
Starsky Robotics Becomes First Uncrewed Truck to Hit 55 MPH - DanFeldman
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/28520/starsky-robotics-becomes-first-unmanned-truck-to-hit-55-mph
======
mdorazio
For those unaware, this part is key:

"Unlike some other "driverless" truck companies, Starsky isn't building a
completely autonomous solution. Instead, it uses teleoperation to remotely
drive the truck between freight depots and the freeway where a highway-only
automated driving system takes over."

Starsky is doing really impressive work, but the trucks aren't designed to be
100% autonomous 100% of the time. I think this is a great solution to the
last-mile problem for freight logistics, however.

~~~
Robotbeat
I was wondering when teleoperation was going to be taken seriously to plug the
gaps in full autonomy.

If Starsky is successful, I suspect this will be used a lot of places. For
instance:

Image vision detects a police officer. Maybe a police officer doing hand
signals. Immediately switches to teleop (with last several seconds replayed)
if in a safe situation to do so. Corner case: solved.

~~~
MegaButts
Pretty much all of the self-driving car companies use remote assistance to
help out with difficult cases and have been for years. The other companies
just realize it's another tool in the arsenal with its own limitations,
whereas Starsky seems to push hard on it being the magic sauce.

The problem with remote assistance is it's only useful for static scenarios,
like getting a vehicle unstuck. It can't help you make a left turn due to lag
(cellular networks are not reliable for real-time safety critical systems),
but it can tell you whether or not you can proceed after stopping for a paper
bag in the middle of the road.

------
DanFeldman
Starsky engineer here. We spent a few days getting all of our emergency
procedures in place and testing all fail-safe aspects of our system on the
road in preparation of the run. We've done unmanned runs before (also in
Florida), but at much lower speed and with a vastly less sophisticated
emergency system.

Happy to answer any questions

~~~
bedosh
Are you worried about (cargo-)theft? The way I imagine it: \- (assumption) it
takes less criminal energy to steal something when no human observer is around
\- lonely road in the middle of nowhere \- well known driving behaviour means
it is easy to stop (overtake, then slow down to a halt?) \- enable mobile
phone jammer (optional) \- take cargo

~~~
DanFeldman
Not sure how we're thinking about this now internally. If there was such a
technologically adept actor targeting us I'd be more worried personally about
safety than the cargo itself.

~~~
DrScump
It's probably best not to comment about it anyway, except to make vague
mumblings about Higgs-Field-detailed sensors and death rays.

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bluescrn
Remote truck driving sounds like a scary job, driving a heavy vehicle capable
of causing major fatal accidents, via tech that could lag or drop out at any
time, with none of the tactile feedback that you normally get from a vehicle?

What does the interface look like? 2D screens (no depth perception), or
something more VR-like with stereoscopic vision and head tracking?

~~~
onion2k
You can see a version (maybe old) of the UI in this video -
[https://youtu.be/rFEmj6Wks7c](https://youtu.be/rFEmj6Wks7c)

~~~
DanFeldman
There are updated videos of our UI floating around the internet. This one is
pretty recent:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HtOhbMSv5c&amp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HtOhbMSv5c&amp)

Excuse the mood lighting, we're experimenting with eye-strain on the remote
drivers.

~~~
eldavido
Starsky engineer here. We are actively hiring developers to work on this
system (we call it "tele-operation" internally).

I'm currently (this afternoon) working on driving the latency of the
communication in this system down even further by stripping it down to bare
socket programming. We'd love to meet anyone who's done RTS games, first-
person shooters, or anything else that involves keeping moderate amounts of
state synchronized over medium-latency networks. :)

~~~
ncallaway
I've done a small amount, but mostly as hobbyist stuff.

If you haven't looked at it already, Glen Fiedler has a great series on game
networking on his Gaffer on Games blogs that covers a lot of those topics in
ways that were really helpful for my implementations.
[https://gafferongames.com/tags/networking/](https://gafferongames.com/tags/networking/)

It looks like his site is down, but it's also available on the internet
archive:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190405204744/https://gafferong...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190405204744/https://gafferongames.com/tags/networking/).
It's all fairly high-level stuff, and I'm sure it mostly just retreads ground
that you're familiar with, but I thought the explanations were all super-clear
and helped crystallize a lot of thoughts that I already had but hadn't focused
that well.

------
flexer2
One thing I like about their business model is that it isn't just the
autonomous/teleoperation tech, but also that they're a full-service trucking
company. That kind of integration should hopefully allow them to provide the
same service as a normal trucking company but with much lower cost.

Even if the company just serves long-haul routes from depots in less congested
areas very close to freeway on-ramps, that's still a huge market, and the
labor cost savings would likely be huge if humans are just driving from the
depot to the freeway.

Related, I was thinking about the idea of teleoperation for drone deliveries
recently as well. The same kind of "last mile" problem exists for landing
cargo from a drone. Have the drone fly from the warehouse to the customer
location, and then pass it over to someone sitting in their house with a
joystick to control landing and delivery of the cargo. Once the delivery is
complete and the drone is airborne again, have it fly autonomously back to the
depot. Pay people $1/landing or something like that.

The last mile is going to be the hardest part of any of these autonomous
businesses. The hybrid teleoperation model where the computer handles the
relatively easy (but mundane) parts makes total sense.

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userbinator
Personally, I'm most worried that this will reduce the attention or personal
responsibility that a driver would normally have --- if you're actually in the
vehicle, anything that goes wrong has a very real chance of injuring you,
possibly fatally; whereas if you're safely sitting far away, then you may feel
like nothing can happen to you even if your vehicle gets into a horrible crash
(you may get arrested, but there's no immediate risk of death from doing
anything wrong.) That lack of subconscious fear for your own life is IMHO not
at all a good thing, because I think it's really that --- and not the law ---
that keeps most drivers on the road from being dangerous and compels them to
attention.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
I personally don't like crashing my RC car or quadcopters, either- it isn't
something I like to do. I'm also a new driver, and I've had several near
misses. One of the possibilities with tele-op is that someone entirely
different can take over if someone else falls asleep, messes up, or does
something belligerent. Technology is a double-edged sword.

