Near Earth was founded as a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University at the end of 2012 and counted around 90 employees as of November…

In a city known for its success with self-driving road vehicles, CEO Sanjiv Singh told Technical.ly in the fall that Near Earth’s developmental challenges are “exactly the opposite” of those of most of the AV industry.

All autonomous vehicle developers look to address two main cases, Singh said: normal scenarios, and scenarios where something goes wrong. In the case of road vehicles, developing the autonomous platform to respond to a problem is easier, because it can direct the car to stop or pull over…

But for aircraft, because air travel is already extremely controlled, the general and normal scenarios an autonomous aircraft may come across are relatively simple to account for. The cases in which something goes wrong, however, present a huge challenge. Aircrafts, unlike cars, cannot simply pull over or land in the event of an error or system breakdown.