Emerging Aviation Technology: Autonomy | Lina Yang
LINA YANG: Hi everyone. My name's Lina Yang. I lead in intelligence system and I'm operational director for the Fremont office. Supernal has a three different office and we do have autonomy and a battery center of excellence here at Fremont. And we've got a great set of algorithmic designers.
And when it comes to autonomy problem or when it comes to battery management problem, so that's where I sit and that's at Fremont. All right, so when Ricardo was asking me if I can give a lecture about advanced air mobility, I thought about what are the topics and what are the sort of the contents that you guys might be interested. If you Google it up and if you look it up, the research papers, there are various different, you know, great papers and great presentations about explaining about the advanced air mobility. So I thought that, you know, if you can actually get all of this knowledge through your Google search, what actually do I wanna give it over to everyone today.
So I try to put my deck with the emphasis of what's currently most relevant as of 2024. I don't know what's gonna happen in 2025. They're smart students and professors and engineers around the world will actually come up with a brilliant idea of solving some of the problems that I represent today.
But I'm gonna be more focusing on the most relevant problem of 2024 and where I see the gap. So that if I can inspire all of you that in terms of, hey, try to write research papers. What are the great topics? Try to launch a project, what are the great project ideas and what's the most relevant to the industry? And if you're sort of curious about that, I'll be more focused on that. Agenda. So advanced air mobility, I mean, you've seen various different pictures and various different OEMs and then everyone coming up with a very different configuration of the vehicle nowadays. But the key words here that you, I would like you to have in mind today while I go through my deck, is remotely piloted, automated.
I don't like to use autonomous, but sorry, I noticed that I put the autonomous there, but it's highly automated and eVTOL and intracity and zero emissions. Those are the sort of the key words that you want keep in mind while we go through this deck. So I wanna start with the, in a typical in aviation, so what is a driving force? As you see, I'm not gonna read through the deck and I hear that because of the jet engine and revolutions, that's where you see that we're now able to travel around the countries and with a couple of, with a few hours and even, you know, crossing other continents.
But you do know the problem with the current existing jet engine, which is that emissions is high and noise is absolutely loud. And although the vibration is quite low, third generations that the whole driving force of UAM right now it's the inventions and then, and actually commercial capable to do the commercialization of electric motors, which has that zero emissions because we're using the electric battery and then quiet because we're using the distributed electrical propulsions and the technologies. Distributed electrical propulsion, I mean you can search it in a, there are a set of the great papers that out there, but in short it is the capability of that we're isolating that thrust producing propulsor jet and vent with the data, with the power producing components, which is a traditionally engine.
And those two system do not necessarily share the same mechanical power transmissions system. And because of this decoupling and because that power producing components can be combined with the energy storage system battery, we're giving the freedom for the thruster producing propulsions to come up with, to use any variations of any devices that meets the various sizes and type, because we can decouple this, you're seeing all of these crazy ideas of the design of the vehicle that you see out there. Some of 'em are example in here. One thing I noticed, I didn't put the sopranos in here because I prepared this stuff for like a couple, couple years for a different conference. I should have done that.
But if you search it up, we do haves SA-2 versions that we announced, you know, several months ago. And at the point I here is that, and these are the driving sort of technology behind it. And hence that you see the various different configuration which gives the FAA a headache.
Like how do we certify this vehicle? These are the brand new vehicles, the type of configuration that we haven't seen before. Hence the FAA is taking time and then working with the industry that in order to come up with how do we ensure the safety and how do we certify this vehicle. I'm gonna come back to this one because that poses quite a lot of challenges because we're introducing that and energy storage system. Briefly, what are the type of type of emissions again, I'm gonna go really quickly because these are the information, you can search it.
I'm focusing on short range urban air mobility, the people carrying vehicle, but there are various different types and when it comes to regional air mobilities and then we could actually potentially put that quite a lot of people with there. But primarily right now the focus for the RAM is for the cargo. Short urban air mobility is that the payload is around 1000 pounds and the people of two to five passengers and depends on the OEMs and you know, it sort of varies and the distance, we're thinking about 10 to 70 miles per trip. Infrastructures, keep in mind that we need a place to land our vehicle and to take up their vehicle. Those are very different set of the configurations than you can imagine for the helipads.
