AV industry needs teleoperation laws

Vehicle teleoperation has never been so … legal.

Teleoperation enables a human operator to control vehicles from far away. In July, Florida became the sixth state to explicitly allow autonomous vehicle companies to use remote operators. The legislation means that the next time you're driving down a Florida road, there's a chance the car behind you won't have a driver in it. At all.

A number of states and countries have either legalized teleoperation or mandated it. Outside the U.S., laws mandating teleoperation exist in Ontario, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands and England. In the U.S., Arizona, California, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and now Florida have all mandated teleoperation. Other states such as Georgia, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina and Tennessee have laws allowing the use of teleoperation, although they do not mandate it specifically.

Florida's legalization of teleoperation is a show of maturity on behalf of both legislators and the AV industry, and we expect to see more jurisdictions adopting similar measures going forward. Legislation has been lagging AV technology, but it's starting to catch up.

The United States is where most AV technology is being developed and where most public road tests are being conducted. As such, the U.S. has been paving the way in AV legislation for the rest of the world. As AV technology started to mature, one of the challenges the industry faced was a regulatory one: the need to legalize testing on public roads. This was an essential milestone in the development of this new technology. Industry groups, governors and lawmakers worked together to craft new regulations. The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a database of such legislation and regulations to allow us to chart its progress.

When the first rules aimed at legalizing AVs on public roads were drafted, they were the product of balancing acts between the need to support AV innovation and the need to protect the safety of road users. The initial legal solution that the majority of states adopted was to require a human safety driver in the AV during operation on public roads. When these laws were enacted, some dating as far back as 2011, they were considered temporary measures. Rapidly developing AV technology gave the impression that fully autonomous vehicles were just around the corner, and both legislators and companies were optimistic that AV technology would soon be proved safe enough to make the safety-driver requirement obsolete.

Once AVs could be legally tested on public roads, companies started running trials and gathering data. However, after a few years and billions of dollars, the industry's initial optimism faded into a surprising realization at the end of 2018: The future of fully autonomous cars was still years away.

The main challenges that AV technology are still unable to solve are the "edge cases": construction, unusual obstacles, poor weather conditions, police officers directing traffic, etc. While human drivers tackle edge cases with relative ease, AV technology cannot yet provide a comprehensive solution to overcome these nuanced and complex situations.

This sentiment was echoed in industry-leader statements such as that of Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Hackett in April at the Detroit Economic Club: "We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles."

Meanwhile, the AV industry continues to make progress. It is set to deploy new models with technology that will still require a human to negotiate edge cases. It is now also becoming clear that the safety-driver requirement that may have worked well for the initial testing phase is no longer relevant, especially for any commercial deployment.

This is what makes the Florida legislation so relevant. Now that both legislators and the AV industry understand that full autonomy isn't as imminent as once thought, we need to find alternative solutions. That's where teleoperation comes in.

When the AV encounters an edge case it cannot negotiate, it stops and calls for a remote human operator to assist. Over a reliable network connection (based on a network bonding solution that utilizes several independent cellular connections and fuses them into one reliable connection), the operator receives all relevant information from the vehicle cameras and sensors and decides how to best resolve the edge case for the vehicle.

This can involve indirect control, such as selecting or drawing a path for the AV to execute, or direct control, such as driving the vehicle using the steering wheel and pedals at the teleoperation station.

Teleoperation combines the safety of human intervention with the scalability required for commercial deployment. One teleoperator can safely solve situations for many AVs, one after the other, a process significantly more economical than having a safety driver in each vehicle. Given the limitations of current AV technology, teleoperation has become the only viable way to enable commercial deployment of AV services.

The Florida legislation is the most recent but clearly not the last in a growing trend of jurisdictions adopting teleoperation. These laws are facilitating the future of mobility by providing a legal framework that is safe and commercially viable.