Despite all of the advances in autonomous vehicle technology, big questions still need to be answered regarding how driverless cars (and humans) deal with the transition to higher levels of autonomy. If a car switches from highway to city mode, will the driver have to intervene? What if the driver is distracted? What happens if the vehicle encounters an obstruction it's unfamiliar with, or experiences a fault in its autonomy system?

One potential solution is the teleoperator. If you haven't heard that term before, don't be ashamed. But you should probably get familiar with it. A teleoperator is, more or less, the human to a remote control car. Only now they're driving street-legal vehicles. Why? Think of them as the OnStar for autonomous vehicles.

At NVIDIA's 2019 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Manuela Papadopol, CEO of teleoperation company Designated Driver, explains the technology to Embedded Computing Design's Brandon Lewis. More than that, though, she and her Portland-based teleoperator Andrew take Brandon for a quick spin around San Jose.

Designated Driver:

URL: https://designateddriver.ai/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/designatddrive

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ddriver/about/