5 ms·

Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar

• causality0 6y ago
  Jet-based hovering vehicles like this and the Flyboard Air suffer from a pair of difficulties: inherent instability and the inability of their turbines to throttle up and down fast enough for basic computer control to keep them stable. Such vehicles are today manual-fly only and require a high degree of skill and talent to operate safely. I wonder if machine learning could be applied predictively to achieve a degree of stability beyond normal "tilting left, apply thrust left" programming.
  • Mmrnmhrm 6y ago
    I understand this is a non linear control problem with a well known model. How would machine learning help there?
  • dvh 6y ago
    Third problem is if your neighbors have them.
• legerdemain 6y ago
  Inspiration for the Star Wars landspeeders? I find it pretty amazing how much of the visual language of science fiction is a digested and recombined medley of the popular science and industrial research of its day.
  • johnwalkr 6y ago
    Actually, this[1] is the original concept. Pretty close! I coincidentally saw it in a documentary yesterday. They changed the design so they could easily make the prop based on an existing small car. [1] https://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Star-Wars-Colin-Cantwell-Landspeeder-Prototype-Model-A.jpg https://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/11...
• redis_mlc 6y ago
  You can see similar saucer vehicles in the Bay area Hiller Aviation Museum. (Hiller had a similar career to Sikorsky.) https://www.hiller.org/ https://www.hiller.org/ https://www.hiller.org/event/flying-platform/ https://www.hiller.org/event/flying-platform/