And because of the new vehicle infrastructure, the configuration that we're introducing, regulatory requirements are non-existence at the moment. We know that after several years of working with FAA with the industry, we have a somewhat good understanding now, but these are the type of stuff that overall that not just the technical industries, that is the problem, but it's a more overall problem that involves quite a lot of regulatory as well. In terms of market, I'm not gonna read through those are really large numbers and there are quite a lot of people doing the assessment about how the large that the industry is going to be. But as you can see that and then it actually enables large set of the market if we actually know how to do automate properly and which one of the keywords that I mentioned before. And by enabling multiple different infrastructures and the players that were introducing new industries. The Elevate missions, these are the very different missions than you see on currently.
Fixed wing have a very different profile, you take off and then you cruise and then you descend. Helicopters are completely different as well, right? You vertically take off and you do a cruise and then you land here because that we are able to transitions our thrust and a lift. We actually take off like helicopters and transition to, similar to the fixed wing and then we do the ascending and then we continue cruise where it's the most optimized with the fixed wing like configurations. And while we try to descend, we change our transition, we change our thrust again to, and to be able to vertically land. Complete different set of the configurations, complete different emissions. Again, that poses quite a lot of open, you know, interesting problems as our industry goes.
Corridors, you do know how the large commercial airliners fly class A, class B through the class, A very, very high altitude. You don't necessarily see them. We keep it such a way for many different reasons.
You do know the helicopters, you don't see that around the city because of, you know, how loud that is and down washing effects of the one motor. When we are, if we enabling, if we're gonna be deploying this vehicle into the city like Berkeley, San Francisco connecting with a San Jose, it would've to fly right above your neighborhood, your residential area. And the problem that we'll be facing is a very, very different set of the problem that existing aviations have been solving. We're gonna be facing with many different cooperative and uncooperative agents and in the airspace and as well as a terrain problem that we are facing right now. It's a complete different magnitude than that of existing inner problems.
I'm gonna talk more about that. But the idea here that we're implementing and then doing the exercise and experiments with the FAA and NASA is that we should build the highway, the corridors for UAM specifically so that none of the other vehicles can enter. Well no, and other vehicles that should be, you know, they can enter in here, but it's a primarily, primarily dedicated for UAM operations and missions.
So those are the concept that we're building that is a notional highway up in the airspace. I briefly mentioned about the vertiport, where we are actually gonna take off and land has to be within the city where next to your campus at the Berkeley campus. I think that was one of the projects that we discussed with Ricardo or nearby next to your residential area. It poses a complete different now that if you think about it, airport and helipad, those are sort of owned and maintained and invite FAA and then we've got whole regulatory framework around it and we know how to manage it. We know where to put, you know, airports and how to manage and how to get it certified and regulatory that the framework is already exist, if we put it inside of city of LA or San Francisco, now that we would've to involve the city planners, city mayors and that understanding, because they're most more interested in here because in case things happen in here or can they use it for any of the emergencies like, you know, for dispatching, for, you know, working with the fire department and whatnot.
So we now we need to establish a good understanding with the use cases and regulatory and then getting it certified now with the city mayors. So that entire industry gets quite complex with the different authority. So I'm gonna talk more about the technologies and the gap as I promised you guys during the beginning of the sessions, it's starting with the electrical, their motors and propulsions and there's a battery technologies that I'll briefly go over and there comes the sensors because we're automating our operations and missions and there's an AI and the softwares and ML, we need a data. And we we're using heavily on in order to, when it comes to sensor fusions and as well as making decisions.
Those are the importance that we're working on it. And that actually requires quite a lot of heavy compute power. The whole point that where you're seeing the automotive ground level vehicle is because the compute power was a available in the GPUs and able to actually gather all the data with the cloud. And we have a large storage that where we can train all these data. When it comes to aviations, I'll talk a little bit more about that, how wide they're posing the problems and the satellite communications, because I briefly mentioned about new agents or the roles and responsibility, we are adding it in here, in a new industry, typically in the aviation industry except that general aviations, if you wanna control your missions and make sure that you are handshaking with the authority, it's been done through the voice with the ATC and the pilots.
