One of the world’s foremost experts on self-driving vehicles is seeking the flying car engineers of the near future.
Sebastian Thrun’s online learning company Udacity will begin teaching the first “nanodegree” in “Flying Cars and Autonomous Flight” next month.
Within two years it could lead to tourist flights over the Grand Canyon and trips to northern Canada where roads are inaccessible for part of the winter.
In a video advertising the course the former Stanford University professor declares in his German accent: “I am firmly convinced that in the future the majority of urban transportation will take place in the air.”
His words carry some weight. Dr Thrun is a researcher on robotics, artificial intelligence, education, medical devices and human-computer interaction. He founded Google’s self- driving car team and led its innovation unit before leaving to become chief executive and co-owner of the flying car start-up Kitty Hawk, with funding from Google’s co-founder Larry Page.
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He believes that a coming revolution in aerial transportation will progress rapidly from drone deliveries by Amazon and Google to people flying around in private vehicles. “I promise in a few years’ time it’s going to be one of the hottest topics on the planet,” he says.
Students will learn to build “an autonomous aircraft system” through coursework, practical exercises and pre-recorded video modules taught by leaders in the field, including Dr Thrun and Angela Schoellig, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies.
She said that the course aimed to fill an emerging gap for people with the skills to build the vehicles of tomorrow. “Students now are either educated to be aerospace engineers, so they know a lot about design and flight, or they are computer engineers who know a lot about systems.” Since 2016 Udacity has had 50,000 applicants for its self-driving car programme, set up to fill a shortage of people with both design skills and engineering know-how.
Much of the technology for flying cars already exists. Small drones are established and aeroplanes fly for much of the time on autopilot. In certain conditions human pilots can land their aircraft only by handing over control to the automatic piloting system. There are really impressive start-ups in this field right now, she said. “Boeing and Airbus are both betting on it.”
