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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 think we will make progress on these issues when we collectively stop pretending that "operator inattention" is the intended result of using of automated cars, not an unwanted by-product.
That safety driver was not even looking at the road, but the exterior camera showed the bicycle was visible to the car for about 2 seconds before the collision...
So the safety system needs an improvement, the driver might get some of the fault because the only reason they are present is to supervise the car and was clearly neglecting this duty, and even if driver was alert it probably wasn't enough time to stop.
This tech and the safety driver program are not adequate for public roads. the tech can improve, the safety driver thing maybe will never work.
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.
I stand by my post in the last topic :
https://slashdot.org/comments....
(You people are CRAZY with your laws and cars, pedestrians should NOT have right of way at all times as it seems you do, or at least most of you behaved while I was there)
That being said, someone speculated this was right near a late night club in a boring area, only fun thing to do is drink there? So maybe drunk.
I'll tell you a few things, they crossed in the WORST spot, just IN the dark part after some light, holy crap does she come out of nowhere.
Also, texting or not, there's NO CHANCE I personally wouldn't have hit that person, based on that video. That person crossing is an idiot. The driver is going to get slammed for this but they couldn't have averted it.
(that being said, video ! = eyes, and generally you can see better than a camera can)
Finally, as someone else said, radar, lidar, laser, what about all the other fancy tech these things should have? (Does it?) because based on those technologies, the speed the person is crossing the road, the direction they're going, the clearness of the road in front of them? Surely some of these features should've picked up the idiot cyclist?
Bonus finally: It's kind of on the cyclist here to also be the one looking for headlights. The car is lit up and presumably noisy, on a motorway, the car can't see you, you don't have bloody headlights, that person should've been able to look up the road, see headlights, not cross?
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.
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.
I am sure there are many instances that self-driving cars have braked and saved lives that otherwise would have been an injury or death. Such incidents never make to the front pages.
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.
Yeah, honestly, crossing a street with 35-40mph traffic at night in dark clothes and not at a crosswalk or intersection?
This isn't a self driving car problem, this is a Darwin award winner.
And this is *only* national news because it was a self-driving car. Had it been a normal motorist, it wouldn't have gone past the local scene.
With that said, I would expect that a self-driving car would have sensors beyond RGB. Any of IR / thermal, radar, or lidar should have been able to pick her and the bike up, even in the dark. So there are lessons to learn here, but I don't think either Uber or the backup driver should be at fault.
William George
Moreover, she (the bike-walker) could have seen the car coming *way* before it (driver or computer) could see her. Why would she continue walking across when she should have seen the headlights coming many seconds away? And why *walking* a bike? Wouldn't *riding* it across have been faster? Or, you know, just riding with the traffic like I presume laws say she should have? (at least in my state, bikes on the road are supposed to follow most of the same rules as cars in terms of lanes, turning, etc)
William George
Automated defensive driving skills are too expensive.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
... however the test driver did not really pay attention.
Being test driver is obviously a fucked up job. 99% is killing time and 1% is killing time.
In Germany there is not one test driver but 3 ... one who would react if something goes wrong and 2 to write protocols about notable stuff.
In this case it is notable that the lights are configured incorrect. They barely shine 15 yards ahead, that is definitely wrong, and a driver or the automatic driving system should adjust speed to about 1/3rd of what it was driving.
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I'm sure serveral automation fanbois got a hard reality check today. Tough love.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeah, he’s there baby sitting the new tech but, assuming the vehicle didn’t slow down, could he have intervened if he wasn’t distracted? He appears to be reading something since he smiles after looking at whatever he’s holding below the camera view. My money is on that guy getting an NTSB finger pointed at him.
Chewbacon
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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?
"Oh noes! We programmed for a person with a bicycle at dawn, dusk, and day but we forgot night!"
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I agree. By the time the jaywalker was visible no one would be able to stop. Thirty Eight MPH (according to the police) is over 110 feet in two seconds, even in daylight that would have been hard, http://www.brakingdistances.com/38Mph. But IR could have added more time to react and should always be in play when visibility is limited. Of course then you need rules for things like rabbits along the roadway (it is AZ), small dogs, etc. but if it was easy we would have had self driving cars sooner.
Yes, it does look like the guy was texting but I don't think anything other than much better sensors could have saved that woman...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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?
I maintain that a 2 mile stretch of road with a limit of 35 (previously 45mph) thatâ(TM)s eight lanes across should have more than one crosswalk, and probably shouldnâ(TM)t exist in this form at all. I hate Uber and the empire theyâ(TM)ve built on the backs of the working poor, but city planning has to modernise with our tech. The real wonder here is that people arenâ(TM)t killed on that road CONSTANTLY.
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The video quality is awful. You can't really say that a human wouldn't have seen the woman by this.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Sometimes people do things for which technology... has no way to compensate
Especially when that technology isn't fucking ready, yet.
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.
Well, the "Safety Driver" is, and has to be, nearly decoration. As another poster has frequently said, research shows universal human failure to maintain attention in that kind of situation. It's true there haven't been large group studies, so it's possible that some small fraction of people can maintain attention in that kind of a situation. But do notice that *small*. It's definitely well under 10%, and probably well under 1%.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Maybe she was riding one of those Russian stealth bicycles.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's at least enough time for a real human to begin applying the brakes.
Slowing down by just 5mph would have given the woman a 30% higher chance of surviving.
With real eyes looking and not a camera, you'd be able to see more detail in the shadows. There are street lights there and a human eye has a much greater dynamic range than a camera.
The person behind the wheel looked up and to their left, showing he saw the woman in the other lane before the impact. The camera couldn't see the woman until she was directly in front of the driver's side of the lane, proving a person could have seen her in the shadow where the camera, due to its limited dynamic range, couldn't.
Perhaps Uber should have forked out for HDR cameras.
It is astounding that LIDAR failed to see that person.
Maybe instead of building their own LIDAR they should have just purchased the technology from Google. :)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
She wasn't just crossing outside a sidewalk, it looks like she was crossing outside the area lighted by streetlights. She was only illuminated by the cars headlights. Seems like the car should have at least attempted to avoid but if a human had been driving the car, she would be just as dead. No human would have reacted in time.
She clearly wasn't paying attention to oncoming traffic. At night you don't cross in front of oncoming traffic and hope that they spot you in time.
