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DVD Player Found In Tesla Autopilot Crash, Says Florida Officials (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A digital video disc player was found in the Tesla car that was on autopilot when its driver was killed in a collision with a truck in May, Florida Highway Patrol officials said on Friday. "There was a portable DVD player in the vehicle," said Sergeant Kim Montes of the FHP in a telephone interview. She said there was no camera found, mounted on the dash or of any kind, in the wreckage. A lawyer for a truck driver involved in the accident with the Tesla told Reuters his investigators had spoken to a witness who said the DVD player was playing a "Harry Potter" video after the accident, but the lawyer was unable to verify that beyond the witness account. Lawyers for the family of the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown, released a statement Friday saying the family is cooperating with the investigations "and hopes that information learned from this tragedy will trigger further innovation which enhances the safety of everyone on the roadways." Lawyers for the family of the victim, 40-year-old Joshua Brown, released a statement Friday saying the family is cooperating with the investigations "and hopes that information learned from this tragedy will trigger further innovation which enhances the safety of everyone on the roadways." Tesla said in a statement Friday, "Autopilot is by far the most advanced driver assistance system on the road, but it does not turn a Tesla into an autonomous vehicle and does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility."
The car was basically equipped with a stay-in-lane and slow-down-if-you-approach-the-car-in-front-of-you kind of system, which is not an autonomous vehicle, nor can you take your eyes off the road. At best it reacts a bit faster if someone in front of you hits the brakes. Google did a talk on this and said in their tests, as soon as a car seems to be working by itself, drivers stopped paying attention to the road, so half-way-autonomous is a bad idea. People don't want to pay attention and they won't if the car seems to be doing a good enough job.
Only a fully autonomous car will be good enough.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Although in this particular case it is unclear whether the driver was actually watching a DVD at the moment of the crash, it is pretty obvious that an assisted driving technology that can handle 95% of the driving situations will make users confident enough to be distracted when operating the vehicle, no matter how many warnings and disclaimers are shown telling users they need to pay attention all the time in case they have to gain control to handle the remaining 5% of the traffic situations. This is clearly explained in this TED talk by the head of Google driverless car program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (this particular issue is discussed around 4:10, although the whole video is worth watching). This is why Google approach to self driving cars is to release their product when the system is able to handle 100% of the driving situations and never require the user to take control in contrast to the Tesla approach of releasing a system than can handle most situations and make incremental improvements over time.
No. Tesla is not staffed completely by idiots. They may be a new company, but I am sure they have many experienced driving experts working for them. You can be sure that Musk has read many reports showing that if you take away all need for user input while driving down the highway (possibly for hours at a time), when an incident happens the "driver" will be completely unable to respond in time to be of any help. It's not rocket science, this is not a new field never studied before.
This driver did what all drivers would do in the same situation, got completely inattentive when asked to sit in a chair and do nothing. The movie, if anything, at least kept him awake and conscious.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I hear what you are saying, but I suspect you are missing one basic part of human psychology.
I have spent quite some time around motor racing, including being a passenger with some very good track drivers (much better than I will ;)
ever be) is some very fast 2 seaters. There is one thing that will ALWAYs happen in such a situation, after a few laps the passenger will
have a very sore braking leg. The reason is that it is pretty much impossible NOT to push your foot, even on a non-existent brake, as you
hurtle beyond what you believe is the safe point towards a collision - unless you are unaware of the collision. You will literally try and push
your foot through the floor trying to help the driver stop
Of course I think the truck driver is being rather 'creative' here also, however in this case the telemetry will tell pretty much all, and even if we
never know, the powers that be will know the speed, control inputs, etc that the car had before, during, and after the crash.
None of this makes it any better for the driver, his family, the truck driver, or anyone else involved.
But come on people, pointing the finger at Tesla really is a step too far. It is like blaming the national mint for a bank robbery.
I do not understand. Why would you think they do in the first place? Perfect SF movie artificial intelligence has not been invented and installed in a car. Are you being serious?
More to the point about spectrums... mid to near IR should show operating vehicle engines, potentially exhaust, etc as hot pixels. And long-wave IR should show people and animals as hot pixels. Both of which sound *incredibly* useful.
That said, I'm not sure where traditional CCDs stop being sensitive... I imagine they don't go all the way down to the long-wave spectrum. They do of course make cooled IR cameras that capture long-wave but they tend to be larger and more expensive. Hmm, let's see how far traditional uncooled CCDs can go... I'm seeing a number of pages putting the range limit at around 150 (or 300?) to 1100nm (human vision is 380 to 750nm, give or take). I wouldn't be surprised if some parts of an engine would glow reasonably well in the 1000+ nm range.... but that's *if* you could see it, though, without something blocking the radiation. I doubt they could see exhaust, at least at the point it leaves the tailpipe. You'd need a special designed, cooled camera if you want to see the lower ranges.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Again, it depends on what you mean by "IR", which is a very broad spectrum range. Cameras often have to add a special IR filter to block near-IR because the lens doesn't block it on its own. You can see here the transmission spectrums of different types of glasses and plastics. You can see that as a general rule they're good at blocking UV but not IR, at least near-IR (750-1400nm). They tend to block more IR the closer you get to the far-IR spectrum, however.
Images being overexposed will do that to you. And the overexposure of an image isn't a fundamental aspect of CCD hardware, it's a processing artifact.
Example: take this image. Note how the boundary between the car and the sky in this picture is completely lost. It's not like the CCD is receiving the exact same amount of photons from the car and the sky - they're actually going to be very different. But they're both truncated off at maximum brightness when saved into an "image" - and that image is then provided to the autopilot. In severe cases, the autopilot is highly disadvantaged, if not inherently doomed, no matter how good its software is. Human eyes don't have that limitation - we can see bright and dark areas simultaneously and make out details in both.
The CCD is getting the data that's needed. But the autopilot isn't.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?