Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

Starting in July, the company will run a fleet of driverless vehicles around Frisco, Texas, a city of 164,000 people on the northern edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Announced today, the six-month pilot—which will keep human safety operators behind the wheel, ready to grab control if the car gets confused or misbehaves—marks Drive.ai’s first large-scale effort to put people in its cars, and the first such deployment in Texas.

The service is made possible through a unique public-private partnership among California-based Drive.ai, the city of Frisco, the Denton County Transportation Authority and the private developments for Hall Park, The Star and Frisco Station. They are all part of the newly formed Frisco Transportation Management Association.

How many landings per hour can the skyports designed by Corgan handle? The way we approached our design allows a lot of modularity and flexibility. There won’t necessarily be a demand for 1,000 landings per hour as an initial investment from Uber’s side. We developed our skyport around a single module that handles 90 landings per hour. Ideally that skyport gets doubled in size into a paired module, which handles 180 landings per hour. The beauty is it’s the same basic building block. Once we hit 180 (landings) it’s real easy for us to continue to scale that by replicating that scaled module up to 1,000 or more landings per hour.

lakewoodhobo wrote:VW To Stop Making Iconic Beetle Next Summer
http://t.co/YN4DZJ2H4u

This story has nothing to do with AVs, but discontinuing the Volkswagen Beetle might be a brilliant move if it's later resurrected as a mass-market autonomous fleet, however different it may look.

People will trust a brand that they have this nostalgia for well before some new product they only associate with automation.

electricron wrote:Autonomous flying vehicles will never be approved by the FAA which is staffed, funded, and controlled by pilots.
Watch some Aviation 101 youtube videos to find out how professional flying is - even for private pilots in small airplanes.
The idea that Billy Bob from anywhere Texas is going to be allowed by the FAA to fly wherever they wished in an uncontrolled fashion is not going to happen.

Uber will expand data collection for potential autonomous vehicles in Dallas, beginning in November, the ride-hailing service said Tuesday.

The data will be collected by a human driver, or as Uber calls it, a mission specialist. The data will be used to develop high-definition maps, that someday could enable self-driving vehicles to carry passengers on certain streets in downtown Dallas.

The company also hopes the research will help it better understand everyday driving scenarios that can be recreated in simulation labs and test tracks

Uber has already begun collecting comparable data in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

Hannibal Lecter wrote:Forbes: Waymo Taps Texas As Its Robot Truck Hub With Dallas Depot.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsma ... las-depot/

"Waymo, the leading U.S. self-driving vehicle company, is expanding its robot truck program by moving into Texas with a new depot in Dallas that will serve as the hub for road-testing its fleet of 18-wheelers."

The start-up, Mozee, is building a fleet of trolley-like self-driving vehicles. And soon you’ll start seeing them around North Texas.
. . .
Their first pilot program is slated for March with a government entity they can’t publicly name yet.