~~~
userbinator
_is that someone entirely different can take over_

That doesn't solve the "hand-over" problem --- which I already mentioned in
another comment here --- if you were suddenly given control of a moving car
headed in a dangerous direction, how long would it take to assess the
situation enough to make a decision on what to do? You have to be already
paying attention to react in reasonable amount of time.

Of course there is the "workaround" of having multiple (alert) drivers per
vehicle, but that seems more trouble than it's worth just to avoid putting a
single driver in a vehicle. (In addition, as all the stories about self-
driving-car accidents have shown, even when people are in the vehicle itself,
they don't tend to pay as much attention if they already have the
"someone/thing else is driving" notion anyway.)

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dmos62
Maneuvering a truck in an urban area looks really hard for a by-stander. The
proposition here is to do it with remote control, that sounds even harder. On
second thought, it might be an easily solvable problem with the proper sensors
and UI.

~~~
penagwin
That's exactly what I was thinking, I can't imagine driving a semi on a busy
road, let alone doing so remotely.

Then again based on those pictures the operates have far better views around
their truck then you would sitting in it.

But then again the UX of looking around vs a computer screen has to be another
hurtle.

~~~
dmos62
I've seen a video of experimental tech where a military humvee had a 360 array
of cameras, whose feeds were collaged into a live 3rd person perspective feed.
I think the humvee also had all its windows boarded up. The idea was for the
crew not to use in-vehicle perspectives at all. I could see that working when
you have to do tricky slow speed maneuvering. A top down view, where you could
also see projections of how the truck would shift given different steering
angles.

~~~
kalleboo
> _360 array of cameras, whose feeds were collaged into a live 3rd person
> perspective feed_

The parking cameras on high-end cars have already evolved from a simple top-
down view (which is now an option even on entry-level cars) to a 3rd person
perspective 3D view, complete with a little 3D model of the car
[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FyjVphbHAL0/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FyjVphbHAL0/maxresdefault.jpg)

------
pugworthy
I'm guessing this is being driven on a closed off express lane, but the fact
that the video image shows signs facing the "wrong way" makes it look like the
truck is going the wrong way on the highway.

------
apo
> Unlike some other "driverless" truck companies, Starsky isn't building a
> completely autonomous solution. Instead, it uses teleoperation to remotely
> drive the truck between freight depots and the freeway where a highway-only
> automated driving system takes over. ...

The video hints at "lane keeping." How much automation is involved?

However much it is, it's not hard to imagine a smooth transition between
remote operation and autonomous driving over time. Each iteration would
eliminate one more thing the driver needs to be concerned with until nothing
is left.

------
Traster
What I don't understand about this solution is that if you have full
automation on the highways then what you need isn't really remote control for
the rest, all you need is to get regulation change so that drivers aren't
considered to be driving during autonomous periods. In most of Europe this
would mean you could have a driver in the vehicle but they could use the long
periods of automated highway driving as their rest time meaning they can
travel almost non-stop, as opposed to how they operate at the moment where
they are forced to pull over for several hours a day.

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dwighttk
>Because of that focus we've been able to develop a highly reliable SAE Level
2 system and a highly reliable teleoperation and supervision system, and it
turns out that's all you need.

level 2!

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i_am_proteus
Interesting to see the ubiquitous dual antennas on the side mirrors preserved
here--- ostensibly no longer for CB, but for tele-operation.

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woodandsteel
It seems to me there are two smart ways to go about this. One is Startsky's
path of starting their own company. The other is a company like Tesla teaming
up with one or more existing big trucking companies, which would be motivated
to do that to lower costs and overcome their huge problems hiring drivers.

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lallysingh
So how do you gas it up? Full service stations are rare outside of NJ these
days.

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xwdv
The cybersecurity implications here are chilling, it’s only a matter of time
before a hacker takes over a truck and drives it into a crowd from a remote
location. Where there is a shell, there is a way.

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jchallis
An amazing accomplishment. Your entire team should be justifiably proud.

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sys_64738
Does it have a Hutch at the back?

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ricardobeat
One would assume Tesla has tested their semi somewhere?

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gazzik
Amazing accomplishment, well done!

