That's what it's like to control an autonomous car miles away

The exit ramp is a long winding slope and you need to make sure that the 50ft big rig you drive is navigating carefully in the bend and does not escape at high speed.

But the fact is, you are not really there. You are in a room in Silicon Valley and watch the ramp unfold in front of you on several screens. This heavy load you carry is thousands of miles from Florida.

Welcome to remote control or remote controlled driving with a human in front of a steering wheel, brake and gas pedals, and a "windshield" covered with monitors. This is a method that allows autonomous vehicles to run without anyone inside. Instead, a vigilant driver or remote operator monitors the difficult moments that the robot or vehicle can not handle. Some companies offer remote driving systems that operate with autonomous vehicles, such as Phantom Auto and Starsky Robotics. Other robotics companies rely entirely on remote control. Even Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company from Google, has operators ready to take charge of their autonomous cars in a difficult situation.

While autonomous vehicles are progressing with taxi services in places such as Arizona and Las Vegas via Waymo and Lyft, it is slower to live a driverless experience. In California, only Waymo has applied for a fully self-driving license – only for testing.

Even in places where autonomous cars drive on public roads, security drivers are still crammed into the front seats, ready to take the wheel. On the other hand, remote-controlled autonomous driving means that cars, truck cabs, delivery vans and even delivery robots can operate on their own. A human is ready to intervene, a bit like these security drivers, but at a distance.

For small robots like Kiwibot, which offer delivery services, the entire operation is controlled remotely. Operators vie for delivery bots on UC Berkeley's campus from Colombia, as SF Chronicle reported. Mobile machines rely entirely on remote operators to get around, which differentiates Kiwibots from Scout and Digit robots from Amazon, which have sensors and standalone capabilities.

Stand-alone remotely operated vehicles fall into a gray area of ​​the spectrum of autonomy. Since a person is always in control, they are not really autonomous. Remote-controlled driving is mainly considered as a complementary tool, with its almost imperceptible latency and high data transmission loads, making it perfect for remote driving and monitoring. Phantom Auto is one of the leading providers of remote-control software on the road. Its services can also serve as a backup security system.

Phantom co-founder Elliot Katz said this week in a phone call from his Mountain View office in California that his company technically does not provide complete autonomy: "Our test vehicles will not move an inch unless someone drives them." The difference, of course, is that someone is a driver located in a remote location, usually the Phantom office in Silicon Valley.

Eric McCarter, Phantom Auto and Remote Operator Program Manager, said remote driving "looks a lot like normal driving," but you have to rely on different signals. When you turn the steering wheel, you feel no feeling of a vehicle or real contraction of tires. The microphones in and around the vehicle allowed him to hear everything that a driver physically in the car would hear; he can see as much and more thanks to cameras showing everything that happens around the vehicle, even behind it. So, even if it's just the essence of driving, "you have to relearn how to drive" in this digital-world hybrid world, whether it's through repetition or on parking lots or on empty roads and little used.

At the end of April, Starsky Robotics, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, conducted a test drive in Florida with remote pilot, Jas Bagri, teleoperating a truck, while the driver of the safety, Luis Velez, was sitting in the driver's seat without actually driving the 20 minutes of testing. This is the 360-degree video version of the player.

One of the remote controlled companies, Starsky, was born from the question: "What if you manufacture a remote-controlled truck?" Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, co-founder and CEO, said to me during a phone call this week that the problem of the growing shortage of long-distance truck drivers was of growing concern. His teleoperations company works with long distance autonomous trucking companies and introduces remote-controlled driving on the first and last kilometers. This may involve traveling from the distribution center to the motorway, arriving at a service station, going to a loading dock or pbading through toll booths. These are usually the moments when an autonomous truck struggles. So the operators come in and help. "It solves a lot of problems in autonomy," he said.

Seltz-Axmacher admits that driving a truck is very difficult. Doing it via remote control may be just as difficult, until you have enough workout. After attempting to pull back a 15-meter-long trailer between parked trucks, for example, he said he came back to the professional truckers with his tail between his legs. On the other hand, long-time truck drivers still need practice for remote driving and follow training for a week to get used to driving a truck in front of a monitor rather than on the road.

The ghost operator McCarter finds that remote driving is similar to traditional driving because both tasks are highly targeted. In the case of teleoperation, McCarter is only monitoring the situation. He explains that his driving sessions are generally shorter and that it is a question of solving an "extreme case", as if an autonomous delivery robot met an unexpected construction team repairing a nest. of chicken. Then, McCarter, who monitors the journey, is alerted and can intervene, bypbad the construction site and return the reins to the autonomous bot.

Remote-controlled vehicles could also help us get used to the autonomy. A Capgemini study of last month's self-drive perceptions revealed that nearly half of consumers were confident that self-driving cars were driving for them or picking up and dropping off friends and family members. Just under 50% of the more than 5,500 consumers surveyed said that autonomous cars evoked "fear". It is comforting to know that there is a human right that can take over, even if they are very far apart.

As Phantom's Katz summarizes, with autonomous cars, we take the human from the driver's seat. Now, with remote-controlled cars, we "add the element to which people are most accustomed: the human."