And then there's some the not ADSB easy sort of only mechanism that were sort of, you know, broadcasting and then sharing the intent digitally. Now that we're enabling multiple different, we're actually inviting multiple different roles and responsibility to players in here. We just cannot do that with the digital, with the voice communications. All the communication has to be digitalized and that requires different set of the communication protocols that we can reliably rely on.
So I'm gonna touch quickly about that one. And then it's also with materials and systems and then some of the robotics problem. So I'm gonna go back to this deck, because right after the DEP that I mentioned about the energy storage system, that we can decouple the power producing components and with a thrust. These are the, I briefly mentioned about, you know, how we take off in a climb and a cruise and descend in a lending. Those are complete, those are very new mission profile that aboard a UAM. One thing that we would've to be also put it as part of our nominal mission is that emergency diversions, in case that where things are happening on the vertiport, on the path where we try to land where there are some things happen or in case that we're, you know, that fire department want to utilize that vertiport for example, for whatever, whatever the situations, electrical energy storage system for eVTOL would have to have those reserve.
It's not like you're driving your vehicle and you've got some issues so that you can just, you know, you know, park on the side lane and then and wait for you do something, but we would've to make sure that we've got enough energy and then because we're concerned that as a nominal cases and we would've to make sure that up there on the corner, those are called the reserve energy. Those are mandated by the FAA. Right now, as of today, FAA's mandate is a 30 minute reserve. If you remember the introductory slide deck, I said anywhere between 10 to 70 miles of missions.
And our target here is from San Jose to SFO at San Francisco that we wanna complete the mission in 15 minutes. Reserving 30 minutes is a very, very, very high toll. FAA's putting that because of our uncertainties, right? And electrical, the energy storage system as well as it like a power producing component is completely brand new. And we do know battery does not, battery is very inefficient when temperature is low.
So considering that we are flying high, right, and then that we're gonna be, those are nominal problem first to face. So they're very scared and we don't have much of the data when and then when it comes to and when the use cases for is that we require high number of the specific powers when it comes to hover and a cruise. I'm not gonna go through all the writings over there. You guys can take a look at it. The only thing that I wanna tell you here is that if you consider that emergency diversion as our nominal cases, that's where we could use the most of the energy, takeoff and hover for landing.
That's where we use the most of the energy and the magnitude of the energy that we use compared to EV battery is, you can take a look at that little, little diagram over there. It differs per scenario, it differs per the use cases. But those are the sort of the magnitude of the problem that we are solving on top of it, we would've to cap the reserve. So sure, we can increase the number of the battery, but I told you that we're a thousand pounds, so there's only so much that we can add it onto the vehicle.
And if you're putting the weight of the vehicle, there goes the efficiency of your vehicle. So those are the trade studies in case that anyone is interested in the batteries and then wanna dig in more here, those are the 2024 that these are a problem that we're facing right now and that, you know, having the great balance between the trade studies of, you know, the weight of the batteries as well as reserving the optimizations of how we are actually gonna deploy our power over to DEP. So that with a given number of the energy that how efficiently that we can use it. So it also talks about same thing in a more, on a different sort of, you know, graphical format as I told you that, you know, the takeoff and a hover and then landing is where we use the most of the energies and the comparison with the existing the battery technologies. So these are the depth of the differences that if you're thinking like, hey, we already have all the automotive using the batteries, it's so easy to deploy over to the UAM, complete different set of the problem. When it comes to situational awareness, I did talk about cooperative uncooperative agents and briefly in a previous deck because we're flying on a lower altitude, think of it like, and then when we are building this UAM vehicle, we should be able to fly through somewhere like a Manhattan.
Quite a lot of problems, right? And these are the terrains that the problems that we would've to solve, and these are uncooperative agents solving how we actually gonna be identifying and solving the problem is also biggest problem when it comes to situational awareness. So the sensors, I'm gonna actually move it over here. So these are the new type of sensors that we're deploying in the aviations, just like a battery. Yes, some of those technologies already sort of mature.
