Find out how Halo remotely delivers cars “driverless” by streaming real-time video and sensor data over LTE and 5G.
We aren’t an autonomous vehicle company like Zoox or Cruise: every Halo.Car you see is driven by a real person. They’re just not in the vehicle!
We call it “remote piloting”.
We have developed a remote driving tech stack, made up of 6 cameras and numerous sensors, modems, compute and antennae, that we install onto a standard electric vehicle.
Together, the remote driving stack allows us to securely stream real-time video and sensor data from the vehicle, and to fully drive the car remotely.
We call our drivers who control the cars remotely “remote pilots”. You can see below what their drive setup looks like.
Within the downtown Arts District, when you book a Halo car it will be remotely delivered to you by a remote pilot at our Halo HQ.
You can return the car anywhere in Las Vegas. If you return the car within the same downtown zone, it will be collected and returned to our HQ remotely.
Pretty cool right?
Click the image to view the delivery zone in Google Maps.
Our remote pilots are professional drivers with 5 or more years of experience driving locally. They complete a 3 month training and certification program to learn how to remote pilot safely, including 40 hours of remote driving in real conditions & on real roads - supported by a safety driver inside the vehicle.
We remotely pilot only in areas where we have completed significant testing to verify that the network can support our needs.
We have a deep partnership with T-Mobile, and use all three network carriers - T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon - to ensure the best possible network coverage.
If the vehicle completely loses network connection, or if the vehicle has some other major issue, the car automatically detects this and comes to a full stop. Currently, this stop is “in-lane”, but we are developing in-vehicle autonomy that will pull the vehicle over to a shoulder before bringing it to a stop.
Look carefully when you see a ‘driverless’ Halo.Car on the road, and you’ll see behind it another vehicle - a ‘chase car’. Chase cars follow our remotely piloted vehicles closely, performing two jobs.
First, with defensive driving, the chase car creates a buffer behind the remote piloted vehicle in case the safe stop system activates.
Secondly, the chase car has a passenger inside with a direct line of communication to the remote pilot.
If something occurs and the remote pilot as well as their vehicle’s safe stop system do not bring the vehicle to a stop, the chase car passenger also has an emergency stop button to bring the remotely piloted vehicle to an immediate stop.
This triple layer of safety is what gives us the confidence to go ‘driverless’.
