Remote driving holds great promise as the next new luxury mobility experience. Here is a glimpse:
Remote Chauffeur Experience
With the remote chauffeur experience, anyone who owns a car will soon save over a hundred driving hours a year, and benefit from new levels of safety and comfort. Examples include:
- Calling a remote driver to drop me off, go find parking, and pick me up later
- Transferring my car to my spouse across town
- Using my car for a quick pick up or delivery
- Drive me in traffic
To bring these experiences to life, Ottopia developed a platform that runs on the vehicle, on the remote driving station, and in the cloud. The rest of this blog post discusses the overall platform. Next week, we will dive deeper into the core technology.
Remote Chauffeur Platform: All The Pieces You Need to Launch
That remote chauffeur experience is not just a video: For the past 3 years, we have been building a holistic platform to bring it to market with select OEM partners. This platform includes not only our breakthrough technology for highly reliable, low-latency communications, and intuitive remote driving UX, but also a full suite of tools to facilitate deployment.
For the consumer, we have designed a white-label app that can either stand alone or integrate into OEM apps. With this app, your customers order a remote driver on demand, and see the status of the remote driving mission:
For the remote driver, we offer the full driving station as well as tools to provide him/her with context on the task at hand, whether dropping me off and finding parking or driving me home from a bar. The station includes a variety of mission and safety features, such as:
- Task to perform
- Navigation
- Network performance notifications
- ADAS alerts
- Enforced speed limits
- Camera prioritization per task
Finally, we offer tools for the operations manager. With these tools, the remote manager can supervise the remote drivers, quickly identify potential car problems, and optimize driver utilization:
Accelerated Deployment Program for Car OEMs
In addition to the full product suite, Ottopia now offers an accelerated deployment program for OEMs.
This program includes three components that we are announcing now:
- Broad support for existing vehicle hardware
- Integration and performance tools
- A new SDK
Keep reading for more on each item.
Additionally, we are working with select partners to support remote driving operations at scale. More on this in the coming weeks.
Support for Existing Vehicle Hardware
Ottopia has built the technology to be as hardware-agnostic as possible, enabling integration with existing car components. We use existing camera configurations on premium vehicles, as well as the existing on-board ECU. Unlike competing systems that require 4 modems, our network optimization technology uses only two standard LTE or 5G connections - without requiring any proprietary arrangements with telecom companies. Our support for existing vehicle hardware dramatically reduces cost and time required to deploy.
Integration and Performance Tools
In order to deploy remote driving, Ottopia works with the OEM to ensure the overall system works smoothly, with optimal performance. To facilitate this optimization process, we have developed several tools.
- Network mapping. Every time a car with our software drives, it automatically contributes anonymized metadata to a “remote drivability map”. This map informs us of any potential limits in the operational environment, and enables us to route remote drives accordingly.
- Video stream optimization. We offer camera unwarping and other video tools on our remote driving station, to enable rapid integration with minimal changes to the existing video pipeline on the vehicle.
- Analytical dashboard. This dashboard shows any potential performance issues, whether from the network or from the vehicle system. This dashboard enables Ottopia to help you debug quickly from one source of truth.
New SDK
Along with the consumer app and revised driving station system, Ottopia recently introduced a new SDK that makes it easier to integrate both components into the OEM ecosystem.
This SDK includes many elements that we will expand on in future blog posts. To give two examples:
- With the new SDK, the remote driving station can accept any indicators coming from the vehicle and present them to the remote driver, making it easy to integrate vehicle ADAS systems with the Ottopia remote driving platform.
- The consumer app is designed for white labeling, enabling you to use your own branding and visual assets on top of our technology platform.
With this SDK, you can get an end-to-end PoC of the full consumer experience up and running in a few weeks.
What's In It For Me?
The Remote Chauffeur Platform is designed to help carmakers quickly get up and running with a remote driving PoC. From there, you can iterate and learn quickly and soon launch a breakthrough customer experience.
Intrigued?
Write to us at info@ottopia.tech to discuss how we can start working together.