Then the commercialized on the automotive side where when it comes to sensors that we're talking about a similar set of the sensor radar. Lidar not so much, but the cameras when it comes to thermal and IR cameras or the visual cameras, and then coupling that with the understanding of, with the software stack on top of it. Just like a battery we're facing with a different problem, automotive side, it's more near distance problem. They care more about, hey, is the five year olds, five years old boy will, you know, he's playing with a ball right there. Is he gonna kick the ball in here then do I have to be worried about it? So the camera sensors, they're detecting the unknown objects around the vehicle is more the near distance problem.
We're flying fast, and so that the problem that we're facing in here is a longer distance problem. So current set of the radar and the camera is not gonna solve our problem immediately. So that's also another area that I am putting my heads down and how we actually can solve the problem. Keep in mind the payload, we're limited with thousand pounds.
The more sensor that I put it on the vehicle, heavier, less efficient that use more power. So that with the lightest set of the sensors, and then which doesn't consume power much, but still solving speed, high speed and then high altitude problem. Oh, not to mention that we're fixed off, right? We are six degrees of the freedom of, so when it comes to the understanding the unknown object, it's a completely different problem then what the automotive industry is doing. So another area that I wanna point it out and in case that anyone's curious about sensors and object detection problem, these are the, you know, 2024 problem that I'm solving.
Not to mention the lack of data. This type is lower altitude like automotive industry that, you know, street lighter, bunch of different open source project where you can put your cameras and start collecting and you can contribute it to the open source community. Not everyone can fly, especially that altitude and collecting enough data for us to do the properly trained and have a certified model out there poses quite a lot of problem as well. Yes, we can collect some of the data using drone and defer, right? And then you can only do so much with that. So those are also the problem that I'm facing right now.
And this emergency landing, understanding emergency landing problem is also quite one of the difficult problem unlike automotive where you can, if you have anything happening, you just pull off and on the side and then you can park it. Air vehicle cannot do that simply because I have an emergency, I cannot just land it on your backyard. I wanted to make sure that identify the flood surface and also have a criticalities of that surface and then have that good understanding of, oh, good understanding of that, where that area is real time identifications of that regions. And then we definitely want, don't wanna land our vehicle next to elementary school, right? Something like that is also the problem that I'm looking at it. So again, if those are the anyone who's interested in sensors, object detections and the visions, navigation visions, oh, that I did mention.
So going back in here, if you're gonna be flying over to Manhattan, you're probably, if you're driving down with your Google drive the map, as soon as you enter SF, San Francisco or Manhattan, it stopped working because there's a GPS, you know, there's a multi-path happening. It's unreliable to get the whereabouts. So augmenting that to give the a hundred percent confidence of a reliability availability, the integrity of where you are is the key enablers for automating our vehicle.
So here, if you see that starting 2040 timeframe, we're anticipating to be growing with the market. That's because when we are anticipating that highly automated solutions should be available for UAM, early deploying UAM vehicles are not gonna be having any of these automated features because right now, the FAA's most concern is how do we certify this brand new shape of the configuration of a vehicle? And we're gonna have a pilot, we're gonna deploy all the humans. You already know that pilots, we're suffering worldwide a pilot shortage. We're deploying hundreds and thousands of vehicle out there. We cannot rely on the pilot. We need to automate our vehicle operations.
And once we have a good understanding of this automated problem, that's where we are actually gonna take off with the high increasing high densities in terms of the operations. So AI/ML it's also a brand new headache that we're giving over to FAA. How do we certify, you know, when you come up with your training modules and then when you said your model is a trained, how do we verify it and validate it and test it because this is not no longer the software code where they can actually read it and then keep it in their artifacts. I mentioned about the computing powers, aviation is one to two generations behind. We just got certified about with the usage of the multi-core. Your phone, it's probably eight or 16 cores.
It's been multi, you've been using the multi-core since, I don't know ever since we put out the smartphone. Aviation kept it a single core and a single dedicated function hardware for reasons for redundancies and without having the multiple dedicated function of, you know, computers and doing just so that, so in case that that one box becomes, you know, unavailable or whatever malfunction, you still got two of the other box that you can actually back that up. I can't do any of this with single core computers. Fusing the sensors and even just understanding that on real time, I talk about the importance of an understanding on real time.
