Recommended reading for a bit of insight into the mechanics of the remote operations. E.g:
"Fleet response and the Waymo Driver primarily communicate through questions and answers. For example, suppose a Waymo AV approaches a construction site with an atypical cone configuration indicating a lane shift or close. In that case, the Waymo Driver might contact a fleet response agent to confirm which lane the cones intend to close."
> For years, companies like Waymo (owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company) and Cruise (owned by General Motors) avoided any mention of the remote assistance they provided their self-driving cars.
> That is just how things work in Silicon Valley. By creating the illusion of complete autonomy...
> While Zoox and other companies have started to reveal how humans intervene to help driverless cars, none of the companies have disclosed how many remote-assistance technicians they employ or how much it all costs. Zoox’s command center holds about three dozen people who oversee what appears to be a small number of driverless cars — two in Foster City and several more in Las Vegas — as well as a fleet of about 200 test cars that each still have a driver behind the steering wheel.
> ...the [Cruise] cars were supported by about 1.5 workers per vehicle
> Waymo and Cruise declined to comment for this story.
I don't know what to say. It's an "illusion of complete autonomy."
The energy of these replies is the same as, "When a parent does a kid's homework, it isn't cheating." The difference is we still have no idea if the child will grow up into an adult, and it's not guaranteed that Waymo will be the one to crack real autonomy, even if it looks that way today. Indeed the longer it takes them the more likely it's not going to be them.
I don't know dude. Simple question: is it fully autonomous? No. If you step inside the vehicle, does it feel that way? Yes. That is nearly the definition of an illusion.
Yes. If you understood how remote assistance works, you'd agree.
There are no autonomous systems that doesn't require some form on human help. The question is can the vehicle do all the driving tasks and when it does fail, it does so gracefully and achieves "minimal risk condition" on its own (because, of course, no one can intervene remotely in real time). Waymo certainly does this.
Nothing will be completely autonomous and no reasonable person expects that. You will anyway need some degree of human intervention in order to achieve robustness. The important thing is that you don't need to take care of driving and spend the time in a more useful way. If you're insisting that everything needs to be fully machine driven and zero human intervention is required, you're effectively moving the goalpost just for your own argument.
There's a world of difference between "driven remotely", which was your claim, and "autonomously operated, with a remote driver available to help, in case of exceptions and emergencies", which is reality.
Just like there's a world of difference between doing your kid's homework, which is viewed as unacceptable, and helping your kid with their homework, which is viewed as good parenting.
> autonomously operated, with a remote driver available to step in, in case of exceptions and emergencies
Listen to yourself...
Anyway, you're getting it. I guess we have to be there and see for ourselves how the parent was involved in the kid's homework, right? If Waymo has nothing to hide, by all means, let in the press to their remote driving center. What are they going to do, steal the source code?
What even is your allegation? That someone has a joystick in a remote center and they're directly controlling the vehicle? And they are doing it all in real-time over cellular networks?
This isn't remotely feasible unless you think Waymo has invented new concepts in physics.
Small point of clarification. It's not feasible to do it safely. It's absolutely feasible to do it well enough to provide the illusion of safety though. There's various companies (Nuro, Vay.io) teledriving vehicles on US public roads right now. Waymo and others simply don't do it because of the obvious safety issues.
None of your links support your claim that "the vehicles are essentially driven remotely". They say that remote operators in rare cases need to provide guidance:
> the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone
Not being completely autonomous 100% of the time doesn't mean it's essentially driven remotely. Driven remotely means driven remotely. Not someone interjecting at one point on a ride, which seems to be what the articles are referring to.
So, pick a lane, you can't have both. Either someone is driving the vehicle, or there are support staff capable of intervening at points. And frankly, I would be horrified to think the second one wasn't happening. That would be moronic.
Edit: Oh, I see you doing a lot of goal post shifting in other comments replying to this. Good luck, driven remotely.
I suppose that if the vehicle will crash or hurt people without human remote operation of some kind, that's driven remotely in essence, no?
If there is more than 1.0 people running the vehicle, that's not good either.
I like Waymo! I just think that they aren't the only ones to figure out autonomous driving, and the crazy thing is that maybe they are specifically not trying to figure out autonomous driving, and that is maybe why only they have found success?
I think you're not really understanding what people are telling you: the vehicles do not depend on remote operators to avoid crashing or hurting people. The remote operators do not drive the cars in real time.
You do realize that your only source for this claim is an article that only mentions Waymo twice: once to say that Waymo had no comment, and once to blatantly lie about the remote operators being some kind of a shocking revelation rather than something they'd been open about for years.
