Credit/Halo/T-MOBILE
T-Mobile is announcing a collaboration with Halo, a 5G-powered driverless car service that doesn’t actually use autonomous vehicles or require 5G mobile broadband. The new service is coming to Las Vegas later this year with a fleet of remotely operated electric vehicles.
You use Halo’s app to summon a Kia Niroelectric vehicle. It arrives empty but under the control of a remote driver. You drive it to your destination. Then a remote driver takes over again and the car is no longer your problem. In Halo’s system, nine cameras feed video to a remote driver—whom Halo calls a pilot—with radar and ultrasonic sensors as a backup. The cars omit the expensive lidar sensors in most autonomous vehicles.
“You simply just hop off and go away, and the car disappears. You have better vision as a remote pilot than actually sitting inside the car,” says Halo founder and CEO Anand Nandakumar says. “It’s significantly cheaper than any other autonomous vehicle company.”
Read the article at Fast Company.