Fully autonomous cars may still be the stuff of science
fiction. Remote driving technology, however, may be much closer than we think.
Scientists at the Technische Universität München (TUM) believe that full-size
remote control cars could be hitting the roads within the next five to ten
years. So if your next rental car turns up to your door driverless, the chances
are that the actual driver is sitting in the car rental headquarters.
Researchers at TUM’s Institute of Automotive Technology have
demonstrated that cars can be driven remotely and safely on public roads. As
part of their project, the engineers equipped the Visio.M electric car with six
video cameras and enabled all functions to be activated via a central control
panel. The video images are fed into a computer before being encoded and sent
to the driver at the remote operator station via LTE.