Sounds like she was homeless. She was also pushing 50. I'm guessing she was just out of it. Fatigue will do that to you. By all accounts no drugs were involved.
I can't fault her for the dark cloths. She was homeless. It's not like she had a lot of options. Maybe the solution is a program to give homeless people reflective clothing. Homes too might help. And medical care. Like I said, she might've just been tired. She might also not have been 100% right in the head.
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There should be a minimum of 2 and they should be given tasks that prevent them from distracting each other. No talking allowed. I cannot imagine any human short of maybe an astronaut with the capacity to remain focused on such a mind numbing job. Heck even when I drive my own car I realize there's huge sections of time where I can't even recall the drive. The only safety there is that because I'm actually controlling the car there some part of my brain reading the road even if it's not my frontal lobe.
Go to a well run public swimming pool and watch the life guards. If they are well trained every couple minutes they will stand up and sequentially point to a dozen different places in the pool. They are using biomechanics to force their attention not to glaze over. You have to do stuff like that and you have to rotate the lifeguards. One safety person in the car at night is nuts.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No human driver could have seen that woman in time to stop, but a car equipped with infrared lidar should be able to.
If the car had blown its horn and made a best effort to slow down as much as possible: she might have survived.
First why is there light shining on the driver? wouldn't that blind them? I don't think that's ambient light because the passenger seat and walls are not illuminated like the driver is.
Second, what is with the coming out of the back of the driver's head? Seriously look at the video.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I generally agree about what seemed to happen and disappointment that the car didn't appear to react at all. I do doubt that human reaction time would have actually engaged the brake pedal in time to slow down before the car touched the player.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Unless the horn honked based on LIDAR (which is reasonable), the person could have taken no action in time. Agreed about the car not slowing down at all, I would have expected it to react, though I do not think a human could have reacted fast enough to even think about slowing down.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The whole concept of 'this is good enough to do it all for you, except pay attention, just in case' is deeply flawed. If not normally engaged, a human's attention will of course drift.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As a driver in a test vehicle he should have been paying attention since its an unproven system. At the same time, that woman didn't react or even look his way either. My guess is she was too drunk to ride the bike, hence her walking it—and also explains not being attentive to staying under the streetlights or at least be looking towards traffic. I am not excusing Uber's potential liability in the situation, but at the same time his level of half-attentiveness seems likely to be the norm for people using these systems in the future, if not far worse.
That safety driver was not even looking at the road, but the exterior camera showed the bicycle was visible to the car for about 2 seconds before the collision...
Thats the fallacy of "safety drivers" in these cars -- no human will stay alert and attentive for hours while letting the car do all of the driving, and when a bad situation does arise and they need to take over they don't have enough situational awareness to do the right thing. The same thing can happen to pilots.
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.
A human being might have got their foot off the accelerator in the time given them - a really great driver might have got his foot to the brake pedal before impact. This is a nightmare scenario for any driver. Oh, and there are vehicles ahead, so it would be illegal to be running high beams. But I agree - detecting things like this is the job of the LIDAR and/or RADAR systems. Why it didn't is really interesting to me - yes, that's the serious problem here.
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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.
It was manslaughter. Lidar should have been able to see her. I think a meat slab MAY have missed her, but maybe not. Deer are common in my neighborhood and I have yet to hit one. A few panic stops, but no contact. And deer basically do exactly what this woman did only faster.
She is coming in from the drivers side and the impact point is on the passenger side. The car was not even trying to stop. It takes about a second walking to get from her point of visibility on the camera (crap quality so a person would have noticed her sooner) to the point of impact. In a second the car could have slowed to maybe 15mph, which might have been enough to save her. And given a person would have likely noticed the reflectors moving on the wheels of the bike, a person would likely have avoided the accident completely. But what is truly obscene is the Lidar system missed her. I checked, Uber supposedly uses a 360 degree lidar system mounted on the roof. And it missed her. Uber's also have a radar system in front, but someone on foot may not be a large enough reflection to trigger a stop. But how did the system not even begin to brake. It mowed her over. The programmer who designed this hot mess needs to go to jail.
The truly sad part is this woman was homeless and has no one advocating for her. This story will go away faster than a school shooting and nothing will change.
It seems this car (the software that is) perhaps was doing the human equivalent of "overdriving its headlights" - i.e., the sensors it had available to it were unable to see far enough ahead to give the software time to react to an obstacle in the road and bring the car to a controlled safe stop. Alternatively, it saw the woman and the bike but failed to classify them correctly for some reason. Either one is a priority 1 bug in my view.
The driver, had he been paying any attention, might also have been guilty of allowing the car to overdrive both its sensors and his own vision and ability. In that case, he should have either taken complete command of the car earlier or manually adjusted the speed (if the UI allows that) while leaving the rest of the driving to the software. Of course, since he wasn't paying attention, about all we can know is that he was guilty of reckless distracted driving.
Yes, the woman was at fault also, but this is exactly the sort of thing that I would expect a self-driving car NOT to do even in a case like this. IFF self driving cars are reliable at these simple things (don't hit stuff in front of you, don't hit buses to your left, and even don't drive under semitrailers that are turning in front of you) am I going to be tolerant of some of the unnecessary delays they will cause in some traffic conditions or odd, rare and complex corner cases where they make an incorrect judgement resulting in an accident.
It seems that this particular case is an obvious test case that one would run long before putting the first car on the public roads so this is likely also a serious QA flaw. It smells a bit of a situation where everyone in the development organization is incented to ship now, debug later. Perhaps companies who are developing self driving cars should hire some engineers "outside the camp" whose sole job is to develop and help execute tests without pressure to "ship now, debug later". Perhaps this independent team should be given about four hours a quarter of every executive, manager, architect, and senior engineer involved in the project (all the way up to and including the CEO) to use as test dummies (after a detailed description of the test, they can opt out -- but that fact will be recorded and will be considered a test failure, it's up to the CEO to then take sole responsibility for declaring that it's okay to ship with that test failure -- such as if the test involved requiring the "test dummy" to jump off the top of a parked truck just into the path of the car when the car was just three feet away and going 60 MPH).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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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I agree with this. Additionally, as bad as the video quality is I could still see the pedestrian quite a way out. The car could have at least attempted to brake, honk the horn and swerve away. The LIDAR most certainly should have seen the pedestrian as well. I think if the driver was paying a lot more attention to the road then this could have been avoided since typically a human has better night vision than a dashboard camera.
