Remote operation of autonomous vehicle in unexpected environment
AssigneeToyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc.
InventorsBunyo Okumura, Danil V. Prokhorov
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Abstract
Disclosed herein are computer devices, systems, and methods for remotely operating an autonomous passenger vehicle. When an autonomous vehicle encounters an unexpected driving environment unsuitable for autonomous operation, such as road construction or an obstruction, vehicle sensors can capture data about the vehicle and the unexpected driving environment, including images, radar and lidar data, etc. The captured data can be sent to a remote operator. The remote operator can manually operate the vehicle remotely or issue commands to the autonomous vehicle to be executed by on various vehicle systems. The captured data sent to the remote operator can be optimized to conserve bandwidth, such as by sending a limited subset of the captured data.
Claims19
A computing device for an autonomous passenger vehicle comprising:
- one or more processors for controlling operations of the computing device;
- a communications interface configured to communicate with a remote server over a network;
- and
- a memory for storing data and program instructions used by the one or more processors, wherein the one or more processors are configured to execute instructions stored in the memory to:
- identify an unexpected driving environment
- send information based on the unexpected driving environment received from one or more sensors disposed on the vehicle to a remote operator using the remote server;
- receive a command sent by the remote operator relating to one or more vehicle systems;
- and
- send the command to the one or more vehicle systems for execution, the command being sent based on a quality metric of the network.
A computer-implemented method for an autonomous passenger vehicle comprising:
- identifying, using one or more processors, an unexpected driving environment if at least
- sending information based on the unexpected driving environment received from one or more sensors disposed on the vehicle to a remote operator using a remote server;
- receiving a command sent by the remote operator relating to one or more vehicle systems;
- and
- sending the command to the one or more vehicle systems for execution, the command being sent based on a quality metric of the network.
A system comprising:
- one or more sensors disposed on a vehicle;
- and
- a computing device in communication with the one or more sensors, comprising:
- one or more processors for controlling operations of the computing device;
- a communications interface configured to communicate with a remote server over a network;
- and
- a memory for storing data and program instructions used by the one or more processors, wherein the one or more processors are configured to execute instructions stored in the memory to:
- identify an unexpected driving environment
- send information received from one or more sensors associated with the vehicle to a remote operator using the remote server;
- receive a command sent by the remote operator relating to one or more vehicle systems;
- send the command to the one or more vehicle systems based on a quality metric of the network;
- and
- execute the command on the one or more vehicle systems.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.