Uplinker, we are so, so much faster at creating things than Evolution.
If you watch football, cricket or tennis on the telly in the UK you'll notice computers are necessary to work out where the balls are and their trajectories. Unfortunately our billion-year-old '
eye-brain-memory combination' doesn't cut it.
In the UK, trains are driven by humans. To my knowledge there are only two exceptions - a short stretch of tunnel south of St Pancras where I believe human driving was deemed incapable of supporting the traffic density. And of course the Docklands Light Railway which carries over 120 million passengers per annum. The DLR demonstrates that while it can be impossibly challenging to drive things like humans do, it can equally be very trivial to drive things like computers can. The 1960s Trident could carry out a Cat 3C landing but only because they had put a wire down the centre of the runway. The discussion of whether computers can emulate human beings is missing the point. You don't need an autopilot to be able to do all the things humans can do. An autopilot does not need to see there is a Land Rover on the taxiway and a couple of blokes looking at a mark on the ground. All it needs to do is detect whether there is something solid in its path or have ground systems that monitor and provide control information. For normal operating procedures the task of flying a plane is very much simpler that the capabilities of a human pilot. As far as you can tell it is at least ten years before an automated car could be let loose in Central London. However automated cars have clocked up millions of miles, probably with a higher level of safety than humans ie there have been a few fatalities but less than if humans had been driving instead. If you got a group of aviation engineers and PPRUNE posters in a room together I bet it wouldn't take more than a day before they had come up with a technical environment that would support automated flight. For example, cars need fine density maps, 5G-like internet connections, various road furniture that defines the landscape to the car, protection from moving objects entering lanes in an unplanned way, etc.
I started this thread because of Airbus's
PR release, slavishly regurgitated by Flight International. In retrospect it has turned out to be a red herring. Why Airbus have spent so much money on computer vision is not obvious. I suspect it's mainly come from EU subsidies ('Clean Sky). Perhaps they used to it to subsidize some other A350-1000 testing tasks. More relevant are other things they are doing like Disruptive Cockpit -
https://www.airbus.com/innovation/au...us-flight.html -which is less esoteric and specifically aimed at single pilot operation .
As always these things are always technically possible long before the political and commercial will allows them to happen