EXCLUSIVE: VOLOCOPTER’S AIR TAXI TAKES FLIGHT FOR FIRST TIME IN THE US
EXCLUSIVE: VOLOCOPTER’S AIR TAXI TAKES FLIGHT FOR FIRST
TIME IN THE US
Intel’s shiniest new toy takes off at CES
By Sean O'Kane@sokane1
Jan 8, 2018, 11:09pm EST
Regardless of whether you believe “flying cars” will
become a legitimate way to get around, there’s no doubting that people around
the world are in love with the idea. There’s always been something inherently
cool about the idea of skipping across the sky in a personal vehicle.
That’s why Intel capped its keynote address at this
year’s CES by letting an 18-rotor air taxi prototype (octadecacopter?) known as
the Volocopter VC200 fly across the stage, albeit briefly. This was the first
time it flew in North America, in fact. No, the Volocopter is not quite a
“flying car” as much as it is a “gigantic drone that you can sit in.” But even
that’s still cool.
Intel could use some of that cachet. Its image has been
scuffed by the recent Meltdown and Spectre security issues, as well as the
questions surrounding a sell-off of shares by CEO Brian Krzanich.
But even if you push that aside, the company is locked in
an ongoing, white-knuckle battle with Nvidia that spans across a vast set of
technologies, many of which involve moving people around in futuristic ways.
The wounds are fresh, too: one night before Intel’s keynote, Nvidia added Uber
and VW to a list of transportation customers and partners that stretches into
the hundreds.
So bringing Volocopter, a 50-person aviation startup from
Germany, to CES — and America — for the first time ever is a way for Intel to
step up and say, “Hey, look at this cool thing we’re working on!”
“What Intel sees in this technology is an enabling of a
whole new market, with different segments and different partners,” Jan Stumpf,
the chief of architecture for Intel’s drone group, says. “But Volocopter is of
course now our biggest and most important one.”
Intel didn’t pick Volocopter out of a folder marked
“buzzy vertical take-off and landing startups.” The tech company has been
working with the German aviation startup for a while now. It’s only now at CES
that the two sides are publicizing the partnership.
Once known as E-volo, Volocopter isn’t exactly a new kid
on the flying taxi block. In fact, we covered the company’s first ever flight
on the second day of The Verge’s existence. The company has pumped out a
handful of videos over the last few years of the first test flights and demos
of the prototype, the Volocopter VC200, in action. It recently followed that
with the Volocopter 2X, a more polished version that’s supposed to be company’s
first true production vehicle. (Intel also showed a video of Krzanich flying in
the 2X during the keynote.)
The Volocopter 2X features a flight time of 30 minutes
and a maximum range of 17 miles, though Volocopter says the batteries can be
quickly swapped to compensate for those numbers until the tech improves.
Volocopter’s made strides to shore up its business before
it announced this partnership with Intel. Last summer, Volocopter locked down a
$30 million investment from fellow German automotive giant Daimler; a few
months later, the company announced a multiyear partnership with the transit
authority in Dubai to test its air taxis. The goal there is to launch a
commercial pilot program in the early 2020s.
But a few years back, Volocopter was interested in using
the flight controllers being developed by a company called Ascending
Technologies. Intel bought Ascending Technologies — which was co-founded by
Stumpf — and that opened up a lane to Volocopter.
Intel works on and with myriad drones, but it saw
Volocopter as a way to test that technology on a much bigger scale, says Anil
Nanduri, the drone group’s vice president and general manager.
“When you’re talking about [scaling this technology] up
to flying transportation, you are now looking at sensors that need to processes
huge amounts of data,” he says. “But what’s most important, it needs to be
safe.”
Right. No one will want to get into a Volocopter if
there’s a remote chance that it will come crashing down. So one of the things
Intel helped the startup with was building enough redundancy into the vehicle
so that it can stay afloat in the face of multiple failures.
For example, the Volocopter uses four IMUs, or inertial
movement units, which constantly measure and determine the vehicle’s attitude
and positioning during flight. The battery system is split up into nine
discrete packs, with each one powering a pair of rotors, so that the vehicle
can still fly if one or two battery packs fail. The GPS and navigation systems
are dual-redundant. Worst comes to worst, there’s a ballistic parachute in the
top of the Volocopter that will deploy, letting the air taxi return to the
ground with its passengers intact.
“In a traditional helicopter, if one single component
along the entire drivetrain fails, you are in deep trouble,” Volocopter CEO
Florian Reuter says. “We’ve pretty much traded in the entire mechanical
complexity of today’s helicopters for electronic complexity, which is far more
lightweight, far more powerful, and far cheaper today. And we think this
vehicle can be constructed in a way that is as safe as a commercial airliner,
which is where it needs to be in order to be applied at scale in megacities
across the world.”
Reuter, Stumpf, and Nanduri all say that electric motor
technology also make the Volocopter much easier to fly.
Nanduri boasts that it’s “so easy” I could fly it, a
comment I’m still trying not to be offended by. (I asked multiple people, but
haven’t been offered the chance — yet.) Reuter takes it even farther. “It is so
intuitive to fly that you could put a five-year-old in here, without any
explanation, and it will know how to maneuver this vehicle,” he says.
The budding air taxi market is flooded with major names
like Uber and Airbus, and Volocopter’s not the only startup to pull in millions
of dollars in funding. Working with Intel helps Volocopter stand shoulder to
shoulder with these competitors, according to Reuter.
“It added a lot of credibility and opened up a lot of
doors for us,” he says. “You need to convince all the stakeholders —
regulators, customers — that this is really happening, that it’s really coming,
that there’s a credible development path behind it, and that there’s credible
financing around it.”
Mostly, though, Reuter says Volocopter quite literally
wouldn’t be here — literally, physically here in Las Vegas — if it wasn’t for
the deal they struck with Intel. “As a standalone startup coming from Germany,
I don’t know how long it would’ve taken us to come to the US and make a big
presence,” he says, standing under the rotors of the Volocopter 2X. “That
[exposure] is a great asset that we want to use to convey the message: it’s
here, it’s an awesome technology, and it’s realistic. It’s going to come very
soon, and it will have a practical impact on our everyday lives.”
As for Intel, Volocopter’s flight came at the end of a
more than hour-long keynote, one where Krzanich talked at length about the ins
and outs of other business partnerships centered around autonomous cars,
virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Volocopter could be a feather in
the cap of Intel going forward, but its cool factor can only do so much to
change the perception of this lumbering tech behemoth.
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