I'm not stupid. I know that there isn't a steering wheel in a building somewhere with a camera feed to a Waymo. The Waymo cars are autonomously driving a lot of the time, in the sense of the car is being steered and going places using computers alone. "Drive the cars" and "real time" are words with specific meanings.
This isn't complicated though. The car phones home for many reasons to have a human being make a decision, using whatever non-steering wheel interface, but an interface nonetheless. That is not autonomous driving. The Waymo is somewhere between a human driver and a people mover at SFO.
It is certainly a scientific triumph that the car can distill the decisions or whatever. We don't know what kind of decisions humans are being asked to make or how frequently. We can make some metrics, like how many people per vehicle or whatever, but I'm not an expert. I'm not going to be able to fart out a metric. I don't really trust a company that needs a bajillion dollars in capital to achieve its goals on its metrics, but of course, I would invest in Waymo - I would invest in all the self driving car companies, because if that's my job and I like making money, that's the best strategy!
So many questions that people can pose, many metrics, they do not get to the core of the meaning of autonomous driving. One of the strongest analogies I've heard is that someone was comparing Waymo's remote driving to Google Maps. Here's the thing - would you be as excited about Google Maps as a technology if there were a human being planning the journeys and sending them to you? Very different science.
I'm not sure why this is so controversial. I am really excited about Waymo and autonomous vehicles. It's more that the reality is closer to tourist attraction than triumph of science.
> the vehicles do not depend on remote operators to avoid crashing or hurting people
Then why do they have any remote operators at all? Don't tell me, to resolve rare problems or whatever, or other speculation. I mean strategically or intellectually, surely, the simple answer is that the cars are not capable of day to day navigation using only computer-made decisions 100% of the time. That isn't controversial. We don't have visibility into specifically what kinds of decisions humans are making, so you shouldn't make such strong absolute statements, but it stands to reason that considering how essential everyone in autonomous vehicles is saying human-in-the-loop operations are, the purpose is pretty important. I would assume that an important purpose is safety! This isn't complicated!
Waymo could clear this all up in an afternoon. Let a journalist visit their remote operations center, and show them a screenshot of the interface. Zoox did! It doesn't take a genius to understand that the illusion and excitement of autonomous driving is so important to their perception of being ahead, Waymo isn't going to do that.
I think the reality is that their remote operations are better than everyone else's, not necessarily the autonomous parts of their driving, and that's why they're operating a taxi service and Cruise isn't anymore.
Maybe the secret to all of this is very effective remote operations. That would also be a really big deal.
> Then why do they have any remote operators at all? Don't tell me, to resolve rare problems or whatever, or other speculation.
I mean, I don't know for sure what exact tasks they do and what exact capabilities they have. If I did know for sure, I wouldn't tell. But given you're doing nothing but speculating, demanding me to not speculate seems unreasonable.
So, let's speculate, but still be more concrete than "resolve rare problems". Let's say that a Waymo can't plot a path it believes is safe, for whatever reason. There could be hundreds of different reasons for that. Maybe it doesn't think there's enough room to get through somewhere. Maybe it can't identify an object. Maybe a sensor stopped returning data. Maybe it's surrounded by an angry mob of luddites looking to torch the car. Maybe the passenger isn't leaving the car at the end of the trip, because they're black-out drunk.
The car can't proceed on its own in these cases. If moving, it'll stop safely, and wait for the human operator to resolve the situation. Maybe they'll annotate the map, or give the car a hint on a possible route, or tell the car to hang tight and it'll be picked up by a service crew (while they order the passenger a replacement car), or route the car with the uncooperative passenger to a {hub,hospital,police station}. In none of these cases is the alternative to a remote operator "to crash or harm people", which you claimed. It's that the car won't move.
The reason the car will stop when it needs help is that a remote human simply can't resolve a hazard in time. Communications aren't reliable enough, the latency is too high, and it's unlikely that a remote operator would have enough context to make a safety critical decision in a split second.
If you knew from the start the cars are not being driven remotely, why claim there's a "remote driver"? If you knew this wasn't realtime remote driving, why claim the remote operation is safety critical?
> I'm not sure why this is so controversial.
Well, you're making an extraordinary statement and providing no evidence for it. Like, literally your only source was about a different company. And when called out on it, you move the goal posts, or pretend that words mean what you want them to mean. That kind of thing is catnip to internet forum posters.
"Fleet response and the Waymo Driver primarily communicate through questions and answers. For example, suppose a Waymo AV approaches a construction site with an atypical cone configuration indicating a lane shift or close. In that case, the Waymo Driver might contact a fleet response agent to confirm which lane the cones intend to close."