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Police Release First Video From Inside the Uber Self-Driving Car That Killed a Pedestrian (recode.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the viewer-discretion-advised dept.

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.

6 of 698 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, it was her fault by Snotnose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. LIDAR by Aero77 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a good example of why visual sensors are insufficient for autonomous driving.

  3. Wait, explain LIDAR again? by shess · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re: The Driver was Texting by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Convinces me Uber is at fault because of 1/R^4 by gumbi+west · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

  6. Video appears to be digitally manipulated by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.