Nissan's Path to Self-Driving Cars? Humans in Call Centers

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: January 8, 2017 at 1:14:53 PM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Nissan's Path to Self-Driving Cars? Humans in Call Centers
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Nissan’s Path to Self-Driving Cars? Humans in Call Centers
> By ALEX DAVIES
> Jan 5 2017
> <https://www.wired.com/2017/01/nissans-self-driving-teleoperation/>
>
> “This is it!” Maarten Sierhuis says. “I mean, look at this.” He points to a photo of road construction at an 
> intersection in Sunnyvale, California, near Nissan’s Silicon Valley research center, which Sierhuis runs. A line of 
> cones shunts traffic to the left side of the double yellow line. The light is red. A worker holds a “Slow” sign. It’s 
> the sort of seemingly unremarkable situation that can trigger convulsions in the brain of an autonomous vehicle.
>
> “There is so much cognition that you need here,” Sierhuis says. The driver—or the car—has to interpret the placement 
> of the cones and the behavior of the human worker to understand that in this case, it’s OK to drive through a red 
> light on the wrong side of the road. “This is not gonna happen in the next five to ten years.”
>
> It’s a stunning admission, in its way: Nissan’s R&D chief believes the truly driverless car—something many carmakers 
> and tech giants have promised to deliver within five years or fewer—is an unreachable short-term goal. Reality: one; 
> robots: zero. Even a system that could handle 99 percent of driving situations will cause trouble for the company 
> trying to promote, and make money off, the technology. “We will always need the human in the loop,” Sierhuis says.
>
> But Nissan has a solution: a call center with human meatbags ready to take command via remote control.
>
> Call for Help
>
> Now, if you’ve ever telephoned a cable provider, airline, or insurance company for customer service, the idea of a 
> driverless car that relies on headset-wearing cubicle-dwellers hardly seems cutting edge. But Sierhaus says his 
> team’s idea, called “Seamless Autonomous Mobility,” is a simple, scaleable answer to the fiendish problem of making 
> robot drivers do everything humans can.
>
> Other players in the autonomous field aren’t about to announce their tech can’t match the vagaries of the real world, 
> but they have looked into remote human backups—“teleoperation,” in the parlance of the business. “It’s going to be 
> massively important,” says Karl Iagnemma, co-founder and CEO of self-driving startup nuTonomy, which is developing a 
> remote control system. Even cars that can handle just about anything will have the occasional failure, even if that’s 
> being hit by another vehicle. And in that case, you want a human around to decide what to do. It’s like an elevator, 
> Iagnemma says: You don’t need a human operator, but you’ve still got a button to call for help when you need it.
>
> Google’s self-driving car outfit, Waymo, has studied the idea, a spokesperson says. Uber declined to comment on 
> teleoperation, but in 2015 the company filed a patent for a system that would let an autonomous vehicle follow a 
> human-driven car, or get help from a remote operator. Stealthy self-driving car startup Zoox has a patent for a 
> “teleoperation system and method for trajectory modification of autonomous vehicles;” Toyota has one for “remote 
> operation of autonomous vehicle in unexpected environment.”
>
> Now, Nissan’s cubicle-based drivers aren’t emergency backups. If the car hits black ice, it’s in charge of staying on 
> the road. There’s no feasible way to get the human into the loop in time to act. But they can help out when the car 
> encounters conditions it’s unsure how to handle. If a Nissan happened upon the construction scene from Sierhuis’ 
> photo, it would stop and ping its control center. A human operator would look around using the car’s cameras and 
> other sensors and issue new instructions—direct control would pose latency issues. Like: When it’s safe, cross the 
> double yellow and get back to the right side after 20 yards. Or a new instruction set could ensure packages and 
> disabled passengers get dropped off in exactly the right spot, and help assess potentially dangerous situations on 
> the road. But most of all, the teleoperator is there to make sure the car’s doesn’t just shut down when it’s too dumb 
> to know what’s going on.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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