA to ground an Airbus fleet...
A lot of planes fly semi autonomously. The Lockheed L-1011 could even land by itself, and that's hardly a new plane.
But the problem is that automation is pretty nifty - autopilot is a great thing. but the concept of having no possible human intervention because there is no human to intervene means that any mistake in programming will kill everyone.
At present, pilots can correct for anomalies. Back to the 1011, I just happened to watch a video about a 1011 where one side of the plane's elevator froze u
Re: Well there goes another nice, middle class job (Score:2)
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Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder
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It's called the "Defence Dept." (Score:2)
Militaries shouldn't exist at all ... violence is wrong.
We live in a complicated world:
It's easy to identify wrong from right
It's considerably more difficult to identify the wrong that's more right.
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I'm not quite sure how to respond to this...
Firstly, I am sorry for any suffering you and you family might have experienced, but I had nothing to do with it, I can assure you of that.
Secondly, you don't know me, you have no idea the experiences I've had, but I forgive you your presumption of 'my' violent and maniacal tendencies.
And no, they were defending (theoretically at least) those hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians (or their rights, at least). That you would deliberately choose to ign
You do understand that doesn't matter, right? (Score:2)
> Militaries shouldn't exist at all. It is completely unethical and violence is wrong.
Um okay. However, you do understand that militaries do in fact exist, right, and that some of them want to kill you?
Given that fact, we're left with two choices:
A. Die
B. Have own military to defend us
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Uh, no.
In the US, military pilots only consist of around 30% of the pilots in the commercial sector. The USAF has problems recruiting pilots and have been considering lowering standards because the num
need to X3 or more of each sensor & 3 quorum (Score:2, Interesting)
need to X3 or more of each sensor & at least 3 cpus for quorum
Sounds like a good option for specialized cargo (Score:1)
They're obviously very confident (Score:2)
Also Pravda was always honest and lived up to it's name "Truth".
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They have "reliable" in their name, right? So their system will be perfect and will never fail ...
Agreed that they're trying too hard. The CEO's name is Robert Rose, so I'm guessing he just wanted something alliterative: Robert Rose's Reliable Robotics (for the cartoon logos and roof-top signage) -- either way, it's lame.
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They have "reliable" in their name, right? So their system will be perfect and will never fail and it won't fall out of the sky and destroy the cargo and maybe something on the ground. And it will never hurt anybody ever.
Also Pravda was always honest and lived up to it's name "Truth".
Sounds like a good place to segue into the success of MCAS.
How VFR aircraft handled? (Score:2, Insightful)
No indication how it handles other aircraft that are under VFR which is more likely in their specified goal of remote areas
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At unmanaged fields, the unmanned cargo plane may require an additional receiver to receive Mode 3/A signals. This would allow the VFR pilot to squawk ident twice to request the unmanned cargo plane execute another circuit around the holding pattern until the VFR plane is out of the area.
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What about pollution? (Score:3)
I'm fine with machine controlled airplanes and I'll even put up with passengers taking airplanes (until electric airplanes are ready) but having a zillion airplanes hopping around just to deliver packages is highly polluting. Frankly, automated trains with automated train yards are the ideal solution but this... this is just wasteful.
Re: What about pollution? (Score:1)
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Nope. I remember seeing a news article recently about an electric plane. It was newsworthy because it's generally not feasible.
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Frankly, automated trains with automated train yards...
You can spot those who've never left their desks pretty easily.
It's Economy of Scale, Stupid (Score:2)
Silicon Valley nerd with more money than sense reinvents the auto-pilot with auto-takeoff and auto-land, like most FedEx jets have had for years now, and then wonders why 50 year old Cessna 172s don't have that technology. That's because air travel is INEFFICIENT unless done at airliner scale or someone invents a low-power anti-gravity drive (or lightweight batteries with 10X their current energy density--same thing.) This plane is too big for dense urban package delivery where smaller drones make sense, an
snowflake alert (Score:3)
he says. "You have all this navigation that you need to manage and all the communications you have to do
Aviation has been a thing for over a century now and it's not that hard if one learns how to do it and pays attention.
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he says. "You have all this navigation that you need to manage and all the communications you have to do
Aviation has been a thing for over a century now and it's not that hard if one learns how to do it and pays attention.
I was thinking the same thing. It's the "Ohhh, everything is sooo hard - how can people do this?" mindset.
It's the thought process that gets people thinking that "Ancient Aliens is a documentary, because - well, "humans just can't do this stuff!, its too haaard."
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he says. "You have all this navigation that you need to manage and all the communications you have to do
Aviation has been a thing for over a century now and it's not that hard if one learns how to do it and pays attention.
His point is that the amount of human-managed complexity is unnecessarily high.
Whether that is an accurate point, I do not know. But it's not unreasonable on the face of it.
Will there be room enough in the sky ? (Score:2)
I was told that it was going to be full of flying cars.
Totally reliable flying robots... (Score:2)
...services.
Yes, I can see it now, the next steam game.
We have to fly less not more (Score:1)
Amazing (Score:2)