The guy following it (and also remote "pilots") are/were part of a training program for the eventual deployment of self driving delivery robots. The startup is from Tallinn, Estonia, with offices in several locations

The same guy for four months?

I sense the plot for a tech drama, when he gets too attached but the project is axed...

I saw multiple people in both Redwood City and Palo Alto.

same thing in san jose, they eventually did go fully autonomous this summer though. those dumb robots used to get stuck on curbs all the time.

Yeah I don't think we have had any truly autonomous land vehicles released into the wild yet. Any company that claims to do it had better provide proof.

That is an excellent point. Beyond a very few fixed route systems, there's not much. Anyone know of anything?

Fifteen years ago I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. At the time, I thought about commercial applications. Starting at the slow-speed end looked better from a safety perspective. Most problems below 25MPH can be dealt with by slamming on the brakes.

The first area to look at was rental car return. When you're done with the rental car, you get out at the terminal, and it drives itself, slowly, back to rental car turn-in. When you order a rental car at the airport, it drives itself slowly to the terminal and picks you up at the curb. Then you drive away manually.

The numbers didn't look good. You're competing with minimum wage labor, and the hardware costs too much. That's still the case. Also, back then, everybody was so paranoid about airport security that getting this past TSA would be really hard.

Second area was shuttle buses. Parking lots, campuses, amusement parks - all slow speed applications. Local Motors and Navya are doing this. Navya had a backup driver on their Las Vegas shuttle bus for the first year or so. Not clear if they finally got rid of them. They have several test installations, but it's not clear that they have trustworthy real autonomy. They have a demo route in Switzerland, but "VBSH has in addition hired and trained three attendants who are always also on board the bus during trips." Their CEO was just fired for underperforming.[1] Local Motors does demos, but still seems to be searching for a serious customer. Baidu has a self-driving bus program, and they've built about a hundred of them. Not clear if they need a "safety driver".

It's rather disappointing that even the slow speed shuttle buses on fixed routes are not yet really autonomous.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/19/navya-ceo-fired-after-big...

What definition of autonomous? Various military groups have deployed aircraft that do indeed operate totally independently, at least in some circumstances. A Global Hawk drone doesn't fall out of the sky if disconnected from controllers. It can continue flying totally on its own, as do cruise missiles. Lots of autonomous boats (small ones) have crossed oceans. A modern torpedo is essentially an autonomous submarine. But no, nothing on the streets of SF.

I think the grandparent forgot to quality autonomous with safe. John Deere (My employer) has been doing autonomous tractors for more than 20 years, there have been videos of dogs driving tractors around while the farmer sips lemonade in a lawn chair. John Deere lawyers will use any legal trick they can to get them taken down though because it isn't safe to not have a human sitting in the tractor watching for trouble (many videos remain because there isn't much to go on). The tractor could kill someone and keep right on going with no care so it isn't safe. Likewise drone aircraft can go one for a while because presumably any other airplane in the area will avoid it. Boats can cross the ocean because odds are it will not encounter another boat (relative to the size of the ocean).

What is hard about self driving cars is we want our kids to be able to ride their bikes on the same streets those cars drive on. Limit self driving cars to just hiways with only other self driving cars and we could have had them 15 years ago and there would be near zero accidents. Dealing with human drivers (who might not be sober), kids, wild animals, and the like is hard. (I'm sure those in self driving cars have a much longer list of things things that are hard)

Some of the autonomous boats know to keep away from the bigger ships, the ones with transponders. Some airborne drones will react to TCAS alerts (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) and change course/altitude in the same manner as a human pilot would. I would assume that the largest military drones are capable of flying home, or at least back to friendly territory, if they are disconnected from controllers.

There are two hard parts of hazard avoidance: identifying the hazard in the first place, and dealing with large numbers of different hazards moving around. Transponders, TCAS, and maps solve the first problem well enough for boards and airplanes.(there are time where they fail but they are rare enough to ignore). Except at ports/airports traffic is generally light as well meaning drones and boats only need to worry about a small number of hazards which makes this easier.

Autonomous cars are hard because children, and wildlife do not have transponders, and worse have a habit of jumping out from cover right into your path. Killing children is obviously bad. Even though who morally would argue that wildlife don't matter still do not like the damage hitting the wildlife causes to the car.

The parent did specify land vehicles.

What are the benefits over the traditional safety driver on standby whithin the otherwise self-driving car?

I can see that this is more future-compatible, the "drone" is smaller than a car, so, when you can lose the driver you will be able to shake off the whole shadow vehicle and have less mass overhead.

Edit: also, PR. The pretty pictures of the obviously driverless vehicle are almost inherently misleading.

Anyone can see anything else?