Latest news with #safetydriver
Forbes
22-06-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Safety Drivers, Remote Diving And Assist - The Long Tail Of Robotaxis
Remote driving room at Vay, where operators have video game consoles and multiple screens to control ... More cars on Las Vegas streets. With Tesla now planning to launch its pilot robotaxi service in Austin TX this week using safety drivers (Tesla employees in the passenger seat able to supervise and intervene) it's a good time to review the history of the safety driver and all the other technologies being used to help self-driving cars deal with the 'long tail' of problems they must solve to work on our roads. Making a car that can handle every possible road situation with perfect safety is a science fictional goal--nobody is close to knowing how to do it. As such, all robocars call on humans in one way or another, from tasks as simple as cleaning and recharging them to intervening when they make an unsafe move. I'll look at all approaches. Removing the safety driver is the 'big hard step' that changes a vehicle from a testing prototype to a real robotaxi. There are many other steps, but they are baby steps compared to the first time the vehicle goes out without a human overseeing it and able to take control. Safety Driver The very first robocars, which were pretty primitive and failed often, were set up so a human driver could sit in the driver's seat and grab the wheel or press the pedals at any time. That immediately disengaged the self-drive system and the car became manually driven. Many cars also had the 'big red button,' an emergency stop button to be used if grabbing the controls failed. It usually did a hard disconnect of all systems, but in practice most are never used. Outside of closed courses like the DARPA Grand Challenge, all robocar testing from day one has worked this way. All teams hope for the day they can remove that safety driver, as that is the whole goal. It generally works well. With properly behaving safety drivers, test robocars have very good safety records. Except for one giant black mark, when Uber ATG did not manage safety drivers well, and hired one who watched a TV show instead of doing her job, allowing the vehicle, when it failed (as prototypes are expected to do) to strike and kill a pedestrian. In the early years, cars typically had two staff in them, one behind the wheel, and the other, sometimes called the software operator, who monitored the driving soft ware to make sure it was doing the right things. Safety drivers can take the wheel at any time, and are told to do it if they feel anything odd is going on, or sometimes if a risky situation is likely. Especially in early years, if there were children on the street, you always took over. In addition, if the software detected any problems, it would alert the safety driver to take over. Teams (and governments) track interventions. The best teams take every significant intervention and create a simulation scenario to duplicate it, then test what would have happened if the human had not intervened. If the car would have done something bad, like hit something, that becomes a priority problem to fix. Indeed, interventions where it turns out the car would have done fine are often not even counted. Tesla took things to a new level when it released Autopilot and FSD. These had ordinary untrained customers act as supervisor for the vehicle. Google/Waymo had only used trained employees who took a driving safety course. When Tesla did this, there was great skepticism that relying on ordinary customers would be unsafe, but in reality, it worked out. Probably not as safe as ordinary driving, but fairly similar. (Tesla misleadingly claims it is much safer, but this is false.) Safety Driver not in Driver's Seat The normal place is behind the wheel, but some vehicles put a safety operator in another location, such as the passenger's seat. In vehicles designed with no controls (like some shuttles) the employee may have access to just an emergency stop button that commands the vehicle to stop and pull over, or slightly more involved controls. This may also include a video game controller, wheel or gamepad that can be plugged in for manual driving. This is probably not as safe as a person behind the wheel. In the passenger's seat, there is a ong history of human driving instructors training teen drivers by having their own brake pedal and the ability to grab the wheel. I remember my own driving instructor doing that. It works, though it's not clear if it has any purpose other than saying, 'nobody at the wheel.' It's more for PR than safety in vehicles that still have a wheel. Even so, some companies have done it. Russian robotaxi company Yandex used it in Austin and other cities. (Yandex is now non-Russian and called AVRide.) Cruise did their first 'driverless' test with an employee in the passenger seat. Most shuttle companies keep a worker in the shuttle who can hit the emergency stop, and pull out a game controller to drive. Remote Driving It may surprise some to learn there are remotely driven cars on the road today. German company Vay uses this to deliver cars to customers in Las Vegas. Several other companies have built different tools for remote driving. I worked (with compensation) with one such company, to produce a video about some of these approaches. Remote driving is done over public data networks, which of course face interruptions and packet loss and sometimes long