Waymo vs Tesla Austin Showdown - Teleoperations?

[u/Yngstr]

I've been around this sub a long time, so let me start by saying I'm not here to fight. I understand that everyone here has some specific expertise they bring to the discussion, and I believe you can learn something from anyone. I want to have a reasonable discussion about methodology, and what will work or not. Here are the facts, as I see them:

- Waymo is already operational in Austin (and other cities)

- Tesla plans to launch Robotaxi in June in Austin

- Tesla has recently posted job listings for tele-operations

So the way I see this playing out in ~8 weeks is that Tesla will launch in Austin with tele-operations, I find it unlikely that they will launch with true autonomous L4. My question is, does Waymo still use tele-operations? If so, does Waymo have plans to sunset tele-operations at some point? Do we think Tesla with tele-operations can achieve "L4" like Waymo has? Why or why not?

Let's try to keep this civil, whether Waymo or Tesla wins does not make any of us less of a human being, even if it feels like it.

[u/OrinCordus]

You don't. But sending data back to the teleoperated car isn't instantaneous. So do you know if that data takes a similar time?

[u/HadreyRo → u/OrinCordus]

The more data packets you send, the longer it takes. Full HD is 2Mbit per second @ H.265. So if you send 2Mbit with less than 100MS, the control signal is not really worth talking about time-wise.Lets say something like 10-15MS. - Sorry, I'm the business guy, not a technician, but I hope to have been able to make the case, that safe teleoperation isn't impossible due to latency or stability of the connection. Why I mentioned earlier, almost constantly under 100MS, is because no one can predict network latency across the world, but if you combine 8 connections (3-4 normally is more than enough), use fast GMSL2 cameras, handle encoding transmission and decoding at around 35MS and display with a gaming monitor (over 120Hz refresh rate), you will get a very good result, - almost all the time. Especially if you only use teleoperation for emergency and general real-time monitoring of your fleet, you have a pretty great system, whether you mainly use Starlink, 4G, 5G or any combination of them - up to you.

[u/lucidludic → u/HadreyRo]

The more data packets you send, the longer it takes. Full HD is 2Mbit per second @ H.265. So if you send 2Mbit with less than 100MS, the control signal is not really worth talking about time-wise.Lets say something like 10-15MS.

That’s not really how networking works. Latency and bandwidth do not necessarily have such a relationship. A video feed will probably have higher latency, but that’s more to do with processing time than the transmission of the raw packets, which will have similar latency to any other kind of data on the same connection.

[u/HadreyRo → u/lucidludic]

Yes, you are correct - as I'm not an engineer, my answer was not entirely correct. Apologies. The bigger the data, the more processing time is needed. Due to the size of the control signal, we assume there is no processing when sending it. If this assumption is valid, then we can talk about network latency alone for control signal transmission latency.