Introducing Voyage Telessist
Telessist combines the intelligence of a human driver with our self-driving A.I. to handle edge cases
A Comprehensive Remote Operations Solution
The Voyage approach to delivering on the promise of self-driving cars has always been pragmatic and customer-focused. How can we provide value today — not tomorrow or next year — using the state-of-the-art in self-driving technology? We want to ship an autonomous ride-hailing service to the people who need self-driving cars the most now.
To accomplish this, we’ve built a suite of self-driving technologies. Commander is our self-driving A.I. designed to drive point-to-point at 25MPH. Shield is our supercharged automatic emergency braking system, complementing Commander and adding extra layers of safety. These technologies and others are then integrated into the driverless-ready vehicle provided via our partnership with FCA.
But no matter how good your self-driving car technology is, it will run into novel situations it doesn’t know how to navigate. Even in calmer communities like The Villages, San Jose, there are always new traffic situations for our self-driving cars to deal with. Construction zones, boxed-in vehicles, chaotic parking lots, even turkeys!
And if you do the math, even an idealized self-driving car that can gracefully handle 99% of driving situations completely autonomously is still basically stuck for 8 minutes during a 12-hour day of driving. Even in this ideal scenario, this kind of downtime is simply unacceptable, both from a safety and a customer experience perspective.
One approach to this problem is to wait to ship a product until you’ve perfected self-driving car technology to the point where it can gracefully handle 99.99% of traffic situations, but that might take years, delaying the world-changing impact self-driving cars will have on society. And even then, years later, you’ll still be confronted with the challenge of how to handle the 0.01% of scenarios that self-driving cars can’t handle.
Another, better, approach that lets us deliver on the promise of self-driving cars now rather than later, is to acknowledge that self-driving cars can’t handle every possible traffic situation on their own (yet!) and devise a system that brings human intelligence into the equation to close the gap between what self-driving cars are capable of today and what’s needed to deliver an incredible autonomous ride-hailing service.
We think that’s absolutely the right approach, and that’s why we’re excited to announce Telessist — a uniquely Voyage take on remote assistance for self-driving cars. With Commander, Shield, our FCA partnership, and now Telessist, we are well positioned to deliver truly driverless cars to those who need it most.
Introducing the Telessist Pod
At Voyage, the safety and comfort of our passengers is our highest priority. Since Telessist is a key component of our system, we designed it to the most rigorous safety standards.
While many self-driving companies utilize remote operations software, we’ve taken it a step further by designing and building the Telessist Pod—a custom-built, proprietary workstation for our remote operators—that uses the same automotive-grade components as our vehicles for steering, throttle, and brake. You won’t find any video game steering wheels here. And these components interface with an ASIL-D safety-certified ECU, just like you’d find controlling your car. While Telessist is active, our vehicles send encrypted messages with the current state of the vehicle, perception, and the behavior planner to the Telessist Pod fifty times per second, and the Pod responds in turn with an encrypted message relaying the state of the Pod, which can include remote operator instructions during monitoring, or the current state of steering, throttle, and brake during Remote Driving. The Telessist Pod is quite literally an extension of our vehicles — with all the safety and redundancy you’d expect from an automobile.
At Voyage, Telessist consists of three levels of human/machine collaboration. Monitoring, Discrete Decision Making, and Remote Driving.
Monitoring — Providing World-Class Customer Service
Most of the time, Voyage’s self-driving cars work incredibly well, autonomously handling everyday traffic situations gracefully and delivering passengers to their destination. But we can never take nominal performance for granted. Our passenger’s safety and comfort is our highest priority. Telessist’s role here is to provide the technology necessary for a remote operator to monitor trips via encrypted, high-definition, low-latency video and telemetry from the vehicle.
Telessist Monitoring also helps us get to market faster and more safely. For example, instead of waiting months or years until we’ve perfected autonomous pre-trip safety checks, a Voyage remote operator simply scans the perimeter of the vehicle using the video and object detection feeds, then sends a command to the vehicle to begin the trip.
