The aviation milestone, believed to be the first complete civil unmanned flight over a populated area, was revealed in a video posted today by Reliable Robotics, a Mountain View, California startup founded by two former SpaceX employees and Tesla that emerged from three years of “stealth” operation.
The flight, for which the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the company in December 2018, occurred several months after the August 2019 flight of a different unmanned small Cessna model, a 1968 Cessna 206, conducted by the Laboratory. Research Department of the US Air Force and technology. Dzyne Technologies company. But that flight took place over the remote Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, not a populated area.
Reliable Robotics also announced that it has now installed the same autonomous flight software on a larger single-engine Cessna 208 Caravan, which is often used for short-haul cargo deliveries and passenger flights, and, in June, it landed that aircraft so autonomous for the first time.
The revelations come a week after another California-based autonomous aviation company, XWing, also exited stealth mode and revealed that it had made the first fully autonomous flight of a Cessna 208 Caravan, although in XWing’s case, a human pilot was on board. ready to regain control of the plane in an emergency.
Reliable Robotics is the brainchild of Robert Rose, who was once director of flight software at Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and later developed autopilot technology at Musk’s Tesla, and Juerg Frefel, who designed the computing platforms used for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Launch Vehicle and Dragon Space Capsule.
The two founded the company in 2017 with a vision of trying to get the planes to fly autonomously as quickly as possible.
One of the biggest impediments to autonomous aircraft is regulation, so the two founders tried to figure out how they could convince the FAA to approve unmanned flight without having to change any existing regulations.
Their conclusion was that while most other autonomous flight companies are looking for entirely new aircraft designs that often look like oversized consumer drones, with four or more electric rotors that allow the aircraft to take off and land vertically and float in place. It would be easier to get FAA certified if they just converted a tried and true existing aircraft for robotic flight.
The Cessna 172 debuted in 1955 and the Cessna 208 was certified by the FAA in 1984. They have recognized records for safety and reliability. In this way, the government agency would have to certify only the company’s software and security plans, not the structures and engines.
Rose, who is the CEO of Reliable, says the company’s business plan is to equip a fleet of Cessna 208 Caravans with its automated flight systems and use them for air cargo deliveries. He predicts that the company will be able to begin autonomous commercial cargo deliveries in the United States within two years.
Rose says the company’s ultimate goal is to transport passengers autonomously as well, but getting FAA approval to do so will take longer and will likely require the agency to establish additional rules.
This plan closely follows that of Reliable Robotic’s rival XWing, which also plans a fleet of autonomous Cessna 208 Caravans to transport cargo as a springboard to passenger flights. The company, which bought a small Texas air cargo company to acquire an FAA air cargo license, says it plans to begin real cargo delivery flights “within months” to further refine its systems, although these flights also They will carry human pilots for safety.
XWing has raised around $ 14 million in venture capital to date. Reliable Robotics has raised more than double that amount – $ 33.5 million, including a $ 25 million Series B round in March 2019 led by Eclipse Ventures, which was also publicly announced on Wednesday. Reliable Robotics employs about 35 people.
Until now, Reliable has had to have an observer on the ground directly observe the flight of its aircraft due to FAA rules stipulating that civil drones must fly within the direct line of sight of a human operator. But Rose believes that this regulatory barrier can also be overcome to allow autonomous aircraft to fly much greater distances.
Rose says that when the company starts autonomous cargo flights, its plane will have a human pilot who will monitor them from a ground control station and talk to air traffic control. This pilot will use Reliable software to issue high-level commands to the aircraft, such as pressing a button that tells it to complete a takeoff sequence, for example, rather than directly manipulating the aircraft’s controls from afar, as is the case. of most drones today. .
He says this will allow a single pilot to perform many more cargo flights per day than is currently possible, significantly reducing costs for air cargo carriers.
Another group of companies is working on autonomous drones to solve package delivery in the “last mile”. These include startups like Zipline, which has used drones to deliver medical supplies to remote locations in Africa, as well as giants like Amazon, which have built delivery drones that can carry payloads of up to five pounds up to 15 miles, as well as companies from rival delivery, such as UPS and FedEx. There’s even another subset of businesses, like San Francisco startup Elroy Air, that is designing new massive vertical take-off and landing drones that can lift much heavier loads and carry them much further.
