Uber has plans to invest 20 million Euros to build a flying car center in Paris as a step toward building new technologies and capabilities for its fleet of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft.
Over the next five years, the Advanced Technologies Center Paris (ATCP) will work on artificial intelligence and airspace management systems to support UberAir at scale with the goal of achieving demonstration flights in Dallas, Los Angeles and a third international city by 2020.
The ATCP will open in the fall of this year and Uber said it will look to hire new employees for engineering, machine learning and computer vision with research focused on capabilities across airspace management, autonomy, real-time communication networks, energy storage and charging systems.
Uber said it will work with European city planners and regulators to model infrastructure needs for electrified transportation.
Part of this includes a new five-year research partnership with École Polytechnique that will help with artificial intelligence, aviation and all-electric transport development. The initial projects with planners and École will be machine learning-based transport demand modeling, high-density low-altitude air traffic management simulations, integration and innovative airspace transport solutions with European aviation regulators such as EASA and the development of smart grids to support future fleets of electric transport on the ground and in the air.