Monitoring is also vital to our customer’s experience. Imagine you’ve gotten into a self-driving car and a few blocks into the trip you realize you’ve forgotten your wallet. What do you do? With Telessist, you simply say “I forgot something. I need to go back for it.” just like you would with a human driver. The remote operator intervenes, sending the necessary instructions to the vehicle to take you back and then get you back on your way.
Discrete Decision Making — Delivering Human Intelligence On-Demand
Occasionally, the self-driving car’s behavior planning software will encounter a road feature or traffic scenario that is more challenging than usual or even completely novel. In these cases, the vehicle sends the remote operator a request for input — “What should I do here?” The remote operator’s response might be as simple as “proceed”, or “proceed at 5mph”, or it might be more complex, like drawing a path through a tricky construction site on the Telessist Pod’s touchscreen.
When the vehicle receives these responses from the remote operator, it’s important to note that the vehicle is still operating autonomously and is simply using these responses as additional inputs to its behavior and decision-making algorithms. Providing human input during novel traffic situations is also an excellent way to train our autonomy algorithms to handle these situations like a human driver.
At Voyage, we call this collaboration between the vehicle and the remote operator Discrete Decision Making, and we believe it is the most scalable approach to delivering on the promise of self-driving cars sooner rather than later. As our self-driving cars require human input less frequently, a single remote operator can provide Discrete Decision Making responses for more and more trips at the same time.
Remote Driving — A Human In Control
Of course, we expect vehicles to encounter rare situations where Discrete Decision Making isn’t enough to provide our passengers with a seamless, safe experience. Think emergency vehicles, unpredictable crowds of pedestrians, wild-deer boxing the vehicle in, complex three-point turns, and more. In these cases you need human intelligence, and Telessist Remote Drive enables a remote operator to temporarily take over control of the vehicle and safely remote-drive it at low speed from the Telessist Pod.
When a remote operator is remotely driving a vehicle using Telessist Remote Drive, the messages from the Telessist Pod’s ECU are sent, encrypted, directly to the self-driving car fifty times each second, while our video system delivers a high-definition 360-degree view from the vehicle thirty times each second at latencies below 100 milliseconds, also encrypted. As I mentioned above, the Telessist Pod is quite literally an extension of our self-driving cars, complete with ECUs at both ends, automotive-grade components, encrypted CAN messages, 5x redundant LTE networking, and more.
Remote Drive Assist — No Single Point Of Failure
While we do everything we can to ensure the reliability and operability of the Telessist stack — from the automotive-grade Telessist Pod hardware to redundant LTE networks — things will still go wrong. If a remote operator is remotely driving a vehicle with one of our passengers and suddenly loses video or control signal due to a network failure, what then? Our commitment to the safety of our passengers requires that there are no single points of failure, and that includes when vehicles are being controlled by a remote operator. That’s where Remote Drive Assist comes in. Remote Drive Assist is a standalone, redundant safety system developed at Voyage that has access to real-time data from all of the vehicle’s sensors and systems. If Remote Drive Assist detects there’s any chance of a dangerous situation during remote operation of the vehicle, it immediately brings the vehicle to a safe stop. If the vehicle exceeds safe remote operating speed, Remote Drive Assist will slow it down.
At Voyage, we have a single-minded, obsessive focus on one goal — delivering on the promise of self-driving cars to those who need it most. We’ve attacked this problem with a ruthlessly pragmatic approach from day one. Find underserved customers in calmer communities that makes an autonomous ride-hailing service tractable today, not tomorrow. Telessist is our latest answer to the question “How do we deliver an incredible autonomous ride-hailing service to our customers in months — not years — and how do we scale to millions of passengers in the next five years?”
If this high-leverage, pragmatic, product-first approach to delivering on the promise of self-driving cars appeals to you, and you’re a talented software engineer who likes to ship early and often, we’d love to hear from you!
