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Human Driver Could Have Avoided Fatal Uber Crash, Experts Say (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The pedestrian killed Sunday by a self-driving Uber SUV had crossed at least one open lane of road before being hit, according to a video of the crash that raises new questions about autonomous-vehicle technology. Forensic crash analysts who reviewed the video said a human driver could have responded more quickly to the situation, potentially saving the life of the victim, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. Other experts said Uber's self-driving sensors should have detected the pedestrian as she walked a bicycle across the open road at 10 p.m., despite the dark conditions. Herzberg's death is the first major test of a nascent autonomous vehicle industry that has presented the technology as safer than humans who often get distracted while driving. For human driving in the U.S., there's roughly one death every 86 million miles, while autonomous vehicles have driven no more than 15 to 20 million miles in the country so far, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. "As an ever greater number of autonomous vehicles drive ever an ever greater number of miles, investors must contemplate a legal and ethical landscape that may be difficult to predict," the analysts wrote in a research note following the Sunday collision. "The stock market is likely too aggressive on the pace of adoption."
raises new questions about autonomous-vehicle technology.
No, it raises further questions about Uber's poor, perhaps criminally negligent, implementation. In the last year Uber's had more, and more serious, accidents than I think every other driverless program combined. Google/Waymo has been testing in San Francisco - not Tempe - for years with nothing comparable.
.: Semper Absurda
I actually watched the set of videos and there's two major things to note:
First of all the safety or backup driver appeared to be distracted. Although in all fairness if you're suppose to sit there hours on end without taking an active roll at driving this is probably going to happen. This is why google believes in all or nothing approach, half-baked systems are going to get people killed. While this wouldn't save the cyclist from being hurt, quick reflexes may have saved it from being fatal.
Second, LIDAR works by projecting a super high speed panning laser that maps out the 3D spacial environment. It causes the computer to produce a 3D model of the surroundings. This should NOT be affected by the dark! Unless Uber decided not to use LiDAR which would be a dangerous move. If they're using LiDAR the only explanation is the AI image recognition system failed to recognize the cyclist which is weird considering an object that BIG moving should register as a collision threat. Google has noted that in their own self-driving program the computer can sometimes panic over a flying piece of newspaper while a normal driver wouldn't because it looks like an object heavy enough to threaten the car.
Its hard to be certain, the video is rather low quality and typically cameras struggle to capture image at night. Even in the low quality video I saw on BBC's site you can see white shoes moving in the shadow which makes me suspect the person was more visible than the video would have you believe.
Perhaps more concerning - the video released of the person supposedly monitoring the car spent an awful lot of time looking down not ahead and out the window.
But consider this. Next time you're a passenger at night on a poorly lit road take out you phone and record the road. I'll wager that your real eyes can see better in the low light then your phone or the camera attached to the Uber car.
Morally, I think the woman is at fault for crossing the road in the dark without looking for oncoming cars and not having any kind of light. But the autonomous car's other sensors should have picked her up anyway. To be successful autonomous cars need to be significantly better then the average driver, they need to be better then the best drivers out there.
I am bias, I can't wait for autonomous cars to come to market. But even I have to admit that it should have seen her coming with plenty of time to spare.
When you live in rural North Georgia or rural New Hampshire for as many years as I have, there's one rule you learn - don't swerve to avoid obstacles in the road (namely deer). You often times will kill yourself trying to avoid the deer much more than you would if you just hit it. So I'm trained, if something jumps out at me, I'm gonna get ready to hit it. A human driver may have been able to swerve out of the way if they were alert and ready to perform the necessary maneuver, but I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna do that. I'll do everything in my power to not kill something, but I won't kill myself trying.
If there is no need to steer, the attention wanders and it is impossible to stay alert. This was discovered almost 100 years ago in the railroads. The engineer had the exacting task of watching for grades and monitoring speed, especially those days with weak steam locomotives that responded very slowly. Still they would get bored and fall asleep. They invented the dead man's treadle. The engineer must keep it pressed, or the locomotive will stop. Even now there are various techniques to check and keep the engineers alert on railroads.
With that much of history, it is stupid for autonomous cars to just leave the driver there. They should have active devices that do challenge and response to make sure the human operator stays alert. Else it is a waste to put a human being there.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Based on the video I saw, she was practically invisible until she entered the car's headlight beams. The road was poorly lit, and she had dark clothing, no reflectors on the bike and no lights.
I don't see how I could have stopped or swerved in time to avoid her in that brief window.
Then I suggest you try driving by looking out the windshield, and not at a crappy video of whats in front of you. I say that not as a joke. People seem to keep judging this situation by the video we see, but the video quality is pretty much crap. I guarantee the human eye would capture much better detail (both in terms of resolution as well as shadow detail) then what we see in that video. The video is absolute crap, so please don't say what you couldn't have done based on it.