If Silicon Valley has its way and delivery drones start roaming the skies en masse, the resulting increase in air traffic could become too much for civil aviation authorities to handle.

A startup called AirMap Inc. has already begun to lay the groundwork for the rise of autonomous aircraft. The Santa Monica, California-based air control provider this morning secured $26 million in funding to speed up the effort.

At the core of its ambitious initiative is a homegrown flight management platform that aims to remove the amount of human oversight required to coordinate drone activity. AirMap claims that automating the process is not so much a convenience for aircraft operators as a requirement to ensuring public safety.

Chief Executive Ben Marcus told TechCrunch that there aren’t enough human air traffic controllers to keep with the rapidly growing number of commercial drones operating in low-altitude airspace. Insufficient oversight in turn increases the risk of collisions and other operational errors.

AirMap aims to eliminate the issue by enabling drone operators to ensure that their flight plans don’t create any conflicts. Its platform is accessible through a mobile app that makes it possible to view the various flight restrictions in a given area, chart a safe route and then easily broadcast the information through the appropriate channels. Over on the other end, authorities can quickly pull the plug on a flight if something is amiss.

AirMap also helps regulate drones when they’re in the air through a “deconfliction” mechanism that enables aircraft to automatically share flight data with another in-flight so to reduce the risk of collisions. The platform supports both manned and unnamed aircraft, which means that airline pilots can check its activity feeds for threats.

AirMap currently works with more 125 airports, a number that should soon move closer to the 1,000 mark thanks to a partnership with the American Association of Airport Executives it struck last April. The startup also claimed in today’s funding announcement that its platform also powers the “vast majority” of the world’s drones. In words, it’s uniquely positioned to provide the automatic coordination that the unnamed flight era will require.

Microsoft Corp.’s venture capital arm provided the biggest portion of the capital while Qualcomm Inc., Sony Corp., Airbus SAS and Chinese drone maker Yuneec contributed the rest.

As part of its growth efforts, AirMap will use the funds to open new branch offices around the world. The startup among others plans to set up shop at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, which suggests that it may be looking to collaborate with the space agency. Such an alliance wouldn’t be too surprising given that many of the technologies developed for the space program over the years have been transferred to the private sector.

Source: Pixabay