latency. As such, it is typically done with a system capable of doing safe basic operations without remote input so that it will, at worst case, just come to a stop if comms get too bad. They are also usually designed to use multiple communications channels to survive problems with any one of them. Remote driving still requires paying a human, so you lose a lot of the cost advantage of a robocar over say, an Uber. However, you don't have to pay a human while the vehicle is sitting waiting. (Uber doesn't pay its drivers for that either, but it effectively builds into the fares for actual driving enough to make drivers tolerate the wait. They can also do other work or read or watch videos between rides.) As such, it can be cheaper to operate a remote driven fleet than a human driven one, and you can do WhistleCar service (car delivery) like Vay. Some companies, like Waymo, make use of low speed remote driving when they are in a situation where they want to move a stuck car or solve a problem the software can't. At these low speeds, you can't do much damage and you can stop on a dime if the connection has an issue. Some delivery robots, such as the early Kiwibot and Coco, were entirely remote driven, because at the speed of sidewalk delivery robots, that's fairy doable without safety concerns. (Indeed, many of these robots are so light that they don't hurt people even if they did hit them.) Tesla has advertised for programmers for some time to work on their remote driving and control systems for both robotaxis and the Optimus robot. Remote Supervision with Driving Remote supervision is effectively taking the safety driver and making them remote. The car mostly drives itself, but the remote supervisor is always watching (usually with an array of screens or possibly a VR headset) and 'grabs the wheel' virtually if they see the need to take over. You need to not need 'instant' takeovers that depend on sub-second reaction times (humans need about 0.7 seconds even when in the car) but is good for most problems which are apparent further in advance when you have the power of a human mind. This approach is not used by any team, at least publicly, though it has been speculated that Tesla is considering it. Remote Monitoring with Stop Most companies have the ability to connect to a car and watch what it's doing, even in full autonomous mode. Companies decline to comment on this, but all of them probably did this when they first dared to send the cars out with no safety driver. It seems like it would be foolish not to. Full time 1:1 remote monitoring doesn't scale very well, but it makes perfect sense in a pilot. In addition, these remote monitors probably have some ability to send a 'kill' command to the vehicle, to ask it to immediately stop and pull over, known as a 'minimum risk condition.' The difference between this and remote supervision is that these remote monitors can't do live steering, just hard stopping. Once stopped, however, they can usually switch into remote assist mode. Remote Assist All companies tend to have a remote assist operations room. There, operators are present who can help vehicles solve problems when they get confused. They usually cannot drive the vehicles directly, only give them strategic advice, like 'Turn around and take this new route' or 'Make the 2nd left' or 'Follow this set of waypoints to get around that obstacle' and most often 'Continue with your current plan, it's OK.' For remote assist to scale, you need to have many more vehicles on the road than remote assist operators, so that each vehicle on average needs active assist just a small fraction of the time. At Starship technologies, a delivery robot company, we set a goal of having 99% autonomy, meaning 100 robots for each operator. This makes the human labor cost effective. It's easier to do for delivery robots which can just stop and wait at any time. A leak from Cruise revealed robots were asking for help about every 5 minutes, which Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt felt was according to plan during their pilot stage. Over time the numbers would get better, but are never expected to get to zero. In most cases, according to Cruise, all the remote operator does is say, 'yes, continue with your plan A.' (In a typical remote assist, the vehicle sees a situation it is not fully sure of and offers multiple plans to the human remote operator, who picks one, or just allows plan A, or rarely crafts a new plan.) Sometimes remote operators will make human-like mistakes, which has been responsible for some strange incidents at Waymo, including one crash when the remote operator approved the vehicle going when it should not have. Some companies do have remote operators watching multiple cars at a time, which humans can do. While this may not scale long term, it's reasonably affordable today and wise during the pilot and growth stages of a robotaxi fleet. Waymo recently added the ability of remote operators to do low-speed remote drive to do things like move cars off the road, or out of trouble situations like blocked streets and emergency vehicles. Rescue Driver When all else fails, most teams can send humans in a car to rescue a vehicle by manually driving it, or in the worst case, towing it. For cars without controls, these teams will have a plug-in video game style controller. There are reports that some cars also have such a controller locked in a compartment that law enforcement can open so they can move cars without controls.
