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Joby Acquires Autonomy Division of Xwing, “Eye on Autonomous Flight”

Joby Avi­a­tion announced this week the acqui­si­tion of the auton­o­my divi­sion of Xwing, a leader in devel­op­ing autonomous flight tech­nol­o­gy, reports a press release. This sup­ports Joby’s long-term vision of mak­ing aer­i­al mobil­i­ty as acces­si­ble as pos­si­ble through the adop­tion of autonomous tech­nolo­gies. 

The pur­chase “is expect­ed to accel­er­ate exist­ing and poten­tial future con­tracts with the U.S Depart­ment of Defence (DOD) and under­scores Joby’s lead­er­ship posi­tion as a next gen­er­a­tion avi­a­tion com­pa­ny,” says the release.

Found­ed in 2016, Xwing has been fly­ing autonomous air­craft since 2020, using the Super­pi­lot soft­ware it has devel­oped in-house. “ Super­pi­lot enables safe, uncrewed oper­a­tions, super­vised from the ground,” con­tin­ues the release “and is the world’s first ful­ly autonomous gate-to-gate flight tech­nol­o­gy.”

Boast­ing more than 250 ful­ly autonomous flights and 500 auto-land­ings, Xwing became the first com­pa­ny to receive an offi­cial project des­ig­na­tion for the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of a large unmanned aer­i­al sys­tem (UAS) from the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) in April 2023, and the first to receive an Air Force Mil­i­tary Flight Release in 2024.

JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s Founder and CEO, com­ment­ed, “The air­craft we are cer­ti­fy­ing will have a ful­ly-qual­i­fied pilot on board, but we recog­nise that a future gen­er­a­tion of autonomous air­craft will play an impor­tant part in unlock­ing our vision of mak­ing clean and afford­able aer­i­al mobil­i­ty as acces­si­ble as pos­si­ble.”

The acqui­si­tion brings Joby to the fore­front of avi­a­tion auton­o­my and com­ple­ments the company’s 2021 pur­chase of Inras, a com­pa­ny devel­op­ing light­weight, high-per­for­mance radar sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy. 

Xwing Air­craft Involved in USAF Auton­o­my Tests (Cred­it: Xwing)

The release con­tin­ues, “Xwing’s com­pre­hen­sive approach, and exper­tise in per­cep­tion tech­nol­o­gy, sys­tem inte­gra­tion and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, is expect­ed to ben­e­fit both near-term pilot­ed oper­a­tions for Joby as well as ful­ly autonomous oper­a­tions in the future.”

And goes on, “The com­pa­ny also expects the tech­nol­o­gy to play an impor­tant role in accel­er­at­ing the exe­cu­tion of exist­ing con­tract deliv­er­ables with the U.S DOD and expand­ing the poten­tial for future con­tracts.”

Bevirt con­tin­ued, “The tal­ent­ed Xwing team has not only made unpar­al­leled progress on the devel­op­ment and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of vision sys­tems, sen­sor fusion and deci­sion-mak­ing autonomous tech­nolo­gies, but they’ve also suc­cess­ful­ly demon­strat­ed the real-life appli­ca­tion of their tech­nol­o­gy, fly­ing hun­dreds of ful­ly autonomous flights in the nation­al air­space.”

A wide range of engi­neers, researchers and tech­nol­o­gists from Xwing will now be inte­grat­ed into Joby, where they’ll focus on the increased automa­tion and auton­o­my roadmap for the Joby air­craft as well as expand­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties to part­ner with the DOD on tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment.

Maxime Gariel, co-Founder, Pres­i­dent and CTO of Xwing, remarked, “Xwing’s goal of con­nect­ing com­mu­ni­ties with clean and afford­able autonomous flight aligns close­ly with Joby’s long-term vision. For the past 7 years, our team has bro­ken bar­ri­ers to advance avi­a­tion auton­o­my.” Adding, “Now, as we join forces with the lead­ing elec­tric air-taxi devel­op­er, I can’t imag­ine a bet­ter home for the Xwing team to real­ize our shared vision.”

Xwing’s autonomous flights were com­plet­ed using a Cess­na 208B Grand Car­a­van air­craft, allow­ing the team to focus on areas such as vision sys­tem pro­cess­ing, detect and avoid algo­rithms, mis­sion man­age­ment includ­ing tra­jec­to­ry plan­ning and real-time updates, deci­sion mak­ing, ground con­trol sta­tions, remote oper­a­tions and the inte­gra­tion of AI and machine learn­ing algo­rithms.

Maxime Gariel

In ear­ly 2024, the air­craft par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Air Force’s Agile Flag 24–1 Joint Force exer­cise, dur­ing which it com­plet­ed dai­ly flights, cov­er­ing around 2,800 miles and land­ing at eight pub­lic and mil­i­tary air­ports, demon­strat­ing the abil­i­ty to inte­grate autonomous air­craft into the nation­al air­space sys­tem.

Col. Elliott Leigh, AFWERX Direc­tor and COO for the Depart­ment of the Air Force, said, ”Autonomous sys­tems are increas­ing­ly com­mon in the pri­vate sec­tor and offer poten­tial­ly game chang­ing advan­tages to the Air Force as well,. We cre­at­ed Auton­o­my Prime to keep up with this shift, and to stay engaged as a part­ner while this tech­nol­o­gy evolves, so that we can adapt and evolve along with the pri­vate sec­tor, main­tain­ing our com­pet­i­tive advan­tage.”

Joby’s acqui­si­tion cov­ers all of Xwing’s exist­ing automa­tion and auton­o­my tech­nol­o­gy activ­i­ties and was paid for with Joby shares. The terms of the deal have not been dis­closed.

For more infor­ma­tion

www.jobyaviation.com

(Top image: Joby Avi­a­tion)

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