
Avro Canada VZ-9 Avrocar - Vigier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar
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legerdemain
Inspiration for the Star Wars landspeeders? I find it pretty amazing how much
of the visual language of science fiction is a digested and recombined medley
of the popular science and industrial research of its day.

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johnwalkr
Actually, this[1] is the original concept. Pretty close! I coincidentally saw
it in a documentary yesterday. They changed the design so they could easily
make the prop based on an existing small car.

[1] [https://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11...](https://www.originalprop.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2014/11/Star-Wars-Colin-Cantwell-Landspeeder-Prototype-
Model-A.jpg)

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causality0
Jet-based hovering vehicles like this and the Flyboard Air suffer from a pair
of difficulties: inherent instability and the inability of their turbines to
throttle up and down fast enough for basic computer control to keep them
stable. Such vehicles are today manual-fly only and require a high degree of
skill and talent to operate safely. I wonder if machine learning could be
applied predictively to achieve a degree of stability beyond normal "tilting
left, apply thrust left" programming.

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Mmrnmhrm
I understand this is a non linear control problem with a well known model. How
would machine learning help there?

