The Airbus Upnext flying truck, a connected truck representing a copy of an Airbus A350 cockpit equipped with artificial intelligence, satellite antennas, GPS, radar and lidar to make taxi and lidar operations autonomous, avoiding collisions on airport tarmacs is presented at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups, in Paris, France, May 22, 2024.
Engineers work on computers on the flight test engineer station at the back of the Airbus Upnext flying truck, a connected truck representing a copy of an Airbus A350 cockpit equipped with artificial intelligence, satellite antennas, GPS, radar and lidar to make taxi and lidar operations autonomous, avoiding collisions on airport tarmacs, that is presented at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups, in Paris, France, May 22, 2024.
"These use cases are much more critical and complicated compared to those of the car industry," said Matthieu Gallas, head of automation research at Airbus UpNext,the planemaker's innovation lab."Copying and pasting technology already available on the market won't work." Airbus hopes the vehicle crawling through a side alley of the Paris exhibition centre hosting the tech billionaires and startups of VivaTech shows how automation can help safely squeeze $100-million-plus jets through increasingly congested airports.Slow-speed ramp incidents are rarely fatal but represent a costly and growing headache for airlines, airports, insurers and passengers caught up in resulting delays.
If successful, the project could result in changes to plane design, but getting novel systems certified is a daunting task.