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0 pointswalrus10669y ago0 comments

That's an option, but London has loads of signal black holes, or the speed is just not good enough. Infinitely worse in the country, if we want autonomous lorries.

I think we'd need a huge infrastructure upgrade to make life easier for autonomous cars. It'd have to be >100 Mb/s mobile data, with extremely good coverage (for the recovery mechanism you mention). Think GPS would need to be replaced too, the signal is way too weak and unreliable. We'd have to embed digital markers/emitters alongside lane markings, traffic lights, signs etc, so they're easier to deal with.

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londons_explore9y ago

No need for high speed - all these issues can be resolved by inching forward or back to get the car back onto the open road. (although obviously high speed is a bonus)

Connectivity you see is from a single mobile phone. A car could have a better antenna, service from all the mobile networks rather than just one, wifi fallback and a backup satellite uplink. If all those fail, you dispatch an engineer to find the car wherever it's stuck and add a solar powered LTE repeater.

If you have a map of the whole service area and know where you started and have a camera looking out the window the whole time, there is no need for GPS really.

EdHominem9y ago

It might even be the sort of thing where you tap the video of the street ahead to tag the bag as passable and the car then slowly drives through it. No remote guidance per-se.

Considering these are car companies doing this, true remote control is not a good idea. The industry response to the car hacks was pathetic. Only Tesla reacted properly. (And probably Google...)

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