Here’s what it feels like to drive an autonomous vehicle from a distance.
You have to be careful that the big rig, which is 50 feet long, doesn’t go out of control and fly off the road at high speeds.
You’re not there. You are in Silicon Valley in a room, and you’re watching the ramp on multiple screens. The heavy load that you are carrying is thousands miles away, in Florida.
Teleoperated driving is remote-controlled driving. A human sits in front of the steering wheel, gas, brake and accelerator pedals and a \”windshield\”, which is covered with monitors. This method allows autonomous vehicles operate without anyone in them. There’s instead a remote operator ,… more.
Seltz admits that driving a truck can be difficult. It’s even harder to do it remotely, until you have enough training. He said that after attempting to back up a trailer 50 feet long between two parked vehicles, he had to return to the professional drivers with his tail in his mouth. Long-time truckers, on the other hand, still need to practice remote control driving. They go through a one-week course to get used operating the truck in front of the monitor rather than the road.
McCarter, the phantom operator, finds that remote driving is similar to traditional driving because both tasks require a high level of focus. McCarter only monitors the situation when teleoperating. McCarter says he usually only drives for a short time, and then pops in to fix an \”edge case,\” like when an autonomous delivery robot runs into a construction crew that is fixing a pothole. McCarter is then alerted, and can take over to navigate the site. He can also hand back the controls to the autonomous robot.
We might also get used to autonomous vehicles by using remote-controlled cars. Capgemini’s study on autonomous car perceptions last month revealed that half of consumers trusted self-driving vehicles to do their errands or pick up friends and family. A Capgemini study (opens in a new tab) on autonomous car perceptions from last month found that about half of consumers trust self-driving vehicles to run errands for them or pick up and drop off friends and family members.
Source:
https://mashable.com/article/remote-controlled-autonomous-driving-vehicles-trucks
