I’d be the first on the team to code in a “clean hood” routine where the vehicle rapidly accelerates in a safe area and then slams on the brakes to yeet the cone off the hood.
I still don’t understand why there isn’t a manual override with a staff member sitting in a racing sim 24x7 who can “jack in” to any deployed vehicle and take over. They’d be able to do the same thing.
Waymo and Cruise both have remote operators who can remotely unstuck cars.
AFAIK they can’t drive the cars directly, but the they can give override commands, reset software, or make the car follow a manually set path. They probably can’t make it reverse at full tilt though ;)
Directly driving cars is considered very sketchy as you could have network latency spikes or dropouts at any time.
That said, it’s possible the cone still prevents the car from moving at all because either:
a. It creates a large enough sensor blockage to be deemed ‘unsafe’ for any movement
Or b. The car thinks its been in a collision, or thinks it can’t move without ‘colliding’ with the cone further.
> I still don’t understand why there isn’t a manual override with a staff member sitting in a racing sim 24x7 who can “jack in” to any deployed vehicle and take over.
Maybe it's harder for a car company to disclaim responsibility for accidents that do occur, if there is always the potential for a human driver to take over. Suddenly they can't say "well we couldn't have prevented this", because they now could have.
a manual override is the easiest solution here. we pilot drones that drop bombs in the middle east from air conditioned containers in arizona, there is no reason we can't do the same for these stuck vehicles after X time period has elapsed.
It’s actually much easier to remotely pilot a drone than a car for a few reasons:
- Cars operate very close to obstacles, at any given time, you are only seconds from hitting something. This means you need extremely high reliability and low latency. Planes have a lot more time to recover from communication loss before hitting the ground.
- Planes can circle in the air safely if they lose communications. Cars have to stop and then block traffic.
- In the air there are no buildings, mountains, tunnels, etc to block signal.
- The military has resources to set up and fully control its own communications system. Rolling out such a system on all public roads would be a huge undertaking. Existing networks (LTE) are not designed for remote vehicle operation.
So basically, while you CAN drive a car over LTE, there are a ton of edge cases that make it pretty unsafe. As mentioned above, these companies do have remote operators to unstuck cars, but they don’t drive them directly.
Hopefully also the first on the team to go to jail for coding clearly unsafe dangerous behaviors into 3 ton autonomous robots. What the hell?
I think software engineers are wholly unprepared and uneducated to be designing and building these things. This is a domain where the rules and responsibilities should be very well defined, and close to what you see in other "hard" engineering domains.
I still don’t understand why there isn’t a manual override with a staff member sitting in a racing sim 24x7 who can “jack in” to any deployed vehicle and take over. They’d be able to do the same thing.