I can also say in Uber's defense that just the other night that I barely saw a bicyclist who crossed in a crosswalk without any reflectors or lights and wearing dark clothing. In this case, however, it was a lit crosswalk and a traffic light so I was stopped.
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No human driver could have seen that woman in time to stop
Had the headlamps been aimed properly, they could have. In the video, when the car is traveling at 38 mph (56 feet/second), it takes about 1.5 seconds between the time the pedestrian came into view and when the collision occurred. That means that the headlamps are only lighting up an area 84 feet in front of the vehicle. If the vehicle's headlamps are about 2 feet off the ground, then when they're properly aiimed, they should be lighting up an area about 285 feet in front of the car (VOL headlamps where the left half of the horizontal beam cutoff is 2.1 inches below headlamp height at a distance of 25 feet from the front of the vehicle).
If the pedestrian was visible at 285 feet, it would have taken 5 seconds from the time the pedestrian came into view till when a collision could occur. That would have given the driver a second to react and 4 more seconds to slow down and/or change direction to avoid a collision.
It wouldn't have helped the pedestrian see the car coming given that it was painted in a dark colour (grey), and was coming out from under a bridge.
I think all self-driving cars under test should be white or brightly-coloured. In fact I'd like to see accident statistics for black vs. white cars.
It's easy to blame technology. Notice in the video that there are TWO nearby streetlights. All the video shows is that it's a crappy dashcam with very poor dynamic range.
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I also noticed two nearby streetlights. I'm almost certain I wouldn't have hit her either.
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I detected movement that would have alerted me about 3-4 seconds prior to impact. And I expect that the video is much darker than human eyes would have made out.
There is a car (I see something resembling headlights) far behind the woman , with roughly the same angular velocity as projected by the woman. It is possible that the machine vision is trained to not take it into account if the data (or a part of it) is coming from a distance.
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Personally, I think human eyes could have done better than the camera in terms of seeing in the dark.
I detected movement 3, maybe 4 seconds before impact. Even if impact were unavoidable, I'm sure I'd have the brakes on and likely swerved.
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her name was Elaine Herzberg, not that person or the pedestrian , `Elaine was killed by ubers car.
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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.
Kids crawl before they learn to walk and run. How about we hone this technology for day time use first and solve the darkness issue with more mature technology later? May be make an exception for freeways, and allow it even in dark. But non-freeway streets, just disable it.
Its human nature to not pay attention or have wrong ideas and expectations about right of way, but getting killed for it is very unfair. Humans can make mistakes, machines can't! We have to get to that level of reliability for this self-driving idea to be viable.
That is also one of the reason we dropped first city speed limit to 50 then to 30 kmh - because in city the braking distance due to lack of visibility is very important. I can't judge for the number on really braking but I can vouch that the reaction time is usually above the 750 millisecond range and at 30 kmh this is nearly 5 meter. Or for the imperial unit for the car case we are speaking of : 35 mph for an attentive human reaction time of 750 ms this is 50 feet per second or roughly 42 feet , or 14 yard. So the women would have had no chance to apply brake. The car itself will also take quite some time so even with lidar :
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so even discarding the human and assuming lidar instant response, the car would still need 136 feet to brake, so into yard about 45 yard. Impossible to avoid the woman even if car start braking instantly. That said I would like to know if it did start to brake on its own or not...
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I've seen people driving like that in Florida with absolutely no autonomy. You cannot be pulled for texting while driving under Florida law. It is a secondary offense. You can be ticketed, but only if they pull you for something else like speeding.
If your vehicle is moving such that your reaction+braking distance is greater than your visibility (whether that's a sensor or an eye), then you're at fault. It's really that simple. You are putting the car into a position where you cannot possibly react to any feasible hazard in the road ahead.
I'm prepared to believe that the video contrast is not reflective of what it looks like from the car, but I've ALWAYS found that dashcams are better than you think and see more than you would, especially in post-analysis.
But the woman isn't DIVING across the road at 100mph. She isn't stepping out from behind parked cars where there's no possibility of being seen. She's walked across the road. The light-beams of the car pick her up. No corrective action is taken until she's already inevitably dead. The car didn't see her. Like the driver didn't see her.
If it was a human driving, that's because "it was dark". Then slow down, so your headlights illuminate the area you're going to need to brake inside.
If it was the computer driving, the sensors weren't able to pick up objects outside a certain range. Then it shouldn't ever be going fast enough to not have a braking distance inside that range.
It's really quite simple.
There's a whole lane to her left. She's at walking speed. You didn't see her despite being "wider" than a person because of the bike. There's a dark spot and your headlights aren't illuminating it and the street lighting isn't great at that point. But no corrective action occurs. The front doesn't dip. The car doesn't slow. The steering doesn't avoid. The speed isn't dropped when visibility drops.
That's an emergency braking scenario, sure. Unexpected pedestrian maybe (but in the UK, you get that kind of thing all the time, and we don't have jaywalking etc. laws). But the fact that even the low-light kit of a CCTV camera can't pick her up until even emergency braking wouldn't suffice means that it was going too fast for the conditions. And that NOTHING appears to change in terms of the car's motion... that indicates absolute failure.
Sorry, no matter how perfect a driver we might think we all are... this is bad driving. That the human "driver" isn't looking is merely incidental in this case, because he couldn't have done anything from that speed - and thus it shouldn't have been AT that speed.
This would be excuseable on a non-lit motorway (designated absolutely no pedestrians, no side-walks, no access to pedestrians, CCTV surveillance and automated warning of "pedestrians in road" for miles if it does happen). But on a lit road, what we'd class as a "dual-carriageway" in the UK, though it might be legal to do quite high speeds, it's always at the driver's discretion and responsibility. And that change from "I can see all the road" to "I can see what's in my beams" should have prompted a slow-down.
And, at the very least, evidence of braking and movement to the left to try to avoid the pedestrian. That camera literally doesn't dip right up to the point it hits her. That means no braking or no suspension. It literally didn't "see" her at all. Not even at the last moment. Not at all until contact occurred. It didn't detect her, even "too late" or try to avoid it. It didn't even know it was going to collide until it actually did.
I hope like hell that whatever transport safety board is responsible demands data from the car about when it detected her and what its expected detection range was at the speed it was doing, and what action was taken before collision.
