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Even in the By midday, the 50-mile ride from San Francisco to San Jose is painful. Like a toddler, driving in the Bay Area switches between sleep (slogs at rush hour) and frenzy (speeding). It's enough to get excited about the day robots will dominate the roads. And it's more than enough to make me envy Evan Livingston, who does not have to show up in person at this meeting, which took place in a Lincoln MKZ sedan that walks downtown San Jose.
No, Livingston is sitting comfortably in his office in Portland, Oregon, when he appears on the screens inside the car and announces that he will be our teleoperator this afternoon. A moment later, the MKZ came to a standstill, not reacting in front of the driver but in front of Livingston, sitting in front of a bank of screens displaying images of the four cameras placed on the roof of the car, which function as flying wheels. and pedals serious players use for games like Forza Motorsport. Livingston is a software engineer for Designated Driver, a new company engaged in teleoperations, the official name for remote control of autonomous vehicles.
Teleoperation is a little discussed but vital element to bring autonomous technology to the world. The serious players in this space are not about to let their robots enter the world without the ability to drive them, or at least to direct them from a distance. Waymo, cruises from General Motors, Nutonomy, Zoox, Drive.ai, Uber and Nissan are quietly developing teleoperation systems. California law states that driverless vehicles must allow remote control. Florida, Arizona, Oregon and Washington are considering similar rules. US Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said he wanted to use similar language in AV Start, the federal law that would govern autonomous driving technologies that had been hanging around in Congress for almost two years.
The current configuration of the remote driver will evolve, but for now, the designated driver uses a bank of six screens that display the streams of different cameras of the car and a map of the region.
Designated driver
The designated driver sees a market there. Autonomy is a vast area including cars, trucks, shuttles, tractors, mining equipment, sidewalk robots, and so on. Not all companies will have the time, resources, or patience to develop their own remote control system. This makes them potential customers. "We are still struggling with voice control, is not it?" Said CEO, Manuela Papadopal. "The reality is that communication is a challenge."
Papadopal and its co-founder, Walter Sullivan, aim to capture 20% of the teleoperations market over the next few years by solving this problem and offering the resulting hardware, software and logistical know-how to anyone who has a problem. a robot and a computer. check. The value of this market remains to be seen, but even a tiny part of an industry that should be worth billions of dollars should be enough.
On the technical side, the main problem is the latency: the remote control of a car does not work if you are still a second behind what is happening. The designated pilot connects to the Verizon and AT & T networks using four cellular radios. Even on a 4G connection, Papadopal indicates that they have already lost latencies less than 100 milliseconds. In addition, the team plans to dynamically adjust the resolution of the operator's video stream when the connection slows down (as does Netflix).
The current configuration of the remote driver will evolve, but for the moment, DD uses a bank of six screens that display the streams of different cameras of the car and a map of the region. The remote driver can do everything he can while sitting in the car: use flashers, honk, change gears, and so on. The remote steering wheel even provides the torque return in the same way as in the car, but the company always strives to ensure that the operator can drive smoothly even when it is not pushing back. in his seat when accelerating or putting himself forward. a hard brake.
Papadopal and his team are also thinking about how a teleoperation system would work logistically. They are developing training and certification schemes for remote drivers, even though California law requires their driver's license to be valid. They study how long a person can stay engaged, knowing that even drivers inside their car are not good at being careful. "You're not there, it's like driving into deafness," says Papadopal, "Even though it's a game, it's not the case. Public roads, you drive with pbadengers, pedestrians around you, cars take over on the left and right, it's a difficult task. "
For starters, Designated Driver has a customer: AutonomouStuff, an Illinois-based company that operates as a kind of standalone supplier to the industry, will now offer the DD teleoperation kit for cars and other unused vehicles on roads and agriculture ). But the Papadopal team does not enter a green field. Phantom Auto is doing the same job and now has eight customers. Since its launch last year, it has focused most AV vehicles on the street into more immediate applications, such as sidewalk delivery robots that now roam cities in the United States. "Autonomous technology is currently being used in different ways," says co-founder Elliot Katz.
And of course, many companies developing robotic technologies will prefer to create their own teleoperation technology. But autonomy promises to be a very big market. The designated driver just has to control a little bit, from a distance, to stay.
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