Honeywell flies its first autonomous aircraft 6 weeks after starting to train the Hivemind SI pilot
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
If the claim holds, teaching an aircraft to fly itself can take weeks instead of a year.
According to Shield AI, Honeywell Aerospace engineers made the first autonomous flight of a BFD-SE8 multirotor aircraft six weeks after starting work with the Hivemind Enterprise platform; the public demonstration (autonomous takeoff, route following, no-fly-zone avoidance) took place on July 8 in Plymouth, Minnesota. On October 8 two aircraft flew a joint reconnaissance mission near Phoenix: detecting, identifying and tracking a target and autonomously delivering a payload. The companies estimate that without Hivemind such work would have taken about a year (a saving of 54 weeks). All figures come from a Shield AI press release.
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