Phantom Auto Wants to Remote Control Autonomous Vehicles

phantom auto self driving featured website

Autonomous Vehicles are the talk of the town these days with most major companies working on self-driving cars. However, while autonomous driving tech might be getting better, there are situations that still confuse the legion of cameras and sensors in autonomous vehicles.

After reports of a self-driving Uber being involved in a fatal accident earlier this week, resulting in the death of a 49-year old woman in Arizona, most US companies have decided to stop testing self-driving cars on public roads. While that is definitely a step in the right direction till the time autonomous cars become better, a Mountain View start-up aims to handle these situations differently.

Phantom Auto Wants to Remote Control Autonomous Vehicles

Phantom Auto is a small start-up based out of a nondescript office in California, where the company performs most of its research and development. This office also houses their remote-drivers — people trained at remotely controlling autonomous vehicles in situations where the self-driving tech fails.

One could argue that situations, where self-driving tech fails, are far and few in between, however, handling those edge-cases is required, either programmatically, or by humans. Phantom Auto chose the latter option.

Basically, a remote-driver will be able to access all the camera data from the autonomous-vehicle they’re handling and will be able to remotely control the car — steer, brake, reverse — the complete package. According to the start-up, there is no visible lag between the operator making an action, and the car mirroring it in the real world, everything happens in real-time — something that is very important when it comes to driving. A lag of even a few milliseconds could cause major accidents on the road.

Phantom Auto’s vision is of a world with numerous call-centers handling gigantic fleets of self-driving cars.

#Tags
comment Comments 0
Leave a Reply