Regulating and managing autonomous flying taxis

Software	None
Covers	AI planning, autonomous vehicles, ethics and regulation of technology
Skills Required	Interest in artificial intelligence, interest in how to make the future work
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ??? Programming

Brief Description

The rapid development of autonomous vehicles that can cope with traffic, and the development of drone technology creating aircraft and helicopters than can fly themselves has created the possibility that autonomous flying taxis might leave the pages of science fiction and become reality. Projects to develop autonomous passenger aircraft that could operate as taxis are already in progress, though it's less clear whether or when they will be able to carry useful payloads: See for instance the Munich-based company Lilium, which has carried out test flights of a VTOL personal aircraft that is designed to carry 200kg.

But how is the transport infrastucture going to work? Where are the airborne taxis going to go, and where shouldn't they go, and who or what is going to control this? How are collisions to be avoided and how will airborne traffic operate efficiently? How can unpredicted events be worked around? (For complex scheduling problems, such as airline flight scheduling, often the big difficulty with handling disruptions is the time involved in doing dynamic replanning.)

Putting in place the necessary regulatory and administrative infrastructure for autonomous passenger aircraft operating in densely populated urban environments, where they will take off, fly at low altitudes, and land in close proximity to people on the ground and in other autonomous passenger aircraft, is a big challenge. It is a challenge that we should be ready for before autonomous aircraft manufacturers and taxi service providers want to mass-produce drones and operate taxi services for real people. It is a challenge that involves overcoming technical problems including autonomous aircraft recognizing and responding appropriately to unforeseen events and unexpected features in their physical environments, and management of routes and resources to make sure that the taxi services work efficiently and avoid space and resource conflicts (and collisions). It is also a challenge that involves figuring out how autonomous passenger aircraft ought to be licenced and regulated, what safety and security issues arise that are distinctive to autonomous aircraft and how these can be prioritized and dealt with, and how the ethical issues and conflicts of priorities can be handled in real life operation.

The aim of this project is to analyse a subset of these issues, investigate what the real questions are, and where feasible, propose answers. It could focus on what is involved in meeting one or more of the technical challenges and proposing technical solutions, or on the regulatory aspects considering what form laws and regulations should take, and what governance is both technically feasible and apppropriate, or on the ethical aspects of operating and using autonomous flying taxis.

Actually building a flying taxi route planniong system would be a rather different project: see Route planning for autonomous flying taxis.

Back to