Imagine a car simulation in which someone in a low cost country sees what the driver in the car would see, including the surroundings (side mirrors, behind them, etc). She can look around, same way as someone in the car and that person can drive. And her actions gets sent to the car half way across the world.
Kind of like a Mechanical Turk for driving. Is this crazy?
Self-driving cars are classified into 6 SAE levels, 0-5. 5 is full autonomy, 4 is autonomy in limited conditions, 3 is self driving but there has to be a driver ready to take over.
Getting to 5 is really hard. It could take decades, because there are a zillion edge cases. But what if you could turn cars loose at the "can handle 95% of driving" level and then let it call a human to give guidance when the car is nervous or confused?
Obviously, the phone-a-friend approach can't work for things requiring quick action. But if you bias the car to just stop safely and wait for orders, I think it's doable. E.g., the car comes upon an accident where the lanes in one direction are blocked. Humans know to go around the accident by slowly and carefully sharing the remainder of the road. So perhaps the car stops before the obstruction and asks for help. A human looks at it and draws in the path it should follow to get back to normal road.
So I think remote "robot coaches" could plug the gap between levels 4 and 5. And maybe some of the level 3 gap, too. And from what I hear of the Waymo operation in Arizona, I suspect Google's doing something akin to this.
I think the right thing to do is to invert the bias. If the car isn't sure it understands what's going on and that it's safe to proceed, it should stop. In which case, development becomes a long series of teaching about rarer and rarer circumstances, so it needs less and less human input to understand the road.
I'm sure Tesla has been keeping that in mind as their self-driving technology progresses.
For whatever purpose they fly Predators manually.
- pilots still need to know how to land an aircraft themselves, so they may as well practice it (it's not like they are driving to work and can read Facebook)
- to prevent interference with the radio signals used for the ILS, ground aircraft are routed away from transmitters which reduces capacity of the airport when it has to be used
- the system isn't perfect, so from a safety perspective it's safer to use it as guidance rather than rely on it
Autoland is a requirement during severe weather conditions - when a pilot cannot obtain enough visual information to perform the landing themselves.
2) Autoland is never a requirement — usually, deciding to try an autoland landing or diverting to an alternate airport is the pilot’s game time decision.
3) Not “almost all” commercial aircraft have autoland capability. It requires specific certifications for the pilot and crew as well as the aircraft itself.
The 737NG, 737 MAX, 747, 757, 767, 777, 787 and every Airbus model have autoland. It's a requirement to be able to use autoland in order to be certified as a pilot for a particular type. Garmin even has a system for newer GA planes so they can autoland nowadays. Autoland is used rarely because its more work for the pilots to enable and they all think they can do a softer landing, but in very low-vis weather conditions its used pretty often.
BAE where doing tests of this lading passenger jets on wet and slippery runways for example
* The remote driver is seeing things 10s-100s of milliseconds after they've happened * And somehow we're getting all of the data coming out of sensors on the car at high enough fidelity over the air * And we're not having connectivity blips that would result in loss of remote control for seconds
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/exclusive-mass-layoffs-rep...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...
The former could annoy you, the latter could kill your entire extended family.
Currently, everyone is vaporware. Including Phantom.