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.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-wa...
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/cruise-driverless-c...
https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1542625065144946688
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.