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Boston: Flying-car capital of the world
By adamg on Tue, 12/16/2008 - 10:16am
Last week, Mass. High Tech told us about a Woburn company getting ready to test a flying car. Now they tell us about AeroCopter, headquartered on Newbury Street (!), which is busy designing:
[A] mono-tilt-rotor aircraft using a combination of magnetic levitation technology and a traditional propulsion system with the aim of providing a commuter-sized aircraft that can be employed for both consumer transportation and as an unmanned aerial vehicle for military applications.
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Comments
Flying cars are for tools
What the hell do we need flying cars for, by the way? Aren't we trying to drive less???!?? I mean I can understand the Newbury Street crowd wants something to impress their golddiggers with but c'mon! There's gotta be a limit to the excess somewhere!
I can see it now......
Air collisions all over the place!! What a laugh and a half.
What about George?
Ultimately, it'd be a bit easier to implement autonomous piloting ability in a flying vehicle than one one the ground. Autopilot for aircraft has been around since 1914[1].
So I doubt there would be that many crashes unless massholes chose to go manual.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
I would imagine autopilot
I would imagine autopilot computers would be programmed to control speed effectively and safely to avoid collision, would maintain proper distance from other vehicles, and obey all traffic signs and signals.
Of course massholes would choose to go manual.
Whenever Im sitting in
Whenever Im sitting in aweful traffic and see its because certain exits are clogged up and that causes people to try to cut in from the extreme left to the extreme right and that blocks all the lanes it makes me wish we had an autopilot system on the highways.
My vision for that would be that the highway takes control of your car from the moment you drive onto the on ramp and would release control back to you the moment you leave the offramp (kind of like a car wash.) You would express where you wanted to go/which exit you wanted before or while entering and then it would bring you there in the most efficient manner possible. Being able to plan your route out miles in advance the computer would know which lane to keep you in and at what speed. If an exit is clogged up it would que the cars up rather then have cars take up 4 lanes of traffic due to one clogged exit.
Yes I realize it would take a mega computer to be able to figure this out, cars would have to be equiped for it, and I can imagine the horror of a malfunction where you cant get back control of your car, but hey we put a man on the moon decades ago why cant I get to where I want to go without having to wait for some jerk who insists on jamming traffic behind him so he can save 30 seconds on his own trip.
Distributed computing
The cars themselves could effectively manage that by treating them each as nodes in a massive distributed computing system.
During low capacity times, the cars can operate using just local sensors to navigate.
True, but in my imagination
True, but in my imagination humans would take back control on local roads and during slow times as the input of pedestrians, open parking spots, stopping to say hi to friends, or even to just stop at a local shop youve never seen before would be variables the computer wouldnt be keen on. I would see people accepting it during rushhour on a highway if it meant no more crazy traffic jams that could have been avoided.
This must be stopped
This must be stopped immediately if we want to survive as a species.
Whit
These look like little
These look like little terrorist bombs to me. Im sure the feds would have a heart attack, they would have to take those planters they have at the Kennedy building on Goverment Center and replace them with giant cement obolisks rising into the sky.
Bingo
The bit about remote control targeted vehicles for the military and civilian toys.
Then again, it doesn't take much imagination to pack a small amount of nasty stuff into a radio-controlled toy and use it to blow a mooninite or MIT student.
Yeah but at least you could
Yeah but at least you could see the little toys flying around , its not all that common to fly a toy towards that building. If you had aero cars everywhere it would be much harder to detect and you could alot more explosives onto it.
BTW the toy filled with explosives thing was done by Grand Theft Auto , I forget which one, as a means of killing enemy gang members in a mission.
Remote control car with bomb
Also seen in the Clint Eastwood - Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool.