From helping address the driver shortage currently plaguing the trucking industry to transporting passengers to and from their destinations, autonomous vehicles (AV) have no shortage of potential use cases for the present and beyond. “As autonomous technology comes to market, it’ll have a broad and positive impact on the overall industry,” said Shawn Kerrigan, co-founder and chief operating officer of self-driving truck technology company Plus.ai, during the Automated Vehicle Symposium (AVS). Before these vehicles can hit the roads at scale, though, there first needs to be some sort of uniform legislation to guide this technology, many speakers noted during AVS, which took place as a fully virtual show this year.

Swift Engineering has announced that its high-altitude long endurance (HALE) UAS has completed its maiden flight. The flight was completed in partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center. To validate the vehicle’s configuration for high-altitude continuous surveillance missions, Swift’s flight team performed a full-system check. The flight trials were conducted at New Mexico’s Spaceport America. “The applications of this technology will usher in a new era of data acceleration. Swift is able to deliver what no other industry or defense contractor can provide in the US market,” says Rick Heise, president and CEO of Swift Engineering.

Plus.ai has announced an agreement with North America’s largest independent vehicle test facility and proving grounds, the Transportation Research Center (TRC), to conduct capability tests of Plus.ai’s self-driving system using a rigorous multi-vehicle approach. Expected to break new ground in Level 4 commercial vehicle testing, this test program will utilize a multi-vehicle test approach to simulate complex, real-world driving conditions. Current published standards only require a single other vehicle test, Plus.ai notes. 

The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (CNO) and Textron subsidiary Bell Textron Inc. have established an agreement for Bell to begin testing some of its mobility systems such as the Bell Autonomous Pod Transport and the Bell Nexus on the CNO test site location in rural southeastern Oklahoma. CNO, Bell and their partners will work with the FAA, NASA, and other federal agencies to “enhance emerging aviation technologies and operations to help the United States retain a global leadership position in aviation technology.”