Skip to Content
Smart cities

A small California town is helping autonomous flying machines get off the ground

August 28, 2018

Silicon Valley startup SkyRyse is working to take humans out of the pilot’s seat.

The news: The company began testing an assisted-flying helicopter equipped with its sensing hardware in Tracy, California, last week. The copter is on track to be deployed in January 2019 to respond to local 911 calls.

The tech:  SkyRyse tricked out the helicopter with equipment similar to what you would see on a self-driving car (including radar, cameras, and more onboard computers). While humans are still at the helm for this initial test, SkyRyse is using it as a data-gathering opportunity. The information obtained by the sensors will be fed to pilots to make flying in dangerous conditions, like fog, easier. It’ll also help craft simulations to further refine its AI algorithms.

Why it matters: Creating autonomous helicopters is in many ways easier than making self-driving cars (there are a lot fewer obstacles to run into in the sky). Proving to regulators that they’re safe is the real challenge. This project will help build up the data SkyRyse needs to prove it can fly. “This is not just about building something that can fly by itself,” Dan Patt, who previously worked on autonomous flying with Sikorsky, told the New York Times. “It is about building a body of evidence that this is a safe way to fly.”

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.