Palo Alto-based robotaxi developer Voyage introduced the Telessist, a pod that allows an autonomous car to be steered from a distance. In a blog post, Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron explained the reasons for remote control of a normally autonomous and self-controlled car under certain circumstances.
A robotaxi, such as Voyage has tested in gated communities in California and Florida, may have a reliability of 99 percent and an operating time of 12 hours a day, but that still means that it has 8 minutes a day where the car is stuck. For this reason – and presumably also at the request of the regulators – Voyage developed a solution with which a Voyage employee can take control of the vehicle from a distance in such cases and safely maneuver it out of a previously uncovered situation.
The Voyage Telessist Pod is a proprietary development and is intended to help accelerate the launch of a commercial autonomous robotics service. If the vehicle gets into a situation where it doesn’t know what to do, it automatically reports to the control center, where an operator can then take control.
To emphasize this again: to go from 99% to 99.99% perfection in robotics could take years. With this pod as a solution, however, Robotaxis can be started in the very near future and thus be used more quickly than many expect.
Thus Voyage joins the ranks of other manufacturers in remote control – tele operation – who, like Phantom.auto, even offer this as a separate business model for self-drive technology developers and robot taxi operators.
This article was also posted in German.
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