I can't do with the single core computers. So that's a major gap. That's a huge gap. And also the balancing it out, what's a minimum, bare minimum that I can do on a real time versus what is a pre learned sort of the data that I can preload it through a vehicle? Understanding that trade study, the trade gap is also the good, you know, topic for research paper, your project and then, you know, and because that is a 2024, the problem that I'm facing right now. Hardware is the one thing, now it comes to software.
Ricardo briefly mentioned about software defined vehicle. That is where my passion actually is. We would need to move away from single dedicated hardware to general purpose, a general purpose and consolidating all of the functions, that way we can reduce the weight problem, deploy the multi-core and then that's where you can create and introduce that virtual machines or dockerize all of your system so that your application can be dockerized separated out and also your, and then that's where, and all this, that compute powers can be actually provided. And it depends on the applications and it depends on the scenario. That's where I can assign some of these computing powers just for that purpose, for that time being.
Again, good topic for those of you who are interested because that is a, you know, that is a problem that I'm facing right now that I'm solving. And so one more thing, once you actually solve this, as I mentioned that it's, it also poses a certification problem because Asia said FAA kept it in such a way aviation industry kept it in such a way, a dedicated hardware for a reason. It's so that you can isolate the problem and in any of the, one of the failures does not necessarily necessarily cascading over to all the other aircraft system.
By introducing this, you would've to be very careful of that. And then you can actually isolate the problem. Although we are using that ethernet as a backbone and sharing all the data you need to have a great architectures about isolating the problem. And then so that it's not, it's not one failures of one of the compute devices not failing entire vehicle. So another certification, the challenges, the headache that we're giving over to FAA. In order to get to the fully automated vehicle, there are multiple steps that that, that I'm thinking industry is thinking.
First is to simplify the vehicle. If you think about your vehicle, the automotive on the ground, none of us were here. But when Ford Forester came up with a vehicle that the way that, you know, people drive back then compared to with your ADA system, it's a huge differences. So automotive industry has been transitioned in order to meet the sort of the requirement of, you know, make it easier to drive so that when you know US citizens and you know, boys and girls to become 16 years old, they can just take that couple of hours of online training and a few, I don't know, 30 hours, some 60 hours of driving test and on the road with monitor and then you can actually try to get the driver's license. We need to have that on the aviations.
Keep in mind the numbers that I mentioned it over there, we're severely suffering the shortage of the pilots before you even get to the highly automated and removing human entirely out of the loop. We need to provide a simplified of a way of operating the vehicle. Because right now helicopter is the most difficult complex machines who operate and there's a reason that not many people actually can do it.
And it takes years of training a highly intelligent person and they would've to renew their trainings and you know, every certain duration. So simplified the vehicle operations and then if you've been, if you've been following the UAM, those are the sort of a forefront of the first step of the automating the vehicle. Once that is done.
And then the next phase is that now that we can, we know how to simplify, we can probably have the human just on the stage just to monitor in case anything happens. But all the operations can be, you know, control the remotely through the connectivities. And once that's that, well good understanding is established and then, and once we actually solve all the problems of the sensors and the object detections and landing spot and making a decision on the spot problem solve, that's when we can actually talk about highly automated operations. So quite a lot of problems.
So if you see that some of the OEMs saying from day one, we can actually remove that, you know, pilots and out of the vehicle. I have my opinion, but because there are quite a lot of difficulties that in order to just to get there. I talked about our communications.
Right now, the best means to communicate with the air traffic controllers is via voice. You know, and then there's an ADSB that where you're putting, you're broadcasting and you can subscribe to what other vehicles are actually broadcasting in terms of their intention, their positions, their locations and their very minimum way of think about it like you have a need, a way that you can just text a five, I don't know, five words to the whole world about where you are. So it's not that entire message that you can actually exchange with everyone. It is just that, you know, like three to five words that you're just sharing your intentions. That has to change, again, because that if we actually gonna be, have a good understanding of that situational awareness problem and then you wanna communicate with everyone. And that poses quite a lot of also challenges right now.
