5 ms·

I've said this before on HN, and it got kind of laughed off, but I really think the next stepping stone toward autonomous cars is drone cars. That is, having r

I've said this before on HN, and it got kind of laughed off, but I really think the next stepping stone toward autonomous cars is drone cars. That is, having remote drivers assisted by all the "autopilot" features that improve situational awareness. These features make it easier to drive a car in person, but they could also be used to make it easier to remote a car. I see many possibilities for this. Designing cars that don't have a driver seat, holding more passengers. Having passengers be able to face each other. Remote pilots handoffs to other pilots via overlapping handshake. Might be able to figure out a way for multiplexing multiple cars across a smaller group of pilots. Anyway, I think this is far more achievable than self driving in the near term.

pilom 10y ago
The problem I see with this is latency. Round trip time for a laptop on wifi (this will need a wireless connection to the vehicle) could get up to 200ms at times. At 60mph the car will be 17 feet from where the operator's screen shows it best case. You've also added 1/5 second to all reaction times. A lot of people would die if every driver's reaction time went up by that much.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  A driver's reaction time is already 1000 ms as is. Latency is an issue, but I think 200ms is a pretty high number. you can get 250ms round trip to a geosynchronous satellite. Surely we can beat that on the ground.
  - pilom 10y ago
    Well, round trip time of light to GEO is 280ms plus processing time on the satellite plus "last mile" connections on earth. I usually see closer to 500ms on satellite internet. In most of Canada, I've never seen a wifi network give me better than 150ms to AWS in us-east in Virginia or us-west in Oregon. Even in SF pinging another server in SF with a wifi connection in the middle can get more than 80ms. For a bus system in a constrained area, you may be able to do it, but you'd probably be better off just going with tracks of some kind to eliminate drivers entirely.
    - ryanmarsh 10y ago
      Some are suggesting that 5G adoption will enable services that will need compute to be near the cell tower, or the backhaul. Services such as low latency AI based assistants and autonomous vehicles. Sorry I can't find the articles I've read on this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
stcredzero 10y ago
drone cars I think you're onto something here, but I don't think it will be done at the scaling of 1-to-1 drone pilot per vehicle. If you look at the situations where "autopilot" and autonomous vehicles have failed, you can think of many of these events as systemic changes. A car pulled over on a stretch of road which has no shoulder due to construction -- This is a systemic change on that stretch of road that applies to more than 1 car. The same even goes for a semi truck making a left turn across two-lanes of single direction highway traffic -- That is a momentary systemic change to that section of road. My conclusion: I do think that remote supervision of "self-driving" cars will be important. But I don't think the supervision will be done on the scale of one pilot for a single car. Rather, I think such cars will uplink their sensor data to huge datacenters where huge computer systems will monitor the road network as a system. (Much as this drone system can monitor a whole Mexican city. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374668) This systemic monitoring system will then alert the autopilot computers of cars on the road to take exceptional actions, or perhaps even send an alert to the driver to take over for awhile. (So in the examples above, the system would tell cars to edge over in the lane to avoid the stalled car on the shoulderless road, or detect semi-trailers crossing the highway in front of a speeding car on autopilot.)
deegles 10y ago
My prediction is that the real money will be in drone powered agricultural robots. Why force people to physically pick produce when they could do the same from their home (or another country perhaps). And 24/7 to boot.
- xtian 10y ago
  This is essentially the premise of the movie Sleep Dealer.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Tractors are already semi-automatic. They are essentially dumb robots on wheels with a person pushing a few buttons.

pilom 10y ago

The problem I see with this is latency. Round trip time for a laptop on wifi (this will need a wireless connection to the vehicle) could get up to 200ms at times. At 60mph the car will be 17 feet from where the operator's screen shows it best case. You've also added 1/5 second to all reaction times. A lot of people would die if every driver's reaction time went up by that much.

DigitalJack 10y ago
A driver's reaction time is already 1000 ms as is. Latency is an issue, but I think 200ms is a pretty high number. you can get 250ms round trip to a geosynchronous satellite. Surely we can beat that on the ground.
- pilom 10y ago
  Well, round trip time of light to GEO is 280ms plus processing time on the satellite plus "last mile" connections on earth. I usually see closer to 500ms on satellite internet. In most of Canada, I've never seen a wifi network give me better than 150ms to AWS in us-east in Virginia or us-west in Oregon. Even in SF pinging another server in SF with a wifi connection in the middle can get more than 80ms. For a bus system in a constrained area, you may be able to do it, but you'd probably be better off just going with tracks of some kind to eliminate drivers entirely.
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    Some are suggesting that 5G adoption will enable services that will need compute to be near the cell tower, or the backhaul. Services such as low latency AI based assistants and autonomous vehicles. Sorry I can't find the articles I've read on this.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

stcredzero 10y ago

drone cars I think you're onto something here, but I don't think it will be done at the scaling of 1-to-1 drone pilot per vehicle. If you look at the situations where "autopilot" and autonomous vehicles have failed, you can think of many of these events as systemic changes. A car pulled over on a stretch of road which has no shoulder due to construction -- This is a systemic change on that stretch of road that applies to more than 1 car. The same even goes for a semi truck making a left turn across two-lanes of single direction highway traffic -- That is a momentary systemic change to that section of road. My conclusion: I do think that remote supervision of "self-driving" cars will be important. But I don't think the supervision will be done on the scale of one pilot for a single car. Rather, I think such cars will uplink their sensor data to huge datacenters where huge computer systems will monitor the road network as a system. (Much as this drone system can monitor a whole Mexican city. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12374668) This systemic monitoring system will then alert the autopilot computers of cars on the road to take exceptional actions, or perhaps even send an alert to the driver to take over for awhile. (So in the examples above, the system would tell cars to edge over in the lane to avoid the stalled car on the shoulderless road, or detect semi-trailers crossing the highway in front of a speeding car on autopilot.)

deegles 10y ago

My prediction is that the real money will be in drone powered agricultural robots. Why force people to physically pick produce when they could do the same from their home (or another country perhaps). And 24/7 to boot.

xtian 10y ago
This is essentially the premise of the movie Sleep Dealer.
AstralStorm 10y ago
Tractors are already semi-automatic. They are essentially dumb robots on wheels with a person pushing a few buttons.