When Self-Driving Cars Can’t Help Themselves, Who Takes the Wheel?<br />While major technology and car companies are teaching cars to drive themselves, Phantom Auto is working on remote control systems, often referred to as teleoperation,<br />that many see as a necessary safety feature for the autonomous cars of the future.<br />Nissan, one of the first automakers to publicly address situations in which a self-driving car may be flummoxed<br />by its surroundings, has proposed using a system called Seamless Autonomous Mobility, or S. A.M.<br />It’s partly based on the remote control technology that NASA uses to operate rovers on Mars.<br />The Waymo approach ensures that latency — a delay in the communications traffic — doesn’t compromise<br />the car’s driving behavior by leaving a remote operator unable to react in real time.<br />And that future is closer than you might think: California will allow companies to test autonomous vehicles<br />without a safety driver — as long as the car can be operated remotely — starting next month.<br />If a Waymo vehicle becomes confused — by, say, a new set of cones or a police barricade<br />in the road — it can request confirmation from a remote human specialist.<br />Developers of self-driving cars from Nissan to Zoox say such technology may be needed to<br />address “edge cases” — the unique situations that software programs can’t anticipate.<br />Waymo, the self-driving vehicle unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is testing autonomous taxis — but with an observer in the back seat.