Right now that we're trying to minimize the problem in here so that FAA acknowledge that there's a shortage of the ATC human personal problem so that they're open for introducing brand new players called PSU and/or ASSP who are the sort of traffic controllers. So FAA now open to have that conversation like what they used to by the ATC tower remote located service providers can actually work with individual UAM operators, the fleet operators and yes, you can fly from, I don't know, from Berkeley campus over to one of the vertiport in San Francisco. I'll give you approval for you to fly and you can depart in certain hours and then land it in certain hours. And so they can do those traffic controls, brand new players, how we actually gonna work with them 'cause we don't wanna enable the voice again so these are digitalizing the conversation with this PSU is the first problem for industries to solve. And as I mentioned because they're brand new players and how do we ensure the integrity of the data that we're exchanging is also one of the problem that I'm looking at it, we can communicate with the you know, person, we can set up the data structures and then these are the acknowledgement that I'm looking for.
These are the message that I'm gonna be sending it over. But if I need to, if Supernal vehicle is a fleet operator, I'm gonna be flying, dispatching my vehicle over to multiple different locations and communicating with them. I wanna make sure that there's a way for me to say that yep, what I get from PSU through the comm link is listed, I don't have to worry about anything. So that understanding the integrity aspect of it is the problem that I'm looking at right now. I mentioned about the PSU, also remember the graph that we're gonna be taking off like exponentially that's starting in a certain year.
Once we have a good understanding of how to automate the vehicle operations, once you introduced multiple different PSUs so that it's not monopolized by the one person or like one Uber, right? Are you using Lyft or Ubers and all the other dispatching providers right now on the ground? Same concept, but then entire network to polish data infrastructure has to be well established and well understood. These are the study that I currently working with NASA and we've got somewhat good understanding of what that actually is. And then right now we're doing, we passed a simulations experiment and then we are deploying it over to national airspace with FAA starting next year. So anyone's good at backend data infrastructure, so networked topologies, another area for you to take a look at. All right, so that graph again, if you wanna take off exponentially, another gap here is the manufacturings. Numbers says over here, right? Airspace, you pick up one of the largest OEMs as of today.
They produced hundreds because everything is manual. You saw the vehicle configurations, there are some of the designs I've never seen before. If you wanna provide that many, if you wanna do that many of the vehicle supply that many of the vehicle, we need to have a good understanding of, you know, how we actually gonna be manufacturing these UAM vehicle in an aviation industry. That's with a current framework, no one's solved that problem yet. So I anticipate we need quite a lot of engineers and a good understanding of how we actually gonna do that in a large scale in the aviation industry because there's a reason that we do it because it holds a very specific new certification rate going here. But anyone with an interest in robotics, that's where we need to fully focus on.
Right now in Supernal, that we've got, well that is one of the reason that you see these UAM/OEMs are invested by the automotive industry because they know how to put out the mass number of the manufacturings and the vehicles out there. So that's also the current topic. So for Supernal, I'm only looking at how to automate the vehicle because unlike the automotive industry on the ground where you would've to deal with undeterministic problem like oh no, no unknown problem because you never know that if again the five years old the boy is gonna kick the ball out of nowhere. That is something that, that is something that you just cannot get ready for.
But aviation industry, national airspace, you can actually put quite a lot of restrict. So we can actually, I can try to stay on the known problem and solve the known and unknown problem. There are known problem because of the whole issues that I mentioned over here, but we're looking at it more holistically inside and outside of the vehicle. I think that is the right approach because if you just pull out that automotive, highly automotive vehicle out there, you take a look at if you actually doing the automotive industry problem, there are highly more automated vehicle out there but it didn't get commercialized right now because of the old undeterministic problem.
So for us, I think for me that is very important that we contribute to entire ecosystem and industry, that these are the set of the structure, they wanna actually implement it including the UAM corridors and then so that we can limit the problems that we actually want to tackle so that we can efficiently automate the vehicle as well as in operations. So yeah, I don't know how I'm doing with the time. Think that's right at clock here so I'll open up for questions. [audience applauding] - Well thank you for the great talk. We have time for questions.
You can raise your hand. I can bring the microphone. - [Attendee #1] Wonderful talk. Thank you.
