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Police Release First Video From Inside the Uber Self-Driving Car That Killed a Pedestrian (recode.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: Three days after an Uber self-driving vehicle fatally crashed into a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz., police have released video footage of what the vehicle saw with its cameras moments before running the woman over, and what happened inside the vehicle, where an operator was at the wheel. The video footage does not conclusively show who is at fault. However, it seems to confirm initial reports from the Tempe police that Herzberg appeared suddenly. It also showed the vehicle operator behind the wheel intermittently looking down while the car was driving itself.
I don't understand people like this. It's dark, you aren't lit, you're crossing a road with a large, fast moving, well lit hard to miss cars. And you can't be bothered to look for oncoming traffic. Only saw the video twice on the news but it looks like she never knew the car was there.
That said, I'm glad I was correct in my knowledge of what those "safety drivers" actually do all day.
This is a good example of why visual sensors are insufficient for autonomous driving.
Yes, this was hard to see using passive techniques with visible light (ie, your eyes), but WTF, the person wasn't sprinting or jumping off the curb, something active like LIDAR should have had no troubles spotting this.
I've seen this happen on huge college campuses as well. Legions of kids crossing streets while paying zero attention to the potential for oncoming traffic. Usually it's because their face is buried in their phone, but sometimes it's not, and they literally step right off the curb into traffic for seemingly no reason. It might make me sound like an old guy but my generation had a healthy fear of death by car instilled into it (by our parents and guardians) which seems to be sadly lacking these days. It's amazing that more people aren't routinely run down.
No human driver could have seen that woman in time to stop, but a car equipped with infrared lidar should be able to. Time to update the sensors on the test fleet.
Exactly what I expected to see....
Someone walking a bike.
At night.
No streetlights.
No backlighting at all.
Wearing black top and dark pants.
With no lights at all on the bike.
No lights on the person.
Not in a crosswalk.
Apparently not looking.
About 2 seconds of visibility.
The pedestrian is almost 100% wrong in every possible way. I don't see how this could be ANY human driver's fault, had a human been driving. As for autonomous, I guess it depends on what sensors. Could their system have had an infrared camera or other sensor that could have seen the wreckless pedestrian sooner than was evident in [human] visible light? That would have been nice. But does that make the pedestrian less at fault? I think not.
True she comes out of nowhere on the video, but that's a really crappy video. She was walking slowing and already in the car's lane when the headlights hit her, even if she had been stationary the result would have been the same.
Of course a human driver could have hit her as well, but I suspect that most often a human driver would have seen her far enough ahead to stop or at least swerve enough to avoid her (of course most Ubers might have as well).
I'm curious if that's the only video available since decent cameras are not that expensive, and I'd expect the car to have several cameras at different contrast levels.
I stole this Sig
It is astounding that LIDAR failed to see that person. I can't even imagine how they went undetected. I really want answers as to why.
BTW, the concept of a "safety driver" on a Level 3+ autonomy system is just window dressing. Distraction is bad enough on Level 2 systems that mandate hands on the wheel and sometimes involve attention monitors. With a level 3+ system, where the person isn't driving at all, distraction is essentially guaranteed (this has been studied; it doesn't matter who you are, you will get distracted sitting behind the wheel for long periods without actually doing anything). A person simply cannot transition reliably from "not at all driving for hours on end" to "emergency driving" in a split second.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
"Operator inattention" is absolutely the ultimate goal of automated cars.
If the human has to pay attention, then the human might as well drive, and the automation is pointless.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The video appears to be deceiving. It is almost like it was purposely dimmed before being released. A human behind the wheel would be able to see much more then what is shown on the video. Look at the buildings in the background, the ditch further down the road... it is all black. No more then 50' from a street light and everything is black. The human eye is so much better then that. If the driver was watching, he would have seen her. Any video system should have also been able to see her. Uber has no excuse - the cyclist was technically at fault but the Uber car should never have hit her. The car never even slowed down.
Deer are harder to see then a cyclist with reflective shoes - most drivers would have avoided a deer in this situation.
Or not. http://www.ncsl.org/research/t... in Arizona "Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection."
Sometimes people do things for which technology... has no way to compensate
Especially when that technology isn't fucking ready, yet.
If you framegrab the images and then histogram the light curve it's hard edged at zero. Someone deliberately made the blacks blacker so it seems like no one could have seen her. Perhaps this is an artifact of the video compression algorithm or the camera itself.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
her name was Elaine Herzberg, not that person or the pedestrian , `Elaine was killed by ubers car.
https://www.standard.co.uk/new...
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
1) It's a shitty video, human eyes may have seen a better picture
2) A second and a half of breaking from 38 mph may not have been enough to stop the vehicle, but it would have been enough time to slow down and swerve. The pedestrian may have been hit regardless, but they also may have survived.
Pedestrians only have right of way if in a crosswalk. They do not have right of way to just walk into a traffic lane anywhere they please.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.