Forbes
22-06-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
Tesla Misses Robotaxi Launch Date, Goes With Safety Drivers
A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes in Austin, Texas, US, on Friday, June 20, ... More 2025.. Photographer: Eli Hartman/Bloomberg Tesla's much-anticipated June 22 'no one in the vehicle' Robotaxi launch in Austin is not ready. Instead, Tesla has announced to its invite-only passengers that it will operate a limited service with Tesla employees on board the vehicle to maintain safety. Tesla will use an approach that was used in 2019 by Russian robotaxi company Yandex, putting the safety driver in the passengers seat rather than the driver's seat. (Yandex's robotaxi was divested from Russian and now is called AVRide.) Having an employee on board, commonly called a safety driver, is the approach that every robocar company has used for testing, including testing of passenger operations. Most companies spend many years (Waymo spent a decade) testing with safety drivers, and once they are ready to take passengers, there are typically some number of years testing in that mode, though the path to removing the safety driver depends primarily on evaluation of the safety case for the vehicle, and less on the presence of passengers. Tesla has put on some other restrictions--rides will be limited to 6am to midnight (the opposite of Cruise's first operations, which were only at night) and riders come from an invite-only list (as was also the case for Waymo, and Cruise and others in their early days.) Rides will be limited to a restricted service area (often mistakenly called a 'geofence') which avoids complex and difficult streets and intersections. Rides will be unavailable in inclement weather, which also can happen with other vehicles, though fairly rarely today. Tesla FSD is known to disable itself if rain obscures some of its cameras--only the front cameras have a rain wiper. The fleet will be small. Waymo started testing with safety drivers in 2009, gave rides to passengers with safety drivers in 2017, and without safety drivers in 2020 in the Phoenix area. Cruise had a much shorter period with passengers and safety drivers. Motional has given rides for years but has never removed the safety driver. Most Chinese companies spent a few years doing it. Giving passengers rides requires good confidence in the safety of the system+safety driver combination, but taking the passengers does not alter how well the vehicle drives, except perhaps around pick-up and drop-off. (While a vehicle is more at liberty to make hard stops with no passengers on board, I am aware of no vehicle which takes advantage of this.) As such we have no information on whether Tesla will need their safety drivers for a month or a several years, or even forever with current hardware. Passenger's Seat vs. Driver's Seat Almost all vehicles use a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla's will be in the passenger seat, in a situation similar to that used by driving instructors for student human drivers. While unconfirmed by Tesla, the employee in the passenger seat can grab the wheel and steer. Because stock Teslas have fully computer controlled brake and acceleration, they might equip the driver with electronic pedals. Some reports have suggested they have a hand controller or other ways to command the vehicle to brake. There is no value to putting the safety driver on the passengers side. It is no safer than being behind the wheel, and believed by most to be less safe because of the unusual geometr20 November 2024, Berlin: A prototype of the Tesla Cybercab stands in a showroom in the Mall of Berlin. Photo: Hannes P. Albert/dpa (Photo by Hannes P Albert/picture alliance via Getty Images)y. It's hard to come up with any reason other than just how it looks. Tesla can state the vehicles have 'nobody in the driver's seat' in order to attempt to impress the public. The driving school system works, so it's not overtly dangerous, but in that case there's an obvious reason for it that's not optics. Tesla Cybercab concept. With only 2 seats and no controls, not very suitable for a safety driver. ... More These are not being used in Tesla's Austin pilot. That said, most robocar prototypes, including Tesla supervised FSD, are reasonably safe with capable safety drivers. A negligent and poorly managed safety driver in an Uber ATG test vehicle killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona when the safety driver completely ignored her job, but otherwise these systems have a good record. The combination of Tesla Autopilot and a supervising driver has a reasonable record. (The record is not nearly as good as some people think Tesla claims. Every quarter, Tesla publishes a deeply misleading report comparing the combination of Tesla Autopilot plus supervisor to the general crash rate, but they report airbag deployments for the Teslas mostly on freeways and compare it without general crash numbers on all roads for general drivers. This makes it seem Autopilot is many times safer than regular drivers when it's actually similar, a serious and deceitful misrepresentation.) As noted, Yandex, now AVRide, has used safety drivers in the passenger seat, and has done so in Austin--also speculated to be mostly for optics, though there are some legal jurisdictions where companies shave made this move because the law requires safety drivers and they hope to convey an aura of not needing them. This has also been the case in China.) When