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Ask HN: Openpilot and Remote Control
I've been wondering for a while about self-driving technology applied to trucks. There seems to be some ways to go before we have perfected self-driving technology to a point that can be safely used on semi trucks. Yet there are existing technologies such as Openpilot that allow some level of autonomous driving, my question is can we not combine that tech with an Internet remote control add-on that can be operated remotely by someone to drive the truck?
The remote control is used most of the time but when the Internet cuts out or if there is latency Openpilot takes over. This can be cost effective as an average US trucker makes ~$20/hr and an average remote worker in Philippines for example makes $2/hr.
Adding the 10x cost saving, there should be more attempts at this. What pieces am I missing or what are the things that you can think of that could go wrong. And also what are the things that could make this work if should someone were to try this?
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoMy first thought when people talking about self-driving trucks is how easy it would be to rip off a semi truck full of iPhones in the middle of nowhere when there's nobody even on board to worry about. What happens when your self-driving truck breaks down hundreds of miles away from any of your employees? With hundreds of thousands of dollars of cargo on board? Every hypothetical scenario you can possibly think of that your truck might encounter needs to be planned for, and every single solution needs to be weighed with the risk of how much cargo you might lose if something goes wrong. Suffice to say, I personally think even once (if?) self-driving trucks become fully automatable, you'll still be paying someone to sit on that truck around the country, just because the risk of not having someone there may be far greater.