Connect(x) Coverage
The autonomous vehicle space has a big task ahead of it. It must not only design a unique, safe personal transportation option, but it must convince people to trust it with their lives. It won’t happen without building trust from users, Anand Nandakumar, Founder and CEO, Halo, told Rikin Thakker, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer, WIA, during this week’s Connectivity Expo, held in Orlando. “That’s a lot of trust that we put in a vehicle. How do we transition the general public into a future where every car is going to be autonomous?” Nandakumar said. “We have to bridge our way to get there. We have to build that trust.”
Halo is set to begin a ride-hailing service where an electric car is dispatched to the consumer without a driver to their doorstep. It appears to be totally autonomous, but Halo skilled professional pilots, who can see what the car is seeing in real time, are driving the car from mission control, several miles away. The car is driven to the destination, where it waits to be summoned for the next ride.
“We don’t coexist with driverless cars today,” Nandakumar said. “We only see a driver in the driver’s seat. That’s what we’re used to. If that’s the case, we just can’t overnight move to autonomous driverless cars.”
The transition from the ride hailing service to fully autonomous cars will take some convincing, given the amount of people who currently would not get into one, according to Nandkumar. “We will slowly roll out autonomy with updates to the vehicle to make it easier for us to transition humanity toward a driverless, fully autonomous car.”
T-Mobile’s 5G network is critical to remote drivers being able to pilot the Halo electric car. A very strong bond must be formed between the car and the network so it can monitor the car, and the latency must be reduced to the point where it is very realistic to the remote pilot. There can be no freeze frames in the video stream that the remote pilot is watching.
Halo needs to push the boundaries to actually roll out a mass fleet of these cars, according to Nandakumar, and it has a plan for rolling its ride hailing service out all over the nation, which may test the limits of the 5G network. “We think driverless cars are a killer application for mainstream 5G,” Nandakumar said. “That’s where there are going to be groundbreaking initiatives and groundbreaking new products on the network side to expand this and make it more mainstream.”
Autonomous vehicles will follow the same arc as mass production, where manufacturers went from totally manual process to speeding industrial robotics, according to Nandakumar. By 2026, Halo plans to scale its product globally in many different countries, operating a fleet of cars delivering people and slowly transitioning humanity into autonomous electric vehicles.
“We would love to see networks with more small cells,” he said. “The wireless infrastructure industry should also really think about pushing the edge network, so people like us can come in and play in that environment where low latency is going to be very critical.”
By J. Sharpe Smith Inside Towers Technology Editor
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