Do you foresee the UAM market to develop like the Boeing Airbus sort of a duopoly or more like the car market where you have many different manufacturers? So thinking about the zoo of different vehicles that you showed, how do you see that developing? - I think it's a leader. You already see that quite a lot of OEMs when it comes to UAM and now that we've got luxury or the flexibility of coming up with a different design, depends on what they do in terms of the trade studies when it comes to DEP. So I think it's not gonna be monopolized by current aviation industry and then that we cannot take off that, we cannot such meet that high number of demands. - [Attendee #2] Hi, thank you for the nice presentation. So what is the markets that you ambition UABs, UAM serving, like it's only going to be cityscapes or going to be something more rural? I don't think that like emergency vehicles will qualify under UAM but is there something along those lines? - So UAM, the industry that I'm well, umbrella under FAA, it's called advanced air mobility.
So underneath the UAM is a one segment which carries that small number of the people/passengers and it's sort of, you know, 10 to 70 miles of the distance. Underneath the AAM, there's a RAM vehicle, regionally air mobility, which is to connect more larger cities. The larger distance of the larger distance between more the rural area and connected with the center of the city. The reason that we're not necessarily focusing on right now is because the battery problem, it can only go so far with the current existing battery with our architectures and there's a fine balance that we would've to do, we cannot just unlimited number, we cannot put the unlimited number of batteries.
So I would foresee that once that hydrogen fuel cell becomes commercialized and then becomes more of the product height, that's where we can actually serve more of the different use cases. - [Attendee #3] Hi, thank you so much. So you brought up a lot of like fancy new technology in this presentation like, like autonomous detection and like flight controlling and also like air traffic management.
But the FAA is known to be very stubborn in new things. Like for example, a Boeing 777 winglet took like, it's just that little folding mechanism that took like many, many years to get certified. So what do you like anticipate FAA's attitude change towards these new technology that you mentioned? - Yeah, yeah, so a good question because that's my number one problem that I'm facing on a day-to-day basis. So it has to be the small enough sort of the chunk and FAA, rightfully, they should be paranoid about deploying the large number of the vehicle up in an additional airspace and then they should be paranoid about, you know, keeping it safe. So there has to be a fine balance between industry as well as in FAA. So I would say that for past, if you ask me this question four years ago, I would say, I don't know.
Since you're asking me that today, their attitude has been quite changed and now we actually see how to move over some of the issues. But as I mentioned, that they first are focusing on how to certify these various different configurations and that's their primary focus. And then for that it's well understood by industry that yep, we're not gonna complicate the problem, one problem at a time so that it's gonna be deployed with a pilot.
We're gonna follow the existing framework, it's gonna be a known operational environment. We're not gonna be introducing everything all at once. However, these are some of the items that we would've introduced it. So these are the second priority that you would've to take a look at it.
So for today, as of today that I'm feel more optimistic. I think that for the past, a few year and a few month and things are moving with some speed. - [Attendee #3] Thank you. - [Attendee #4] Hi, thank you for the talk, that was quite useful for a lot of the products I'm doing. So my background's actually with UTM prior to Berkeley, but specific to like the V2V communications you were talking about. As a provider, would you feel like as Supernal, are you more keen on having a protocol that perhaps is established by the FAA or an authority and allowing for the operators themselves to establish communications and worry about integrity or would that be better done by a third party UTM provider or private UTM provider that kind of bridges that gap? - I have my personal opinion about V2V.
I think that we might be complicating the problem more than it needs to be because that integrated problem, getting that redundant data is sure, it's a good thing. But if there isn't any way for me to validate that, what's the ground source of the truth, that becomes a quite difficult problem when it comes to data infrastructures and data network. So I think with the current existing sort of through the PSU that when it comes to protocol, I don't think FAA is gonna be mandating that, like how you guys resolve the problem as an industry. So I think it's the solution will come up from the industries and then we're, and in fact that working with a UTM provider so that some of the UAM PSU candidates are already existing UTM providers because those are the data, they're already sort of the vetted out so I have a good understanding of what the problems are.
- Thank you. - Thanks. - All right, so I think we addressed all the questions and wanna thank the speaker again. - Thank you so much. [audience applauding]
2024-11-04 12:16
