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From lightweight delivery drones to self-flying air taxis meant to ferry groups of people, a panel of local tech leaders held a discussion in Mountain View this week about what the future of unmanned aviation could look like.
Executives from NASA and three locally-based airspace technology companies took part in the panel on Wednesday, July 24, to kick off Mountain View’s ninth annual Technology Showcase. On Thursday, an array of local tech companies are showing off their work with exhibits outside City Hall from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Co-hosted by the city of Mountain View and the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce, the yearly tech showcase is meant to highlight innovations happening in Mountain View. The Mountain View Voice is among the event’s sponsors.
“Mountain View is the innovation epicenter and it’s amazing to discover the emerging technologies that are going on right underneath our noses,” Mayor Pat Showalter said in her opening remarks.
Wednesday’s event included four panelists, who each spoke about the work their company is doing in the airspace field. Leadership Mountain View Director Brian Kosinski then posed questions to the panelists and took additional questions from the audience.
Alex Norman kicked off the presentations by talking about the work Matternet is doing to deploy autonomous drones to deliver items in a quicker and more environmentally friendly way. Starting in 2017, Matternet used drones to serve hospitals in Switzerland, transporting blood samples from emergency rooms to labs. This meant a faster turnaround time and improved patient care, Norman said.
Matternet’s technology has applications beyond the medical space. The company recently announced plans to launch a pilot program in Mountain View to deliver medicine and food to people’s homes.
“When you order food, for example, and small items, you basically are moving a two-ton vehicle through the streets just to deliver a small package,” Norman said. “We think that there is an opportunity for us to make this more efficient and also better for our planet.”
Jim Tighe of the company Wisk spoke next, also talking about his company’s work to automate aviation, but in a much different way. Rather than small packages, Wisk is looking to transport people in autonomous air-taxis.
“We really want to be the future of mobility,” Tighe said. “Just as today you can take an Uber or a Lyft to the airport, wouldn’t it be great to be able to take an air taxi to the airport?”
The company has completed over 1,700 test flights, most without a pilot or crew on board, and is currently developing its sixth-generation plane, Tighe said.
Robert Rose of Reliable Robotics presented on his company’s efforts to upgrade existing aircraft to add automation capabilities. Late last year, Reliable Robotics flew a cargo plane from the Hollister Municipal Airport without anyone onboard. A remote pilot operated the aircraft from Mountain View, Rose said.
“We started the company because we saw an opportunity, as an incremental step, to bring the world closer to autonomy by adding automation technology into the aircraft, but still keeping a human being involved,” Rose said.
While Rose said that having no humans involved is likely far out in the future, he added that it will happen eventually and the industry should be preparing for it.
The final presenter was Joseph Rios of NASA, who has been working on the traffic management system for unmanned aircraft. The goal, Rios said, is to make sure that when the vehicles that companies are creating are ready, the airspace is ready to accommodate them.
“You see these folks building these amazing machines. They have very specific use cases, very specific things they want to do to impact our lives,” Rios said. “We don’t want to have them get all the way down the line, and then not be able to access the airspace and fly effectively.”
Making that possible will involve increasing the automation of the air traffic control system, Rios said. NASA is currently working on the systems that allow small drones to operate, which is happening at scale more quickly than bigger aircraft, Rios said.
After the presentation, the panelists took questions from Kosinski, as well as audience members, on topics including concerns about automation displacing pilots, what challenges their companies are facing, how environmental sustainability fits into their work and safety concerns with unmanned aircraft.
Asked about the potential impact of unmanned aircraft and why people should care about it, Rose said he believes mobility will “radically change” over the next century, as this technology makes it possible to dramatically increase the number of flights and fly to many more places.
“AI is great, but I think the thing that is really going to impact the world over the next century is autonomous aircraft,” Rose said.