I was wondering when teleoperation was going to be taken seriously to plug the gaps in full autonomy.

If Starsky is successful, I suspect this will be used a lot of places. For instance:

Image vision detects a police officer. Maybe a police officer doing hand signals. Immediately switches to teleop (with last several seconds replayed) if in a safe situation to do so. Corner case: solved.

Pretty much all of the self-driving car companies use remote assistance to help out with difficult cases and have been for years. The other companies just realize it's another tool in the arsenal with its own limitations, whereas Starsky seems to push hard on it being the magic sauce.

The problem with remote assistance is it's only useful for static scenarios, like getting a vehicle unstuck. It can't help you make a left turn due to lag (cellular networks are not reliable for real-time safety critical systems), but it can tell you whether or not you can proceed after stopping for a paper bag in the middle of the road.

Which RF communication system is reliable enough for this? Surely not cellular data.

If it only goes between depots on highways, isn’t that the opposite of last-mile?

Teleop is a good solution for last-mile.

Surely teleop has the same issues as regular trucks though - they are a danger to pedestrians and cyclists sharing the roads.

At least the truckers have an easier time being with their families if they don't have to drive all over the country all the time and can instead do their job from an office. It's also easier to switch drivers so that they don't have to drive when they're tired.

How much of a hazard have semi truck operations been to pedestrians and cyclists? They can only use large arterial roads.

I'd wager that a primary motivator for self-driving+teleoperation is increasing the amount of time that trucks can be hauling, not necessarily making them safer than existing trucks.

Trucks are the main killer of cyclists here in Berlin.