Project

In recent years, there have been several deployments of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on public roads as robotaxi services, where the operation of the robotaxis is often supported by remote operations to ensure safe and efficient operation of the AVs. In this context, remote operation refers to a case where a human remote operator located outside the vehicle supports operation of the vehicle remotely in situations when the vehicle reaches its operational limits. For nonautomated vehicles, remote operation is used, e.g., in the context of delivering vehicles to customers via remote driving, or in operations in harsh working conditions such as construction sites or mines. Simultaneously, remote operation has been used in other domains and industries as well, e.g., in air traffic control, forestry, maritime, mining, rail transportation, unmanned aerial vehicles (such as drones), etc.  

We think that learning from existing work in other domains would be extremely beneficial for safe deployment of remote operation within road transportation. Therefore, the main activity and goal in this project is to compile a list of organizations and/or locations that remote operation have been deployed, both by industry and research organizations. At the beginning, this will be done with a special focus on the Nordics and European regions. We plan to collect the input by means of a short questionnaire, asking organizations to fill in information about their deployments. Other activities can include workshops with relevant stakeholders to get their insights. Consequently, the results will be disseminated through a SAFER lunch seminar, and as a publicly available list, which will be used further in the Remote Operation Working Group at SAFER. 

As an expected result, an overview of remote operation deployments, serving as a tool within the Remote Operation Working Group at SAFER to initiate discussions on future developments of remote operation. This overview would also serve as a tool to initiate future project ideas within the group.