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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Maneuvering a truck in an urban area looks really hard for a by-stander. The proposition here is to do it with remote control, that sounds even harder. On second thought, it might be an easily solvable problem with the proper sensors and UI.

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That's exactly what I was thinking, I can't imagine driving a semi on a busy road, let alone doing so remotely.

Then again based on those pictures the operates have far better views around their truck then you would sitting in it.

But then again the UX of looking around vs a computer screen has to be another hurtle.

Would be interesting to have a head-mounted display a la VR headsets and model a truck with the virtual windscreens being the camera outputs on the truck. Would be interesting to see.

I've seen a video of experimental tech where a military humvee had a 360 array of cameras, whose feeds were collaged into a live 3rd person perspective feed. I think the humvee also had all its windows boarded up. The idea was for the crew not to use in-vehicle perspectives at all. I could see that working when you have to do tricky slow speed maneuvering. A top down view, where you could also see projections of how the truck would shift given different steering angles.

Land Rover has this now:

https://jalopnik.com/the-2020-range-rover-evoque-lets-you-se...

You don't really need to board up the windows for the cameras to be a big help. At least in the up armored humvees (the ones with bolted on armor), the side windows were very small, to the point that you had to have a passenger look out their side window to tell you if there was any oncoming traffic, or if it was safe to change lanes.

> 360 array of cameras, whose feeds were collaged into a live 3rd person perspective feed

The parking cameras on high-end cars have already evolved from a simple top-down view (which is now an option even on entry-level cars) to a 3rd person perspective 3D view, complete with a little 3D model of the car https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FyjVphbHAL0/maxresdefault.jpg

The other day I saw a truck carrying a blade of a wind turbine. It was gigantic, looked around half the length of a city block. Driving with one of those must be nearly impossible, I can't imagine how you would make a turn

Just like trucking rockets - it is done with careful planning.

This is REALLY hard stuff, but fascinating from a UI/Human-machine interaction perspective. Shameless plug - we're actively hiring for software engineers and product management around the Teleoperation system. We need more people fully focusing on making this better and working with our drivers on feedback, features, and other enablers for the remote-control experience.

https://jobs.lever.co/starskyrobotics/

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