this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Serious question: Wasn't it obvious?
There was some hate babbling when that robot taxi company in SanFran published that their autonomous cars were assisted by remote drivers who took over when situations were too complex for the robots.
I think remote support and steering will be the most reliable and practical way those tasks will be handled for the foreseeable future. How much assistance the cars will need may diminish but I don't think they will ever be able to work without any human assistance.
thats just regular driving with extra steps
Sort of. It just depends on how much the person needs to control the vehicle.
The easiest example I can think of: Imagine lorries traveling along a motorway, and they can do that autonomously because it's "easy", and when they get into a city a remote operator needs to drive them manually into the depot.
Each operator could easily drive 4 or 5 lorries, if only one of those is entering a city at a time. Instead of needing a driver per truck, you only need drivers for the maximum number of trucks that might be entering cities at the same time. For a fleet of 30, that could be 5 drivers.
For things like mining, where safety regulations mean that you want to avoid having people in the mine as much as possible, even having one driver for every haul truck (so yeah, regular driving with extra steps) could be economically profitable if it means you can reduce some other, potentially expensive safety controls.
this would work mostly in the us where the majority of the time you are in wide highways. aside from that, i see how it can be useful.