I also find it suspicious that it cuts out at point of impact (sure, censor it)... that might suggest that maybe the car just kept going and the guy had to stop it.
Not true. Given recent news of people hurling their bodies at self-driving cars which are stopped at lights, we need a car which actively evades people who are chasing it.
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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.
I too have perfect sight in hindsight.
I'm not giving the Uber test-driver a pass on this.
So what if the final end-user isn't going to pay attention, that's why it's still in development. The test driver was behind the wheel of a test system. They should have been MORE attentive than a normal manual driver because they need to monitor the behaviour of the vehicle as well as the surroundings
LIDAR could easily have trouble with dark clothing in the same way that headlights do. Yes, it's infra-red, and dark for visible light is not necessarily the same as dark in IR, but LIDAR is not magic.
What sort of idiot crosses the street without watching for traffic???
An alert driver may have seen the woman however even if they didn't this is proof that having a driver behind the wheel "that can take over in the event of the self driving car coming across a situation that it can't handle" is a load of shit because by the time you've actually realised something has happened, you've been alerted to it and got over the initial shock and even thought about putting your hands on the controls the accident is already well in progress and you're just a passenger.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Distraction is bad enough on Level 2 systems
I've only ever been rear-ended by distracted drivers on Level 0 systems.
You have to enable every fucking thing under the sun to get this video to play. I am NOT enabling googletagmanager.com, amazon-adsystem.com, or googletagservices.com, because I do not want to be systematically advertised to, nor do I want google to tag me so that they can track me.
Posting a link to a site like that is doing the advertisers' work for them. Fuck you, Slashdot. Fuck you twice. Here is a link to the guardian, which doesn't make you bend over for google and amazon just to watch a video.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Another possibility -- the LIDAR profile of a pedestrian slowly walking a bike could have resembled a something that the computer was designed to ignore. For example, signs on the side of the road, or fences, would generally cause a lot of false signals unless the system was designed to ignore these.
We don't know the woman personally, so I'm not going to call her by name, even if her name is available. That's just common sense. When you are talking to someone about a trip to a diner, do you say "Rebecca brought the food", or "the waitress brought the food"? When you tell someone about your trip to the doctor do you say "Bill (or Dr Smith) says I need to watch my cholesterol" or do you say "my doctor says I need to watch my cholesterol"? When you stay at a hotel, do you tell your wife "The lady at the front desk said breakfast will be ready at 6:30" or do you tell her "Cindy said breakfast will be ready at 6:30"? (think carefully about your choice on that last one)
I understand the point you are trying to make, but you're going about it in an awkward way.
We don't actually know that LIDAR failed to see the person. It could have seen the person and taken its course of action anyway, if it determined that doing so was the best decision. It could have decided that swerving out the way was more dangerous, for instance.
Whatever the case, I expect the software failed to respond appropriately to the hardware inputs, not that the hardware inputs failed to pick up the person at all.
If you look at the sign on the streetlight at the right, it appears to flash yellow twice around 1-3s into the video.
Does anyone know what that's about?
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.
I guess I'm a superhuman driver... In fact if that's your criteria for being beyond human then you'd best start to welcome your tea-swilling British overlords.
Because this shit happens in the UK all the fucking time and no-one dies. Suicyclist rides on unlit road in black with no lights or reflectors... Yet our streets aren't filled with bodies, quite the opposite, we have 1/4 the number of deaths per capita from road accidents than the US.
What was wrong here was:
1. The "operator" wasn't paying attention.
2. The car was not using high beams on a dark street (my BMW 2er does this automatically).
3. The "operator" wasn't paying attention.
4. The car was not taking into account the paths of objects off the road.
5. The car was travelling too fast for the conditions (low visibility).
6. Did I mention that the "operator" wasn't paying attention.
Using these simple steps:
1. Use your high beams appropriately.
2. Manage your speed according to the conditions.
3. Pay FUCKING attention.
I can avoid killing cyclists and pedestrians in the dark.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The radar and lidar certainly SHOULD have seen the pedestrian and it certainly appears that the driver was NOT paying attention.
I've worked with LIDAR for aerial surveying.... LIDAR certainly would have picked the pedestrian up. Its software that ignored it. There is no way for the LIDAR or RADAR not to return an object like a pedestrian or pedestrian with bike at that distance (the parking distance control RADAR in my BMW freaks out at an overhanging leaf). What likely happened is that it was written off as a false positive because it wasn't directly in the way of the car and the car was not tracking the path of nearby objects.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Occasionally I've driven on freeways with 65-70 MPH speed limits in total darkness, except for normal headlights. High beams had to be turned off to avoid hindering other drivers.
It's basically impossible to drive at a safe speed where you can possibly avoid unexpected obstacles like pedestrians. The best you can do is watch the reflectors, lane markers, and the lights of other motorists. Lowering speed to 20-25 MPH on a freeway is simply not an option.
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.
This. But it should be noted the car was not using high beams on an unlit empty street. This is something a new BMW 2 series can be optioned with (as well as auto-dipping headlights which is standard). This wouldn't have prevented the collision because the operator wasn't paying attention, but its a flaw that still needs to be fixed.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I detected movement 3, maybe 4 seconds before impact.
No you didn't. You can look at the time on the video in the article, and her white shoes were visible at the 3 second mark. She was hit at about the 4.5 second mark. That is 1.5 seconds to react from when you first she a faint white blur that may be something, and about 1 second from when you can actually tell it is a person on the road and not some bag flying in the wind.
Mean reaction time for a human driver is 1.5 seconds. That means it takes 1.5 seconds from when you see a pedestrian to when you start to press the break and/or begin to swerve the car. Obviously that is the mean, meaning you could be a bit quicker, but police should never fault anyone for not reacting withing a couple seconds.
That woman would have been dead in nearly 100% of cases with a human driver. The biggest difference is many human drivers may have swerved or acted erratically and caused more harm to the driver as well. I agree with others here that a LIDAR or even night vision cameras could and probably should have saved her life, but no human would have done better.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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. [...] If the driver were paying a lot more attention to the road than the phone then this also could have been prevented.
I first see the white of her shoes at the 3 second mark. She is hit at around the 4.5 second mark. Since mean human reaction time is 1.5 seconds, you would have had no ability to avoid this pedestrian.
