Naira Hovakimyan, Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss how a $6 million grant from NASA will help to make flying air taxis a reality in the near future.

Cheddar Innovates

$6 Million NASA Grant to Make Air Taxis a Reality, Really Soon

So what is the goals of air taxis? So the goal of their taxes is to live in your affordable rural area. But to be able for example, to die in an expensive city, which is not far say I'm living in urbana champaign and I have a flying car that can help me to have my dinner in Chicago or work in Ohio at the same time. So it gives us an opportunity to optimize the short time commute, which I otherwise is another long drive or you have to connect through big airports. So that's the whole objective of having this flying vehicles. So let's talk about this grand house, the $6 million dollar grant gonna help kind of get us there. Uh so we have a big interdisciplinary team of 12 professors and four industry members. So all of us, together with the two million annual budget will be addressing inter disciplinary problems in autonomy. Of course, our grant alone cannot get us there. But given the rapid growth in the industry, we can address some of the challenging problems in autonomy to make it more affordable and more easy, accessible for everyone. And there's one component of obviously creating these vehicles, right? But the other issue is in the infrastructure, what kind of infrastructure is actually needed to make flying taxis or our cars a more realistic reality? Certainly we need FAA regulations and we need safety guarantees that can be quantified analytically in a priority, which can help us to optimize the runways in the air and all kinds of other infrastructures needed, like parking lots in big cities can be on the top of the skyscrapers. We can have rooftops in my house, I can take off from my backyard because it can be vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. So obviously these infrastructures are being developed in parallel as we are talking, because urban vehicles are going to be reality new future and and in theory, so to speak, or as far as we understand it, passengers won't even need a driver for this kind of transportation. But with that, I guess it becomes curiosity around what kind of safety features are gonna be needed to put in place to keep passengers actually safe here. Uh, certainly, uh, we should all be able to leverage this technology for our convenience. And that implies that not all of us are pilots certainly should be available for us for full autonomous flight. And why we are sure that this is more physical than for example, having fully autonomous self driving cars. Because in air you have less unpredictability on the road, You have passengers and unpredictable pedestrians crossing the road and there can be lots of other unpredictable circumstances in air things are a lot more predictable. And if we have the weather forecast and we have designed and planned optimally and we have the fully autonomous flight, this should be definitely a more feasible option to go kind of in that vein. It really ties into my next question here when I think about something that already exists that some of us at least have exposure to, I think about like self driving cars that has faced a pretty fair set of challenges over the last couple of years here and it's still really faces a long road to becoming a standard or something that's more normal for, for most of us to utilize. What are some of the similarities differences between the challenges that these two types of transportations face? Uh, there are certainly lots of similarities as far as the control and perception system goes in terms of integrating sensors and actuators and having a fully developed and uh fully validated autonomy stack. However, in air, although it's three dimensional, we are free from all kinds of trees and skyscrapers and these type of obstacles on our way on the road. These obstacles are a lot more so definitely in terms of path planning and optimization, the challenges are on a completely different scale in both cases. So I have to ask when you envision this, will it be just like what we see on tv and in the movies, I'm literally, I'm a person who grew up on the Jetsons, right, And I'm hearing the theme song in my head being like, oh my goodness, how cool would that actually be is it gonna be like that or something different here? What's the reality of what this will look like? Certainly it's going to be even cooler. It's going to be even cooler. Yes, so cooler obviously because it's going to be it was supposed to be watching the cartoon on the on the tv screen there. Yes certainly it will enter our life in somewhat similar sway. At first it may be just a rich man's toy and then slowly it will become more affordable and accessible the way we have observed the pest revolution. At first they had just one model, it was over 100,000 dollars price and today we have more different Tesla models in the 30 40 K range. So this process is evolutionary of course in the beginning it will be few. It will be just affordable only for few down the road will have I believe Car shops of flying cars of Boeing and others along with really quickly only got 10 seconds here but went down the road. What timeline do you think? Do we actually see these in real life? 3, 4 years, five years ago, Three or four years or five years. So in about five years I'll plan that to be my next car. Really appreciate your time and your insight. Night era Hoback Eamon, professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois, urbana champaign