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Comment by myroon5 | Hacker News Reader

Unmanned Remotely-Supervised Truck questions:

I wonder how latency is handled. I wonder how close nearby you'd still want the remote driver since someone across the world would have at least hundreds of milliseconds in delay communicating back and forth

Also, what happens in periods of disconnectivity? It seems like you'd still need some autonomous capability then, although it might be lessened to only needing to pull over?

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For Starsky's engineering / demo purposes - they could limit themselves to a few safe routes with good connectivity. Just use a couple of cell modems from different networks, maybe add a satellite backup to be extra safe and you should be safe enough if the truck can do basic collision avoidance and lane-keeping.

For the future, the good news is that the world is already headed towards a state where roads come with high-speed connectivity infrastructure for vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-x communication. Building reliable, high-speed connectivity to the road makes a lot of sense if you want autonomy to really take off.

This is pretty simple, there’s really no need to give direct steering/throttle control. As an option, it’s good to have, but any real system will default to higher level commands, e.g. drive to this location, pull over, etc.

If they have to have an office in every state that is no problem. Except maybe Alaska there are enough cities that you can open an office in every state very quickly and hire people to live there. In fact work from home might even be useful. I could well see them hiring remote people with a "must live within 100 miles of X small town and have a reliable car". 95% of the time they will work from home, but that other 5% they use their car to drive to wherever the stuck truck is and figure out how to get out of trouble.

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