That driver shouldn't have been texting, but he was 0% at fault. There is no way he could have avoided her; human biology is literally incapable of reacting that fast. At best he could have put himself in danger by jerking the wheel and acting erratically.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Just remember that a person's eyes have a superior angular resolution to that video, even in the dark, and a far greater dynamic range.
Ever take a picture at night with a mixture of light levels, and stuff you can clearly see is washed out to all black? The eye can deal with a much wider range of things from the brightest thing "in frame" to the darkest thing captured than basically all imagers.
I human driver would have seen her in time to at least stomp on the brakes, as ineffective as that would be. And I suspect that a human driver would have noticed her sooner. Almost certainly the cameras do not portray te lighting conditions accurately.
The automation systems didn't seem to know shit about her.
And it wasn't as if she "suddenly darted" into he road.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
According to AZ law, low-beams need to be at least 100 ft. And high-beams 350 ft. Sounds like Uber is at least in violation of that. Don't know anybody who drives with their high-beams on all the time, so I can't comment on the other part of your argument.
While humans need light, should the car be seeing with something better... like radar?
It could have seen the person and taken its course of action anyway, {...} It could have decided that swerving out the way was more dangerous, for instance.
Unless Uber have been implementing their driving system in a completely weird way (e.g.: the whole thing is just a giant deep neural net black box, with sensors on one side and controls directly driven by the output of the NN on the other side, like the Nvidia demo platform - which is just a techdemo, not a real-world use case), there are low-level system in drive assistance systems.
Even on current "Level 1" system currently on the street for quite some time, it the FCAS detects an obstacle in front of the car, the FCAS will hit the brakes and try to decelerate as much as possible (either stopping before hitting the object if distance permits, or in the current case if the obstacle jumps into view at the last moment, trying to shed as much kinetic energy before the impact as possible to reduce damage and potentially make the collision non-fatal).
Even if the higher level path-finding doesn't react (and frankly what should it do ? swerving is rarely a good idea as it increases risk of skiding), the low-level system should hit the brake.
Here they didn't, meaning that they didn't register the bike to begin with.
Somehow, not only the victim wasn't seen by the camera (obvious from the video : she was in dark until the last few seconds. Neither a human nor a camera would have noticed them in time), but it wasn't seen by either the lidar nor the radar.
Either she was invisible to the sensors (e.g.: the dark jacket aborbing the IR light used by the lidar, the spokes of the bike's wheels shattering the radar wave in a weird way, etc.)
or the sensors didn't register her (e.g.: the radar detects her as an object, but to the side (not in the same lane) and thus not a collision danger at that time. My experience with ACC is that sometime the radar has problem undestanding which object are in the same lane or not (problems fusing radar detections with the camera's lane detection and/or with the drivers wheel's heading) sometime missing (false negative) objects which are a bit on the side, or sometime getting confused (false positive) when the lane is curving a lot and the radar picks something in front of the car).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Jokes about stealthy bike aside, she *is* indeed very stealthy.
- Her jacket is very dark, it might be also dark in the IR spectrum and be as invisible on the LIDAR as on the camera.
- She not only doesn't have any light turned on on her bike, she doesn't even have any reflector on her bike nor on her clothing (here around where I live that would be considered suicidal)
On the other hand, the radar should have picked-up her (unless the bike wheel's spokes are scattering the radio wave in a weird way), but maybe the radar saw her too much to the left side, i.e.: "in a different lane and thus not on a collision course". The radar analysis part of the system should be upgraded to take into acount object moving perpenducaly to the vehicle.
(i.e.: Yes, if she stayed where she was, she would have been in a different lane. But she was moving side ways to the right. If the radar was able to pick her up, the computer should be able to calculate speed/trajectory and determine she'll be in the car's lane by the time the car reaches her).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I very frequently drive 75+ on interstates in total darkness (far from any city lights) for hours at a time with only low beams on -- and can see much farther then can be ascertained by viewing that video. Which leads me to assume that the camera was either of very low quality, that the technology is still insufficient or that the video was modified in some way. The sight lines on that road looked fine (and she was not entering the roadway from behind a tree/parked car). Looking at the video, even the road was "visible" for a very short distance (and with the pink bike, she should have been far more visible). Heck, if I am paying attention, I can avoid potholes in the highway doing 75+ in the dark -- and a pothole is much harder to see on a highway in the dark. Something doesn't make sense here -- and if the available cameras are really limited to that level of quality in the dark -- then either these vehicles shouldn't be authorized to work in the dark -- or they will have to prove that other sensors (radar or lidar) are both configured, can provide sufficient "visibility" and are working properly. To be honest, if my eyesight was limited to what the camera footage showed, it would be gross negligence to drive at almost any rate of speed exceeding 20 MPH in the dark -- ever.
Any evidence for that statement? You can't rely on the video - digital cameras have much, much poorer dynamic range than the human eye. When you drive at night, you don't have nearly as dramatic a cut-off in your vision as is shown in the video. That's just one reason why you couldn't rely on digital cameras alone (at least those relying on visible light) to detect obstacles in a moving car. You could use a camera operating outside the visible spectrum and therefore could illuminate much higher without dazzling oncoming drivers.
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.
Oh, sure. "Some guy said it's well lit" is all the evidence I need in order to ignore video footage and firmly believe that a human driver could have avoided the accident. Gossip is the best type of evidence!
Due to the apparent total darkness where the bicyclist was crossing and the bright street lights right before, it seems that the camera was adjusting its DR to accommodate the near conditions. The human eye (not an old person) would have been able to see much further than what the video suggests.
Lidar most certainly saw her, Uber's software most likely didn't know what to make of it and discarded it as noise.
Maybe the headlights were in DRL (daytime running lamp) mode.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I agree. By the time the jaywalker was visible no one would be able to stop.
She may have been visible to a human much earlier than we can tell from that camera footage. That camera seem to have a relatively narrow exposure range. She was in the the other lane well before camera visible. In the camera picture, the left lane is totally blacked out past the direct field of the headlights. You can see well past that with your eyes.
That the car didn't even appear to slow down (although that is hard to tell as well) is another concern.
It was a dashcam. The lens is slow, everything looks way darker than it does to your eyes. The driver could have seen her way before the dashcam viewer could.
Agree 100%. I've never seen that dramatic of a falloff of viewable area with the naked eye unless its is heavy fog or rain. Camera exposure range is pushed up due to the brighter areas.
