So I thought I had a great idea for how to solve the problem when a driverless car get's into a sticky situation and needs help. If there's a person in the car, that's easy. But what happens when summoning a car from across the country and it get's pulled over for having a blown tail light? Or it gets into a situation it just can't handle?
Here's the idea:
Have a trained set of remote "drivers" ready to take over remotely, watching via the cameras, able to hear and speak to anyone outside the car via the audio systems. When the car signals it's stuck, it starts streaming the video feed back home, and someone will analyze the situation and "drive" the car via remote control. I'd imagine the "drivers" might have augmented reality visuals so they feel like they are sitting in the car looking out, can swivel their heads and see the view from the cameras, corrected from wide angles to human scale.
I hadn't heard anyone mention anything like this, so I hit the 'net looking to see if anyone else thought of this. Turns out they did...but not for driverless cars. It was for autonomous delivery robots roaming the sidewalks:
Pizza, the unsung agent of the robot revolution
Here's the idea:
Have a trained set of remote "drivers" ready to take over remotely, watching via the cameras, able to hear and speak to anyone outside the car via the audio systems. When the car signals it's stuck, it starts streaming the video feed back home, and someone will analyze the situation and "drive" the car via remote control. I'd imagine the "drivers" might have augmented reality visuals so they feel like they are sitting in the car looking out, can swivel their heads and see the view from the cameras, corrected from wide angles to human scale.
I hadn't heard anyone mention anything like this, so I hit the 'net looking to see if anyone else thought of this. Turns out they did...but not for driverless cars. It was for autonomous delivery robots roaming the sidewalks:
“We don’t want 100 percent autonomous driving. We always want 99 percent because we know and want an element of human oversight and operation at all times. We are estimating that, in the future, it will be one human operating 100 robots. There would be a bank of operators. Think of a call centre of human operators being pinged by robots in various neighbourhoods around the world, saying: ‘Ping, there’s a hole in the road, what do I do?’ or ‘Ping, there’s a new obstacle in my way, what do I do?’ A human can make that decision in a split second. There’s even a microphone and speaker on board, so nervous pedestrians can be reassured or perhaps even asked for assistance.”
Pizza, the unsung agent of the robot revolution