When Self-Driving Cars Can’t Help Themselves, Who Takes the Wheel?

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