She wasn't just crossing outside a sidewalk, it looks like she was crossing outside the area lighted by streetlights. She was only illuminated by the cars headlights. Seems like the car should have at least attempted to avoid but if a human had been driving the car, she would be just as dead. No human would have reacted in time.
Camera exposure range is limited,, a human paying attention could have seen her sooner and been able to swerve, maybe not completely avoiding her but maybe not hitting her fatally. There was no car in the oncoming lane so plenty of room to swerve left.
This is far from clear cut
Modern cars like this Volvo auto aim them.
Well, the "Safety Driver" is, and has to be, nearly decoration. As another poster has frequently said, research shows universal human failure to maintain attention in that kind of situation. It's true there haven't been large group studies, so it's possible that some small fraction of people can maintain attention in that kind of a situation. But do notice that *small*. It's definitely well under 10%, and probably well under 1%.
I actually feel bad for the driver as well as the family of the victim. You can argue the drive wasn't doing his job, but the human factors element set him up for failure.
Clearly this is an opportunity for traffic law enforcement then. Cull the tailgaters and rack up some money for state/local services.
Win-Win.
And 15 feet less stopping distance if they were going the limit. Not to mention she may have survived had they partially stopped.
Why can Uber vehicles go over the limit?
Check out this video that shows how easy it really is to see on same stretch of road at night;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's perfectly clear cut.
Don't walk in front of moving vehicles, or you will die.
I have no great love of Uber, but I have active disdain for idiotic pedestrians who want to die in front of my car.
His name is Robert Paulson.
His name is Robert Paulson.
His name is Robert Paulson.
Why on earth should they be held to a higher standard? That's ridiculous.
It might be instructive to learn just how much this newly minted test driver was paid.
It's UBER. My guess is minimum wage.
Real test pilots / test drivers aren't cheap.
Hence the second part of mysidia's sentence:
It's clear that a human driver would certainly not have seen the person before it was too late.. BUT you expect from a selfdriving car to be able to see into the dark using radar, so IT should have noticed the person much sooner. But it still might have been impossible to prevent the accident. Selfdriving cars will never be able to cope with all situations safely, but it will be much MUCH safer than with a real person behind the wheel..
I'm not talking about when she was first illuminated by the headlights. I saw movement in the dark using the same intensity of focus I would have used when driving in those conditions. I would have also been driving slower, because it's hard to see.
And this is just in the video, I expect I would have seen her much sooner with my eyes. This coming from someone with fairly bad night vision!
In my opinion the standard for this technology is that there should never be any doubt a human operator couldn't have done better.
Another thing to consider: what if this had been a bicycle legally occupying the lane? Or small displacement scooter?
I don't know how you handled the situation (or if you just kept going until you hit) but the "parking" a.k.a. "emergency" brake should have still been operational even with the hydraulic line broken. It's good to keep in mind that there's a brake lever there in case of something like this happening.
Not stop, but slow down.
If the safety driver had seen the woman one second earlier, he could have slammed on his brakes and at least slowed down the vehicle before hitting her (which may, or may not, have made a difference). But the rest of your point is a good one.
It's going to be a long time before I let a driverless car drive me around. And I can't believe that these things are allowed on the road when they are clearly flawed. This is just as bad as when the Tesla ran full bore into into a giant trailer. The first, most basic thing a driverless car should do (safety wise) is be able to tell that something is directly in front of it. In both of these cases, it was completely unaware that there was an object in front of it. If your 'driverless' car can't do this most basic task, then it needs to go back to testing tracks and R&D. Not drive around on public roads...
This episode of Adam Ruins Everything?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=-AFn7MiJz_s
Which is why NASA picks up their astronauts at the local Home Depot, shoves them into space with no training, and pays them minimum wage.
The UBER "Safety Driver" is a test pilot for an unproven technology running in test mode on public roads fer fuck's sake.
Per what we had to memorise for the UK driving test, stopping distance (including thinking distance) at 40 mph is 118 feet. See the table in rule 126 of the Highway Code: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/th...
What youâ(TM)re saying is that they have no excuse if they should have seen them at 285â(TM).
But in the case of this particular segment he doesn't appear to have cherry picked the data; see for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking
and
Then there's this which echoes the statements of some of the folks posting here about their hatred of anybody who dares set foot in the road except within a crosswalk when the light is green:
And as someone from the UK posted previously, UK law is substantially different from US law and custom:
The NASA astronauts are expected to exercise control over things in multiple ways. It's not even a bad analogy. The safety driver is supposed to just sit there until things go pear shaped and then instantly be on top of it. A test pilot couldn't handle that job.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This video looks doctored [to favour the potentially liable].It looks to me that it has been edited to have additional black/dark splotches to make the woman’s image seem darker than was actually the case in the original footage.On top of that, I believe that the human eye (such as of the human operator in the vehicle, had he been looking at the road) should have seen more than just the supposed utter blackness to the left.
I don’t have time to spare right now to extract frames from this video and include them here, but if you play it in a video player that lets you move frame by frame, here’s what you can discover and discern:
There is a pair of consecutive frames in the video (just before the collision) where the woman’s dark jacket is not illuminated in the earlier frame, and then illuminated in the immediately following frame.We can also see that the street lighting is orange in colour, whereas the vehicle headlights shine something distinctly lighter in colour than orange.Her head and hair/hat are also lit in orange several frames before this pair of frames.It seems very likely to me that blackness was added up to and including the earlier of the two frames, because the jacket should not just suddenly turn orange, it should become orange at the same time her head turns orange, which is several frames earlier.
Furthermore: Observe the first 2 seconds of the clip.Looking at the left side, you can see how much of the road, curb and even grass/dirt is illuminated by the headlights to the front-left of the vehicle.Estimate how far the headlights seem to be illuminating: the entire width of the adjacent lane, plus the curb, and more.
Now move the clip forward through the next seconds up to the collision.Observe how much that same front-left area of the vehicle is NOT lit anymore as it approaches the black splotches.The headlights should still be illuminating at least the full width of the adjacent lane.But they aren't.
In my opinion, this video was intentionally altered.
(This isn't even considering any LIDAR or radar that others have already mentioned.)
Why on earth should they be held to a higher standard? That's ridiculous.
For the same reason we can automatically assign some fault for an accident if we detect that a human driver has high blood alcohol content or was texting, on that basis alone. If the driver was operating below the maximum possible level of ability for that specific driver, then there is responsibility to be assigned to the driver.