Cruise did their first 'driverless' demo ride in San Francisco, they had an employee in the passengers seat. So Tesla has been ready to run with safety drivers for years. What's tested here isn't the safety of the cars, but all the complexity of handling passengers, including the surprising problems of good PuDo (Pick-up/Drop-off.) Whether Teslas can operate a safe robotaxi with nobody onboard, particularly with their much more limited sensor hardware, remains to be seen. Other Paths To Launch Tesla apparently experimented with different paths to getting out on the road before they are ready to run unsupervised. In particular, vehicles were seen with the passenger seat safety driver, and also being followed by a 'chase car' with two on board. Reports also came of Tesla planning for 'lots of tele-ops' including not just remote assistance (as all services do) but remote supervision including remote driving. We may speculate that Tesla evaluated many different approaches: Because Elon Musk promised 'nobody in the car' and 'unsupervised' in the most recent Tesla earnings call, there was great pressure to produce #1, but the Tesla team must have concluded they could not do that yet, and made the right choice, though #3 is a better choice than #4. They also did not feel up to #2, which is commonly speculated to be what other companies have done on their first launch, later graduating to #1 #5 just looks goofy, I think the optics would not work, and it's also challenging. Remote driving is real and doable--in spite of the latency and connectivity issues of modern data networks--but perhap Tesla could not get it ready in time. All teams use remote assistance operators who do not drive the cars, but can give them advice when they get confused by a situation, and stop and ask for advice. Even Waymo recently added a minor remote driving ability for low-speed 'get the car out off the road' sort of operations. I have recommended this for some time. It is worth noting the contrast beween Cruise's 'night only' launch and Tesla's mostly-daytime one. Cruise selected the night because there is less traffic and complexity. LIDARs see very well at night. Tesla's camera-based system has very different constraints at night and many fear it's inferior then. On the other hand Tesla will operate in some night hours and with more cars and pedestrians on the street. The question for Tesla will be whether the use of safety drivers is a very temporary thing, done just because they weren't quite ready but needed to meet the announced date, or a multi-year program as it has been for most teams. Tesla is famous for not meeting the forecast ship dates for its FSD system, so it's not shocking that this pattern continues. The bigger question is whether they can do it at all. Tesla FSD 13, the version available to Tesla owners, isn't even remotely close to robotaxi ready. If Tesla has made a version which is closer, through extra work, training and severe limitations of the problem space, it's still a big accomplishment. This will be seen in the coming months. Two robocar teams had severe interactions with pedestrians. Both those teams, and one pedestrian, are dead. Tesla knows they must not make mistakes.
BBC News
06-06-2025
- Automotive
- BBC News
China's driverless lorries hope to expand
They rumble down the highway between Beijing and Tianjin port: big lorries, loaded up and fully able to navigate there is a safety driver in the seat, as per government regulations, but these lorries don't require them, and many analysts say it won't take long before they are "safety driver" Huo Kangtian, 32, first takes his hands off the wheel, and lets the lorry drive itself, it is somehow impressive and disconcerting in equal the initial stages of the journey, he is in full control. Then - at a certain point - he hits a few buttons, and the powerful, heavy machine is driving itself, moving at speed along a public road to Tianjin."Of course, I felt a bit scared the first time I drove an autonomous truck," says Mr Huo. "But, after spending a lot of time observing and testing these machines, I think they are actually pretty good and safe."As the lorry veers off the freeway and up a ramp towards the toll gates, the machine is still driving itself. On the other side of the tollgate, Mr Huo again presses a few buttons, and he is back in charge."My job as a safety driver is to act as the last line of defence. For example, in the case of an emergency, I would have to take back control of the vehicle immediately to ensure everyone's safety," he terms of the upsides for a driver, he says that switching to autonomous mode can help combat stress and fatigue, as well as freeing up hands and feet for other tasks. He says it doesn't make his job boring, but rather more asked if he is worried that this technology may one day render his job obsolete, he says he doesn't know too much about the diplomatic answer. Pony AI's fleet of driverless lorries, currently operating on these test routes, is only the start of what is to come, the company's vice-president Li Hengyu tells the BBC."In the future, with driverless operations, our transportation efficiency will definitely be greatly improved," he says. "For example, labour costs will be reduced but, more importantly, we can deal better with harsh environments and long hours driving."What this all boils down to is saving money, says industry expert Yang Ruigang, a technology professor from Shanghai Jiaotong University, who has extensive experience