Tele-driving an Electric Vehicle over a Private LTE Network

We demonstrate tele-driving operation for an electric vehicle capable of stopping itself in case of system failure over a captive LTE network deployed in a university campus. Our electronically controlled vehicle is driven remotely by an operator from a control room which receives the multi-camera real-time video feed from the vehicle over this network. Our primary contribution includes the responsive emergency braking mechanism for the vehicle, modular vehicle design based on CAN bus, low latency LTE MAC scheduler design, and modifications to popular video tool, FFMPEG to support low latency real time video streaming. Our demonstration shows complete integration of the different components, i.e., the vehicle, the LTE network and the remote driving application. Another salient feature of our system is the O-RAN compliant RAN awareness module and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) application which enables real-time network performance monitoring.