Smooth teleoperator: The rise of the remote controller | Hacker News Reader

Smooth teleoperator: The rise of the remote controller

venturebeat.com

19 pointsthedrbrian11 comments

Our company [1] works with a large number of autonomous robotics companies of varying scales, tasks, and morphologies. Teleoperation is a regular part of the workflow for many.

It is an exceptionally good time to be building specialized hardware & autonomy systems for a task and then providing that system as a service to customers. This article went into a few examples, but by our count there are ~800-1000 companies currently operating with this model.

Happy to answer any questions about how people doing this deal with the myriad of issues (both business and technological). It’s a fairly new thing, but extremely well suited to the future.

[1] https://formant.io

Thank you.

One of the possibilities of teleoperation, labor arbitrage to low-cost countries, and a response by regulators, to protect the local labor force and only allow them to run remotely operated jobs.

Does it still makes ecojomic sense to use teleoperation extensively in this case ? Are there any new efficiencies besides in-country wage differences ? Could this really become a big job category in the future ?

It's important to keep in mind that teleoperation is always paired with an (initially quite immature) autonomy system. Just as blakesterz called out in the sibling comment, the strategy here is to start with high volume of teleoperation and then scale up autonomy over time, essentially increasing the productive output of one teleoperator.

We see companies all across the board, from 1:1 (or even multiple people always watching at once) to over 1:100 in operator / robot ratio.

In practical terms, this usually takes the form of operators being notified of situations that they have to resolve, and switching between systems frequently.

Once you're above a certain level of productivity, the cost of the teleoperator is negligible... so it doesn't really matter where you locate the labor as long as you have a reasonable path to reaching a high ratio using autonomy.

Fortunately, getting robots out in the world lets you gather the data needed to improve your autonomy system, and so it's worth it to get out there early as long as it's safe.

When an interviewer pressed Postmates VP Ali Kashani last year on whether the company’s use of teleoperation technology was an “admission” that AI alone can’t solve all of the challenges its robots encounter on sidewalks, Kashani swiftly retorted: “That’s a strategy, not an admission.”

That's a smooth answer! I didn't know what 'teleoperation' meant, it just means those bots are being operated remotely, at least partially. Somehow I've not seen that term before.

"Operators can use the software to monitor fleets or draw a path for a robot to follow. When necessary, they can even take over and control the vehicle directly."

The reality, regarding jobs, about all of this: jobs will be outsourced to countries with cheaper labor.

It's already happening: kiwibots, which runs teleoperated delivery robots, is using drivers from Colombia, for $2/hour.

That's awesome! You can do it from home, too.

Legislation requiring companies to pay remote workers at least the minimum wage of the location the remotely operated machine is located in seems like a good idea.

When operating machines in California workers should be paid the Californian minimum wage. Companies that refuse should be denied the opportunity to operate in California.

I'd be interested in how you'd propose to make that work when operators may be jumping in to a robot anywhere on the planet from one minute to the next. Require logging and reporting on when remote labor was used to support the tax jurisdiction you're operating in? It seems that would also require reporting to every locality you operate robots in individually, which is currently not necessary.

Would you propose to use the same method for other remote services such as call center support?

That would be a problem for these companies to figure.

> It seems that would also require reporting to every locality you operate robots in individually

Yes, exactly. That should be required. Also your call center idea is pretty good too, though I think not quite as clear cut as having remote laborers use robotic bodies to circumvent minimum wage laws.

The call center example is actually more relevant than you might imagine. The jobs often look very similar to remote tech support in practice. In fact, some companies running call centers have begun offering remote support to autonomous systems as an expansion of their market.

This type of labor falls pretty squarely in the "information work" category, and often (as in your Kiwi example) looks mostly like operators performing a high-level task like specifying waypoints on a map.

It doesn't to me.

This sounds like saying someone in India who wrote code for a website being accessed from California needs to be paid CA minimum wage.

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