Because.... we say every vehicle's driver has An absolute duty to prevent their vehicle from colliding with pedestrians, And they have some fault for an incident unless it is clearly impossible that they would have prevented it. That is: "Assuming the driver makes no errors -- this accident could still not possibly be prevented; would be an adequate defense", BUT for this case that doesn't hold..... The Self-Driving car COULD have prevented the accident and FAILED to prevent the accident, and it was ultimately caused by Unsafe driving and some defect in the Uber system that they have yet to determine.
For the same reason we can automatically assign some fault for an accident if we detect that a human driver has high blood alcohol content or was texting, on that basis alone. If the driver was operating below the maximum possible level of ability for that specific driver, then there is responsibility to be assigned to the driver.
First, that is not the standard. Drivers do not need to be in peak condition for every drive, that is absurd. People drive all the time while a little tired, after a fight with their ex, with children in the car, while listening to the radio, and yes even after having a glass of wine. Plus people, ALL people make reasonable mistakes. They are NOT held responsible for every accident, only those that likely would have been avoided by another reasonable driver.
Second, if this were true it would lead to perverse and damaging outcomes. The geriatric mother would drive home despite having poor night vision and terrible reflexes because the son had a single glass of wine (or even had a long day at work).
Because.... we say every vehicle's driver has An absolute duty to prevent their vehicle from colliding with pedestrians, And they have some fault for an incident unless it is clearly impossible that they would have prevented it.
"impossible?" Again, this is a fantasy of your own making. Drivers have the obligation to avoid accidents to the best of their ability at the time and are not found responsible unless they were doing something illegal. There would be thousands more people in jail for manslaughter if your standard were applied, just about every pedestrian death is avoidable if the driver did something different. A human driver in this accident would not be in jail if it were simply pointed out that some drivers (or even this driver) could have possibly seen that tiny bit of light.
That is: "Assuming the driver makes no errors -- this accident could still not possibly be prevented; would be an adequate defense", BUT for this case that doesn't hold..... The Self-Driving car COULD have prevented the accident and FAILED to prevent the accident, and it was ultimately caused by Unsafe driving and some defect in the Uber system that they have yet to determine.
Aaaand this is why your argument is totally vacuous. If we use your standard self-driving cars will never be deployed because EVERY accident could be avoided if they had more sensors if they had better algorithms if they launched bubble wrap safety balls from the grill to cocoon a pedestrian that darts in front of them. Your extreme position will cost millions of lives and countless injuries and damage.
Going back to perverse incentives. Which do we want on the road, a human with a 97% safety record or an autocar with a 99% safety record? Your answer is the human and your reasoning is simply ridiculous FUD.
"Either that or the dashcam was misleading in terms of light levels"
They are. My commute is mostly unlit and what the camera sees on highbeam is about half (or less) what human eyes can see. on low beam it's even worse than that.
This is a serious (as in catastrophic level) failure on Uber's part. It doesn't _matter_ that the pedestrian was crossing illegally. The car needs to detect and avoid obstacles on the road.
Firstly: In most most countries what she did was perfectly legal and Uber wants to deploy this software outside the USA. This demonstration of incompetence has set back licensing of self-driving vehicles by a decade (thanks to public pushback) or more and will ensure higher levels of care in certification and more rigorous testing procedures.
Secondly: If that had been a cow or other large animal, it wouldn't be a dead pedestrian, it would be a set of dead car occupants. There's a reason that the "Moose Manouveure" is a required part of the finnish driving test.
Thirdly: Hazard perception is an important part of most countries' driving tests. The car utterly failed - but then again most american drivers utterly fail, which is why your USA license is generally not transferrable to another country without a full driving test.
Fourthly: Even if being on the road _is_ illegal, this kind of thing happens and humans take account of/react to it. If there's a crash or other hazard on a freeway I want my robocar to stop, not plow on and end up being part of the mayhem. Uber have demonstrated a 100% fail at hazard handling. California was right to order them off the road and Arizona should follow suit.
Well that obviously didn't work.
Maybe a protocol for "Safety Driving" is needed that somehow maintains the "Safety Driver's" level of alertness instead of having them sit there like a lump to magically awaken and take control when the car is about to run over a pedestrian.
But that costs money. This is Uber.
This is a serious (as in catastrophic level) failure on Uber's part. It doesn't _matter_ that the pedestrian was crossing illegally. The car needs to detect and avoid obstacles on the road.
Complete the thought, please. Some obstacles, most obstacles, most hazardous obstacles, all obstacles? All obstacles in every condition? As well as a human, better than a human, perfectly?
Firstly: In most most countries what she did was perfectly legal and Uber wants to deploy this software outside the USA.
Hell, in some countries that Uber would have been driving on the wrong side of the road. What the hell were they thinking?
This demonstration of incompetence has set back licensing of self-driving vehicles by a decade (thanks to public pushback) or more and will ensure higher levels of care in certification and more rigorous testing procedures.
That the public overreact should not be blamed on Uber. It certainly affects them and their bottom line, which they will have to reckon with, but you can't blame them for others being luddites. Blame the luddites.
Secondly: If that had been a cow or other large animal, it wouldn't be a dead pedestrian, it would be a set of dead car occupants. There's a reason that the "Moose Manouveure" is a required part of the finnish driving test.
And when Uber is ready to test in Finland they can add software to handle that.
Thirdly: Hazard perception is an important part of most countries' driving tests. The car utterly failed - but then again most american drivers utterly fail, which is why your USA license is generally not transferrable to another country without a full driving test.
So again, why the problem if the car is generally safer than human drivers on the road it is operating on?
Fourthly: Even if being on the road _is_ illegal, this kind of thing happens and humans take account of/react to it. If there's a crash or other hazard on a freeway I want my robocar to stop, not plow on and end up being part of the mayhem. Uber have demonstrated a 100% fail at hazard handling. California was right to order them off the road and Arizona should follow suit.
So basically you're saying that these cars are not ready to be deployed around the world with no safety driver. Good thing that nobody is arguing for that then, isn't it?
Didn't work? It has in fact worked in thousands of other cases. It isn't foolproof but maybe it's good enough. Not that you could even clearly say this is an example of the system failing.
So basically you're saying that these cars are not ready to be deployed around the world with no safety driver.
