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.

Comments

Yeah, it was her fault

[Snotnose]

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.

Re:Yeah, it was her fault

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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.

Re:Yeah, it was her fault

[geoskd]

Level 3 shouldn't exist; it's too dangerous. Even Level 4 probably shouldn't exist, in that it can leave people stranded when things go wrong (but it's supposed to always avoid accidents / unsafe situations and pull over safely when it can't handle them). The levels should be 1, 2, 5.

I'm sorry to have to bring reality into your delusion, but that is not how engineering works. You can't just go from level 2 to level 5 without many millions of miles of real world experience.

The best example of how this process works is the airline industry. In the airline industry, all kinds of new auto piloting features have been added over the years. They were mostly good, but flaws have been found that have caused crashes. Without those crashes, the flaws would never have been found because they are so subtle. That is why the NTSB investigates crashes, and very rarely are criminal charges brought. The reason is simple. If you start bringing criminal charges, then people stop co-operating, and the system that we have now that results in constantly improving safety doesn't work. There isn't anyone that will argue anymore that what we have now for airline safety is far better than it would have been if we stayed solely with 1950's technology in the cockpit, and you can't get where we are now any other way than the way we did: Billions of flight miles of testing with live passengers.

The NTSB seems to be taking the same approach with self driving cars, and I applaud their approach. The NTSB doesn't (and nothing else can) guarantee that there wont be accidents like this. The assurance you do get is that every year, the technology will improve and the danger will be less than before. The systems will always get safer because of the way the NTSB works.

It was long ago determined by our good friends at NASA and the NTSB that the single most dangerous piece of equipment in power air flight is the pilot. This part cannot be significantly improved over its current state, so it has been systematically replaced in the cockpit over the last 50 years. Today, the Pilots are largely just there in case something goes truly wrong, but we are quickly approaching the time when the presence of a pilot will not significantly improve the odds of surviving any given flight.

Applying that same principle to over the road travel is a no-brainer, and given that there are some tens of thousands of traffic deaths in any given year, self driving cars would need to kill on the order of thousands people for every year sooner that they bring about an end to humans in the driver seat.

So far self driving cars have killed less than 10 people that I know of, and if it takes them 10 more years to get it right without killing anyone, then it would be worth the trade if they had to kill 10,000 people to get it right in 9 years instead of 10.

LIDAR

[Aero77]

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

Wait, explain LIDAR again?

[shess]

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.

Re: The Driver was Texting

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

Re:Convinces me Uber is at fault because of 1/R^4

[gumbi west]

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."

Re:Convinces me Uber is at fault because of 1/R^4

[Kaenneth]

"Pedestrians have the always have the right of way."

We'll engrave that on your tombstone.

Video appears to be digitally manipulated

[goombah99]

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.

Re: The Driver was Texting

[AaronW]

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.

Re: The Driver was Texting

[u801e]

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.