[Noumenon72]

What is their claim about latency here?

> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.

That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?

[gruez]

>That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?

Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

[AlotOfReading]

Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.

[xnx]

They had to throw something in about speed even though the gating factor is the RA's ability to interpret the situation and decide a course of action.

I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.

[fragmede]

They could get rid of that latency by hiring Americans.

[fooker]

Any American within a good distance of a large city to mitigate latency issues can make about 4-5x driving for Uber or delivering food.

And latency to small towns in the middle of nowhere is not significantly better than latency to Philippines.

You can expect something in the ballpark of 70ms in both cases.

[jeffbee]

People don't like to work in the middle of the night.

[meatmanek]

You can stream video with milliseconds of latency, provided you have enough bandwidth for the video stream. Videoconferencing and cloud gaming both work on this principle.

That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.

[Retric]

They don’t do human in the loop at highway speeds.

Further the cars need to safely stop in an emergency without human intervention. There’s no way for the car to first notice a problem, then send a message to a call center which then routes to a human, and for that human to understand the situation, all fast enough to avoid a collision. Even 50ms is significant here let alone several seconds.

[gruez]

>That said, I would argue that their focus on one-way latency is misinformation meant to make the picture look rosier than it actually is. Round-trip latency is what matters here -- the video feed needs to get to the assistant, then the assistant needs to react, then their response needs to get back to the car. If one-way latency is 250ms, then round-trip latency would presumably be 500ms, which is a very long time in the context of driving. At highway speeds, you'd travel ~44 feet / 13 meters in that time.

Right, which is why the blog post is titled "Advice, not control ..." and goes to explain that they're not relying on the "remote assistance" people to make split second judgements.