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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.
The scariest part is that the pedestrian does not react to the car at all before being struck. As if she either gave no effort to check for oncoming traffic, or if she just had the mindset of "I have the right of way, the vehicle will stop for me".
We'll never know what her motive was for crossing at such a poor time, and it's a tragedy that this happened, but her choice to cross there was baffling.
Also the driver was "intermittently" looking down? No, the driver was looked up twice for a brief moment twice in the video with very long periods of staring down. This may have been unavoidable regardless, but until self driving cars are more reliable, taking your eyes off the road like this is not a good idea.
I had heard reports that the video showed her popping out of no where. Absolutely that is not what it shows. It shows here suddenly coming into the headlights lit region, not appearing from behind a bush.
What's the cardinal rule of driving at night or snow storms? NEVER outdrive the range of your headlights. That is, your stopping distance abolutely positively has to be within your range of sight. Anything else is completely irresponsible.
So that's clearly what happened here. The woman in the video just appears like magic in a couple of frames from dark to in the head light. That means the leading edge of the headlight zone was something less than 1/2 of a second from impact. No way can you stop in that time.
This is defacto outdriving your headlights. Uber is guilty. Case closed.
Now moving on to technical details this also shows. I think part of this is that the dymanic range of the camera sucks. I am fairly sure my own eyes would have been able to see further into the dark. Those black pixels ar not just dark they are completely saturated on the dark end. Nothing is resolvable in them which is why the appearance time is so short. This is a serious problem for all systems as the dynamic range of most cameras is very limited, especially when were dealing with 1/R^4 light fall off ( 1/^R^2 light outbound and then 1/R^2 reflected. Thus a 256 bit sensor is effectively a 16 bit dynamic range sensor. And if you were to account for glints and such then it's even less. No wonder she pops out.
Secondly, where the hell was the lidar here? Shouldn't that have spotter her?
Uber is flagrantly at fault.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You're kidding right? It is impossible to tell from that video.
WTF happened to LIDAR and sub millisecond braking reactions? The woman stepped out of a shadow at a point where a human would've struggled to brake hard enough to stop, but a machine should've been able to sense via lidar an object moving ACROSS ANOTHER LANE in a trajectory that would end in front of it fast enough to at least brake enough to turn a death into an injury.
I don't think this is a problem with autonomous cars in general, but a problem with Uber's 'I got mine, fuck everyone else' mentality towards everything. I doubt they're prioritizing pedestrian safety whatsoever.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
No freaking kidding. It doesn't matter that it was dark - LIDAR should have seen her from hundreds of meters away, watching her slowly step out into the road and watching her steady march across the road. Instead, it maintains speed without any braking whatsoever, straight into her. I mean, what the heck,Uber?
If you have kids anywhere near where Uber is doing automated driving tests, keep them inside. Seriously... This is just ridiculous. If it can't detect an adult slowly walking across the road, holding a bicycle, even when it's about to plow into her, what is it going to do when a little kid suddenly darts out in front?
Are they even using the LIDAR, or is it just a decoration to make passengers feel better?
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
First of all, the woman would have been much more visible than the video captured. The video was very dark; way darker than adjusted human vision. Secondly, as you said, where are all these nice sensors that are going to make automated driving safer? What happened to 'these cars can see way better than you can'?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Suppose that this was not a self-driving car. You see a video of a driver spending 50% of their time looking down at a (phone, book, video game, etc.) and 50% looking ahead. They look ahead, and suddenly get an OH SH*T look and plow someone down. What would the law say?
1) The pedestrian was negligent.
2) The driver was negligent.
This is contributory negligence, and I don't think the driver would get off with no penalty just because the pedestrian was negligent. This cannot be allowed to continue.
So back to the self-driving part: either the driver thought "Oh, it's a self driving car, I'll play a video game" or Uber said "Monitor this status console here on your lap and just look up every now and then to make sure that you don't plow over someone." The police need to figure that out. If it is the former, the law should do whatever they normally do in cases of contributory negligence. But if it is the latter, then Uber needs to lose their license for testing these cars, and face a big fine.
I do not think a human could have reacted fast enough to even think about slowing down.
They're probably going to find the pedestrian 100% responsible since they were illegally crossing an unlit section of a major highway in a totally reckless and inattentive manner, but it still looks like a failure of the Uber system -- even if they turn out not to be criminally liable, they're SUPPOSED to be better than a human at avoiding accidents, and should be held to that standard.
A Human's capabilities would be limited by the visible light, and a HUMAN cannot safely drive 38 Mph on a road at night if their visibility is not a sufficient footage down the road to safely stop in time upon an obstacle appearing at the edge of their visibility --- in a highway with no streetlights and no traffic, the driving conditions can be improved by turning on High-beams to allow a higher speed, otherwise the driver has a duty to slow down to a safe speed for the limited visibility under dark nighttime driving conditions, Therefore, the driver could be cited for hitting the pedestrian, because they were driving at an unsafely high speed that's not an allowable speed under the nighttime driving conditions without high-beam headlights enabled (By the time an obstacle appears in the illumination cone, it's already too late to react!).
Either that or the dashcam was misleading in terms of light levels, AND the driver had a longer time than 2 seconds when the pedestrian could be seen.
The radar and lidar certainly SHOULD have seen the pedestrian and it certainly appears that the driver was NOT paying attention. I also will say that in the video I could see the pedestrian while still a way out where the car should have started braking and it could have avoided killing her. While not nearly as noticeable as they would have been had the bicycle had reflectors on the wheels I could still see it when pausing the video.
The pedestrian should have had reflectors on the bicycle wheels. Just the other night I barely saw a bicyclist crossing the street in front of me at a crosswalk until they were in my lights due to the lack of any reflectors and dark clothing. I don't know what the laws are in Arizona, but where I live bicycles are required to have reflectors, a headlight and a taillight at night.
If the driver were paying a lot more attention to the road than the phone then this also could have been prevented.
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On the contrary, almost any human driver would have spotted that women from far away. Don't be fooled by the artificially darkened video, as others have noted in reality the lighting conditions on that road are pretty good, and she was also not jumping on the road but crossing it slowly and under perfect weather conditions. As some autonomous driving expert on HN as commented, the sensors should have had no problem picking her up from far apart and this looks a lot like a problem with the LIDAR software.
This accident was fully preventable.