I believe that the London Circle tube line is driven by computers, but there is a human driver in the cab to operate the doors, and presumably to hit the emergency stop if the computer goes haywire or the human sees an obstacle. But a tube train runs in one dimension, on tracks. It also runs in specific tunnels, so the probability of obstructions is very low.
What you say about putting wires down the runway, or special street furniture etc is fine - that will work - and for that matter, planes could be simply towed to and from the runway by tug crews. But that is not computer vision, and you will still need pilots to 'conduct the flight', since they do rather more than taxi. Would you or your family fly in a pilotless aircraft?
A so-called autonomous car, even if the route is lined with copper wires or whatever, will still not be able to differentiate between a rubbish bag blowing into the road and a child chasing a ball, so it will have to emergency stop for anything it "sees", even a tumble weed, or a bird flying across the road, as they do.
Perhaps instead; a way forward to preventing horrendous airplane accidents would be to have live flight data monitoring?
If certain FDM parameters are significantly exceeded, or the profile looks badly wonky; a flight could be flagged up in real time and the chief pilot in their office could look at the flight parameters and have a direct communication channel to say to the crew, "er guys, what is going on here? You will go-around or immediately do x,y,z." etc.
Or maybe even something like the Apollo mission control?
Last edited by Uplinker; 12th Jul 2020 at 07:52.