Your Very Own Personal Drone:Coming Future or a Jetsons Fantasy?
Traveling in your very own personal drone has been in our imagination since a very long time! In 1958, Frank Lloyd Wright had a vision for an urban future where everyone will have their own helicopters.The Jetsons showed us s futuristic world where it was possible and fiction makes it look all the more real.
Chinese firm Ehang displayed an electric first of a kind personal drone which can carry a human being ,at the Consumer Electronics show held in January 2016 at Las Vegas. Equipped with eight rotors, pushing with 142 horsepower it can carry a payload of up to 220 pounds at speeds up to 60 miles per hour for a maximum of 23 minutes. All you have to do is sit inside, use the tablet to select your destination and press the button. This Autonomous aerial vehicle will then takeover and use its GPS enabled sensors to take you to your destination. It takes up to four hours to charge and is built in with a fail safe mechanism. The company claims that if anything malfunctions, the drone will land in the nearest possible area to safety. While it still definitely needs to get certification by international flight authorities in China and Federal Aviation Agency in U.S, the biggest downside is the $250,000 -$300,000 cost for each drone!!
While the company wants to commercialize it by the end of the year, it also raises questions of what it might mean for us in the future. Are we looking forward to air travel in terms of short distance low altitude transportation? We can also anticipate sky taxis and alleviating on ground traffic from cars as the company imagines .Or does it mean moving traffic from ground to air?
It might be the future of transportation but it will take years before we see full scale mass usage!
At the same time, Amazon and Google have already come up delivery drones and are trying to push regulators for testing in relatively sparse population areas.
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