This car was not ready for limited testing under these conditions WITH a safety driver.
The trouble is someone who is Not driving is going to automatically become fatigued watching and get distracted.
They'd be better off with a remote datacenter of staff watching the car's cameras 24x7 in 10-minute shifts.
Is there a published account of the thousands of cases where a pedestrian was about to be run over by the autonomous vehicle and the "Safety Driver" saved the day?
Or just thousands of accounts where nothing much got in the way and everybody went home happy?
Yes, there are thousands of logged accounts of the safety driver taking control of the vehicle.
Thousands where the driver saved a life by taking control at the last second? Of course not, that is an absurd standard.
Just the other day a student driver crashed into the DMV building while taking her driving test. Does that prove that the current system of human driver testing is a complete failure?
This car was not ready for limited testing under these conditions WITH a safety driver.
Again, by what standard? Thousands of people have died in auto accidents since this one from human drivers. Should we suspend all driving?
The trouble is someone who is Not driving is going to automatically become fatigued watching and get distracted.
So what? The car doesn't get tired or exhausted. As long as the overall system is roughly as safe as the average driver it deserves to be on the road. All drivers get bored and distracted by such driving, autocars have a much better chance of avoiding freak accidents such as this.
They'd be better off with a remote datacenter of staff watching the car's cameras 24x7 in 10-minute shifts.
That's a ridiculous conclusion based on no evidence. If other self-driving car companies want to develop such a system and show that it's safer (or cheaper) then by all means go for it. To state it as an obvious solution is again, ridiculous.
We have actual proof of teleportation! Its a conspiracy. The car industry did this on purpose. Oh and Im from the future so I know.
There is ample disagreement here about whether the "Safety Driver" should have seen someone there significantly before the "last second"; it's likely that the poor video from the dashcam is not representative of what a person with good night vision would have seen.
Engineers have also weighed in on the fact that it's very odd that the LIDAR system didn't detect the person long before the car reached her.
The difference is that you are comparing "amateur" drivers with low skill levels to what a professional driver could accomplish. But professional drivers and meaningful protocols to keep the driver alert cost money, and we're talking about Uber here.
The only difference is that you are holding Uber (and other self driving car pioneers) to an unreasonable standard.
Some level of professional driver could have avoided this accident. Some level of self-driving car could have avoided this accident. But could the minimal level of driver we give a license to have avoided this accident? Certainly not. That is the ridiculous double standard you are trying to advocate for.
No. This is new technology in test mode. As such it should be supported by adequate safety measures before being turned loose on public roads. But Uber wants to do things as cheap as possible and they expect that the state will just roll over for them.
"This car was not ready for limited testing under these conditions WITH a safety driver."
Exactly this. As Google quickly discovered, a car which demonstrates even limited autonomy engenders so much overconfidence on the part of the safety overseer that they forget what their task is supposed to be and STOP PAYING ATTENTION. I look on driver assist technology as a way of allowing me to relax a little whilst expanding my scan around the instruments and whant's happening outside the vehicle but I've noticed most drivers use it as a way of paying less attention to what's going on outside the vehicle.
Human factors play into this in a vary large way. This is important in the same way that paying attention to Human Factors is what has reduced aviation incidents and fatalities the most since the 1960s, over any technical improvements (We've had civil aircraft that can fly themselves from runway to runway in full whiteout conditions since 1972. Nearly everything else has been about improving reliability and operational costs)
You can't put a car on the road which claims autonomy - even under test - if it fals the most basic of hazard perception tests. In other words an automated car has to be able to pass the most _advanced_ driving tests in the world, not the stupidly basic ones in a country where cars have effectively been given more rights than human beings. Furthermore, you need some way of ensuring that the surpervisors ARE paying attention and regularly testing them to ensure they know what to do when things go wrong. Aircraft are highly automated, which is why pilots are run through simulators to test worst-case scenario handling regularly and _DRILLED_ into what to do. The idea is that when they react, they react automatically, without going into "stunned mullet mode" watching the aircrash fly itself into the ground (or the car roll into the hazard) - as my flight line instructor use to put it. Even with that training, the Air France 447 pilots managed to fight each other and stall from 38,000 feet into the ocean before they realised what they were doing after the computer handed control back to them unexpectedly.
A safety driver/supervisor has a legal duty of care which has been repeatedly proven to be ignored by bored humans - to the point where Google actually gave up on the idea of even trying to rely on humans being supervisors, because the risk of them being 500 miles away with the fairies when the car asked them to take over was just too high (the classic example is the anecdote of the google employee (early on in trials), who was texting, found his phone was flat, turned around and reached into his backpack on the back seat, got out his laptop, set it up on the passenger seat, then got out a charge cable, plugged the phone in, booted up the computer, then plugged the computer into the car to charge, for a total eyes-off-road time of over a minute - at 75mph on the freeway. That was the point when Google realised that no matter what people are told and how much it is drilled into them that they are legally responsible for supervising the vehicle, they cannot be relied on to safely do so. (It wasn't the only such case, there were many more just like it).
A hazard or obstacle on the road is a hazard. Is that a paper bag or a cinder block?, does that piece of material flapping on the road, conceal an injured person? Do you really want to run it over to find out the difference? You go around it if you can, especially if there's plenty of road and distance to do so. You don't even want to run over small animals if you can avoid it, the panel damage can get expensive. Emphasis on if you canb avoid it. For the case in question there was no other traffic around and plenty of time+room to take evasive action.
It seems that a lot of the people trying to blame the pedestrian are flat out pathological arseholes who need psychatric evaluation and should NEVER be allowed behind the wheel of a 2 ton killing machine. They're exactly the kind of driver that robocars should be eliminating -
It seems that a lot of the people trying to blame the pedestrian are flat out pathological arseholes who need psychatric evaluation and should NEVER be allowed behind the wheel of a 2 ton killing machine.
Well: the pedestrian deserves a little blame for creating a danger, but it's hard to blame someone who is dead and wasn't in control of a vehicle.
Maybe a human driver could not have stopped either, but a human driver exercising due care would definitely not have wound up in this situation.
I firmly believe that Uber's vehicles should be banned from the road permanently, and any reparations and criminal penalties that could be made for the death --- Uber should be required to pay the highest possible amount.
Let Waymo, or another player who has a program built on a more responsible approach continue to develop the technology.