Closed Loop Autonomous Flight Milestone [VIDEO]

It’s no surprise that amazing achievements are reached when teams work together. This has never been more true than in the case of the incredible milestone recently achieved by Airbus’ Autonomous Taxi, Takeoff and Landing (ATTOL) project.

Launched in June 2018, ATTOL is a technological flight demonstrator developed to understand the impact of autonomy on aircraft. The rapid physical demonstration of ATTOL’s capabilities was made possible via a cross-divisional, cross-functional, global team working in Europe, the US and China.

In April 2020 in Toulouse, France, the ATTOL demonstrator hit a major milestone by performing fully autonomous runway landings. For the first time, Project Wayfinder’s software—embedded on an A350-1000 aircraft—was used to guide the aircraft. This is an impressive demonstration of how far autonomous flight software has progressed, particularly for challenging maneuvers such as runway landings.

View a video from these flights here:

At Wayfinder, our team’s mission is to create autonomous flight and machine learning solutions to enable self-piloted aircraft operations. We worked extensively before each flight to ensure the system behaved as expected. This is an exciting milestone for Airbus, the ATTOL team and Project Wayfinder as we build scalable, certifiable autonomy systems to power the next generation of aircraft.

- Arne Stoschek