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Steer, accelerate, brake – all with the driver 900 km away

Working, studying or shopping remotely are things that, in recent years, have entered the daily lives of many – they no longer surprise us and seem here to stay. But did you know that driving can also be done remotely, with the driver 900 km away from their vehicle? Turns out, it’s not impossible. This technologically innovative idea was conceived here in Latvia and further developed in Norway.

The team behind the Latvian start-up getUgo has come up with a smart car with a remote-control system made in Latvia. Looking for partners to bring the dream closer to reality, the company explored the opportunities offered by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism, set up a cooperation project and successfully implemented the Driverless pilot vehicle system for transport routing in industrial parks project between March 2022 and February 2023 with partners from Norway – Applied Autonomy and Herøya Industripark. The total cost of the project approached EUR 130,000.

“Our biggest success is that we were able to operate a vehicle at a 900 km distance from Riga. This is the farthest we have tried and we did it on a 4G mobile network with a 120 millisecond delay,” says Jānis Upmanis, CEO of getUgo. Both remote and autonomous vehicle mobility was tested in the project, along with several demonstrations and safety tests.

With this project, getUgo was able to take the notion of remotely controlling cars from a PowerPoint presentation to a real, functioning industrial park, which has to coordinate and route numerous incoming vehicles on a daily basis, but for the time being only with the help and participation of human beings. As human labour becomes increasingly expensive, this technology has the potential to replace the current algorithm in place to carry out the task. That is why Herøya Industripark, one of the largest industrial parks in Norway, with around 80 companies and 2,500 people working in the area daily, also expressed interest.

“Some time ago, we set the goal that our industrial park would, in the future, become autonomous. Now we see that both the technology and the people have become more willing to take this step and make the move to autonomous solutions. This is an exciting sector that we want to be a part of,” says Skjalg Aasland, Business Development Manager at Herøya Industripark. Tove Sørensen, project manager at Herøya Industripark, emphasises that the park is gaining more and more know-how when it comes to becoming autonomous in its operations.

Herøya Industripark’s main involvement and contribution in the project were to provide access to the industrial park so that tests and demonstrations could be carried out, as well as to advise on the business side of industrial parks and future scenarios for the use of such technology.

This is not only an opportunity for industrial parks to become more efficient but also for autonomous vehicles, delivery robots, lawnmowers, drones, and trucks. All you need is the internet to make it happen, and standard mobile networks are sufficient to do the job. The driver is taken out of the vehicle and placed in an office, behind a steering wheel and monitors, driving a car that could be on the next street over or on the other side of the world.

It should also be noted that other professionals in the field were also keen to follow the goings-on in the industrial park. The outcome of this project goes to show that science fiction is slowly becoming part of our everyday lives.