Investigating Remote Driving over the LTE Network

Remote driving brings human operators with sophisticated perceptual and cognitive skills into an over-the-network control loop, with the hope of addressing the challenging aspects of vehicular autonomy based exclusively on artificial intelligence (AI). This paper studies the human behavior in a remote driving setup, i.e., how human remote drivers perform and assess their workload under the state-of-the-art network conditions. To explore this, we build a scaled remote driving prototype and conduct a controlled human study with varying network delays based on current commercial LTE network technology. The study demonstrates that remote driving over LTE is not immediately feasible, primarily caused by network delay variability rather than delay magnitude. In addition, our findings indicate that the negative effects of remote driving over LTE can be mitigated by a video frame arrangement strategy that regulates delay magnitude to achieve a smoother display.