Battery limits and safety rules slow autonomous electric aircraft

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:07:23

   like drone drone i remember i was in uh leonardo da vinci airport years ago and there was one out for gyrocopter thing out front this can fly itself etc uh that feels like a much bigger problem in that you you're not retrofitting a new piece of technology onto an existing infrastructure that this is basically an entirely new thing that you need to have where they can float around. Yeah. So the term most common in our world is they call it eVTOL, E-V-T-O-L. So electric vertical takeoff and landing. Okay. Right. Right. So VTOL.

2. 1:08:00

   Well, VTOL, everybody's seen VTOL, V-T-O-L, vertical takeoff and landing. It's a Harrier jet that the military flies. The movie True Lies, you know, the big scene on the Harrier jet. So it's the jet that has thrusters that point down, it rises, and then it has thrusters that carry it forward. And so, you know, we've had these VTOL, you know, things. And, you know, by the way, we also have had helicopters, which have the same property.

3. 1:08:22

   So we've had these things in the past. And then the electric part is basically, you know, that they'll be electric. And then the other presumptive part of that is that they'll be autonomous. They'll be self-piloting. Because for those things to go mass market, you can't expect everybody to get a pilot's license, right? You're going to want to just get in and want to sit back and let the thing fly itself.

4. 1:08:40

   So autonomous electric, vertical, takeoff and landing. We have all of the elements to do that. We know how to do all of that. Like all those technologies exist now. And there are companies that have put this together and have these products working. The big issue right now, I think there's a couple of big issues. One is just power. um, which is, it's just, it takes a lot of power to get something in the air and keep it in the air. Um, and like I said, batteries aren't very good right now, um, relative to what we need for things like that. Um, so, you know, we need, we need some breakthroughs in batteries. And then the other is just, you know, cost and, and, and, and, you know, infrastructure and, and then, you know, safety regulate, you know, sort of safety regime and all that, you know, over the

5. 1:09:17

   course of five or 10 years, I think you could imagine, um, you know, that happening. There's also, um, you know, there are people working on the Ironman suit. Um, you know, Elon keeps making references to i don't know that he's working on it or not but he keeps making references to it and then um there are there are i there have been well do you remember i don't remember there was i was at the james bond one of the old james bond movies um like goldfinger one of those movies uh actually had what looked like a stunt where james bond actually escaped uh from a house by strapping on a jetpack um okay and actually and actually did this thing and he did this thing a big arc up in the air and then he landed you know like a half mile away and when i was a kid i i watched it like you know i just love those i love those movies and i watched it i was like well clearly they did

6. 1:09:55

   that with like a green screen special effects and it's like no that was an actual jet pack no way that actually yes that actually existed and and actually the military has those today um i've seen someone boarding a like a tanker type thing and they've got sort of their hands in gauntlets and that but that's uh not electric that's that looks like it's jet some sort of sort of fuel jet powered type thing yeah that's right so today today that would be today that would be today that would be jet powered and there are jet packs like that um again expensive risky you know not not not not mainstream you don't want a bullet in the wrong location if you've got one of those things strapped to you yes exactly that's maybe the second most dangerous hobby after flying in squirrel suits um uh so it's those those are the hobby videos where they

7. 1:10:36

   end the youtube videos and two seconds before the uh the final moment um so but like you know look we you know we know how to get things in the air like we know how to do that um and so you know is there a kind of you know is there a kind of propulsions is there a kind of you know either fuel system propulsion system is there a battery system by the way you know there are hobbyists that have literally put together like quadcopter drones um you know where you it's like a you know it's like a helicopter with you know using lots of individual like quadcopter rotors and so that that could be electric powered and could basically do the same thing um and so i you know there's lots of lots of hobbyist activity here and so i think people are going to be you know working on this a lot over the next few years solving autonomy helps tremendously um because um uh you're able

8. 1:11:15

   to um you know then the human doesn't need to be trained you can you can make the thing super safe Another interesting thing that's happened is if you've seen the Waymo, like the Waymo cars in the street, they've got this sensor on the top of the car that kind of spins around. And that's a system called LiDAR, and it's a light-based form of radar. And so it's a system that lets it do basically 3D mapping of the environment.

9. 1:11:36

   So the Tesla is basically optical. So the Tesla is using cameras to construct a 3D model of the environment and sort of interpolating distances based on having different camera angles. the Waymo cars actually have these sensors called LiDAR that actually do depth sensing. The problem with the depth sensing is LiDAR sensors historically have been extremely expensive, which makes it hard to field these things in products.

10. 1:12:00

    Coming down rapidly in price now. And about three months ago, I bought my nine-year-old as my in-house prototyper for all this stuff. And I got him a Chinese robot dog for, I think, $1,600. And the robot dog's snout. And it's a robot dog like the demos you've seen. If you've seen the Boston Dynamics robot dogs, it's like that. But you can buy it and you can actually have one of your own. It does all the things. It's very impressive. And it actually has the snout that's the spinning sensor.

11. 1:12:28

    um and so they've somehow gotten lidar down to a couple hundred dollars wow um and again like that's very encouraging because now that you've got that now you could start to think about building all kinds of things that then have have depth sensing and so all that yeah so all these pieces are starting to fall into place and with a little bit of luck and some progress in batteries um the next you know five years ten years yeah more of the iron man stuff you know just some stuff hopefully will start to happen it really is a different timeline speaking of which i went