Safe landing is the main challenge for autonomous flying cars
Taking off in a flying car is easy, according to aerial vehicle parts provider Near Earth Autonomy, but landing is not. Autonomous flying cars require specialised software to be able to cope with any problems on landing such as obstructions or difficult conditions, which does not yet exist. The company is developing hardware for Airbus's Vahana, which can take off and land vertically, using a range of sensors and laser scanners to determine if it is safe to touch down. A working prototype will be produced by the end of 2017 if all goes according to plan.

Before you can zip about in a flying car, engineers must solve more than a few problems. Oddly, figuring out how to make a flying car fly isn't among them. The basics of flight were sorted out more than 100 years ago. No, the big challenge lies in making these things fly themselves so you don't have to go through the hassle of earning a pilot's license. Here, too, taking flight isn't the big problem. Landing is.

“Takeoff is fairly scripted,” says Sanjiv Signh, the CEO of Near Earth Autonomy. His company makes sensors and robotic controls for aerial vehicles like drones. “But the landing site may not be ready to take a vehicle. Maybe something went wrong, and there’s already a vehicle on deck.”

A human pilot would know what to do. But a computer algorithm? It must be programmed. So Airbus, which really is developing an autonomous flying car, tapped the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, company to provide the hardware needed to get it off the ground—and back down again.

Airbus calls its self-flying flying car Vahana, and is working on it at its Silicon Valley outpost A^3 (pronounced "a cubed"). The single-seat electric aircraft uses eight propellers mounted on wings that rotate. Vahana takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like an airplane. Engineers call this VTOL, or vertical take-off and landing, but a growing number of people think it's just the thing for flying cars. Airbus hopes to start flight testing a prototype before the end of the year.

If all goes according to plan, Vahana will use a Near Earth Autonomy technology called Peregrine. The system, mounted under the fuselage, looks like a shoebox with a dome. It contains lidar, inertial measurement, GPS sensors, and all kinds of processing power. When the aircraft is at an altitude lower than 65 feet, it laser scans the ground in three dimensions, looking for objects bigger larger than 12 inches across, to determine whether the landing spot is clear and safe. If it does spot an impediment—like your jerk neighbor's flying car—it will suggest an alternative LZ and feed that back to Vahana's flight control computer.