Everyone May Have a Personal Air Vehicle

We are going to have personal air vehicles that are both cars and planes. Here's what Missy Cummings, associate professor at Duke University and director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory at the MIT, think about our future. It's basically the intersection of a drone with a robotic car, so that your plane is also your car, but the big leap in technology is that you are actually DRIVING NEITHER.

We are terrible drivers, says Missy Cummings: humans have a half-second lag in almost any quick response that they need to have, while computers and automated systems have microseconds. There really aren't any technological hurdles to this idea, just psychological and cultural, in terms of giving up the car. But NO TECH NEEDS TO BE DEVELOPED to have your own personal flying car. What we have to do is improve production and reduce manufacturing costs. Hence, we need more robots.

We shouldn't worry about the machines rising up and taking over, says Cummings, but hackers and terrorists who want to do wrong. At the moment she's working on trying to develop technology that allows any flying robots to be able to fend off any attack and to navigate itself without any external signal.

It promises much in terms of safer travel, so when she looks at globalising this concept of personal air vehicles, it means we will see the quality of life improve dramatically for everyone around the world.