working on driverless technology in both China and the US."Anything that can reduce operating costs is something a company would like to have, so it's fairly easy to justify the investment in having a fully autonomous, driverless truck," he tells the short, he says, the goal is simple: "Reduce the driver cost close to zero." However, significant hurdles remain before lorries will be allowed to drive themselves on roads around the world - not the least of which is public China, self-driving technology suffered a major setback following an accident which killed three university students after their vehicle had been in "auto pilot" Intelligence Unit analyst Chim Lee says the Chinese public still has quite a way to go before it is won over."We know that recent accidents involving passenger cars have caused a huge uproar in China. So, for driverless trucks – even though they tend to be more specific to certain locations for the time being – the public's image of them is going to be absolutely critical for policy makers, and for the market as well, compared to passenger vehicles."Professor Yang agrees that lorry drivers are unlikely to lose their jobs in large numbers just yet."We have to discuss the context. Open environment? Probably not. High speed? Definitely no. But, if it is a low-speed situation, like with the last mile delivery trucks, it's here already." In Eastern China's Anhui Province, hundreds of driverless delivery vans navigate their way through the suburban streets of Hefei - a city with an official population of eight million - as human-driven scooters and cars whizz around was once one of country's poorest cities, but these days its government wants it to be known as a place of the future, prepared to give new technology a Huang, president of autonomous vehicle company, says they discovered a market niche where driverless delivery vans could send parcels from big distribution hubs run by courier companies to local neighbourhood stations. At that point, scooter drivers take over, dropping off the packages to people's front doors."We're allowing couriers to stay within community areas to do pickup and drop off while the autonomous vans handle the repetitive, longer-distance trips. This boosts the entire system's efficiency," he tells has also been talking to other countries, and the company says the quickest uptake of its vehicles will be in Australia later this year, when a supermarket chain will start using their driverless delivery in China, they say they're now running more than 500 vans with road access in over 50 Hefei remains the most from Rino, the city has also now given permission for other driverless delivery van companies to Huang says this is due to a combination of factors."Encouragement came from the government, followed by local experimentation, the gaining of experience, the refinement of regulations and eventually allowing a broad implementation."And you can see them on the roads, changing lanes, indicating before they turn, pulling up at red lights and avoiding other the courier companies, the numbers tell the story. According to Rino's regional director for Anhui Province, Zhang Qichen, deliveries are not only faster, but companies can hire three autonomous electric delivery vans which will run for days without needing a charge for the same cost as one says she has been blown away by the pace of change in her industry and adds that she would not be surprised if heavy, long-haul lorries are routinely driving themselves on roads in certain circumstances within five Yang agrees. "Heavy trucks running along a highway unrestricted, at least five years away."When asked if it could really happen so soon, he responds: "I'm pretty sure it will happen. In fact, I'm confident that it will happen."Industry insiders say that the most immediate applications for driverless lorries – apart from in enclosed industrial zones likes open-cut mines or ports – are probably in remote, harsh terrain with extreme environmental conditions, especially along vast stretches and in a largely straight technical challenges do remain lorries need better cameras to track well ahead into distance to detect hazards much further down the road, in the same way a person can; more tricky roads may also need to have extra sensors placed along the route; other hurdles could include breakdowns in extreme weather or sudden, unexpected dangers emerging amidst very busy top of all this, the technology – when it comes to heavy lorries – is still not cheap. What's more, these vehicles are right now modified old style lorries rather than self-driving vehicles straight off the production wants to be a champion of new tech, but it also has to be careful, not only because of the potential for deadly accidents but also because of how Chinese people might view this shift."This is not just about fulfilling regulations. It is not just about building a public image," says Chim Lee. "But that, over time, the public will see the benefit of this technology, see how it will reduce their costs for buying things, or look at it as a way of imagining that society is improving, rather than viewing this as technology which is potentially destroying, causing car accidents or removing employment opportunities."Professor Yang sees another problem. "We humans can tolerate another human driver making mistakes but our tolerance for autonomous trucks is much much lower. Machines are not supposed to make mistakes. So, we have to make sure that the system is extremely reliable."
