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Experts Say Video of Uber's Self-Driving Car Killing a Pedestrian Suggests Its Technology May Have Failed (4brad.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the system-failure dept.

Ever since the Tempe police released a video of Uber's self-driving car hitting and killing a pedestrian, experts have been racing to analyze the footage and determine what exactly went wrong. (If you haven't watched the video, you can do so here. Warning: it's disturbing, though the actual impact is removed.) In a blog post, software architect and entrepreneur Brad Templeton highlights some of the big issues with the video:
1. On this empty road, the LIDAR is very capable of detecting her. If it was operating, there is no way that it did not detect her 3 to 4 seconds before the impact, if not earlier. She would have come into range just over 5 seconds before impact.
2.On the dash-cam style video, we only see her 1.5 seconds before impact. However, the human eye and quality cameras have a much better dynamic range than this video, and should have also been able to see her even before 5 seconds. From just the dash-cam video, no human could brake in time with just 1.5 seconds warning. The best humans react in just under a second, many take 1.5 to 2.5 seconds.
3. The human safety driver did not see her because she was not looking at the road. She seems to spend most of the time before the accident looking down to her right, in a style that suggests looking at a phone.
4.While a basic radar which filters out objects which are not moving towards the car would not necessarily see her, a more advanced radar also should have detected her and her bicycle (though triggered no braking) as soon as she entered the lane to the left, probably 4 seconds before impact at least. Braking could trigger 2 seconds before, in theory enough time.)

To be clear, while the car had the right-of-way and the victim was clearly unwise to cross there, especially without checking regularly in the direction of traffic, this is a situation where any properly operating robocar following "good practices," let alone "best practices," should have avoided the accident regardless of pedestrian error. That would not be true if the pedestrian were crossing the other way, moving immediately into the right lane from the right sidewalk. In that case no technique could have avoided the event. The overall consensus among experts is that one or several pieces of the driverless system may have failed, from the LIDAR system to the logic system that's supposed to identify road objects, to the communications channels that are supposed to apply the brakes, or the car's automatic braking system itself. According to Los Angeles Times, "Driverless car experts from law and academia called on Uber to release technical details of the accident so objective researchers can help figure out what went wrong and relay their findings to other driverless system makers and to the public."

12 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't matter by Snotnose · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Forget the Lidar, or lack of (they were testing cameras?). Forget the dude (heh, the first 12 hours thought he was a she. That's gotta hurt).

    Had I been driving that car, full alert, I would have killed that chick. I'd have felt bad, even knowing it was her fault. But the fact is, this dumbass walked in front of a fast moving car, at night, when she had no illumination, and the car had headlights. Her best hope of survival was a 100% functioning self driving car, anything less and she's dead.

    1. Re:Doesn't matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your missing the point. The point of the 'dynamic range' bits of the summary are to say "just because the video didn't show enough light doesn't mean there actually wasn't enough light".

      When driving a car with normal headlights, can you genuinely not see what's the next lane over 150 feet ahead? If not, you need new headlights. Or new eyes.

    2. Re:Doesn't matter by bigwheel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The fact that she had a bicycle leads me to believe that she was not blind. And based on her walking speed, I doubt that she was being chased. However, IF it was an electric car, she might have misjudged the vehicle's distance and speed.

      What I saw on the video was an inattentive "driver", looking down for a full 5 seconds just before impact, and not hitting the brakes or making any attempt to avoid the pedestrian. I suspect that the "driver" was lulled into believing that the car was better than it really was, and therefore, behaving like a passenger rather than a driver.

      Very sad.

    3. Re:Doesn't matter by PixetaledPikachu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Experimental technology doesn't work as promised. Total shocker there.

      Yes, experimental technology obviously fails every time, but that's not the point. The point is Uber is deploying fail-prone experimental technology in public and it took someone's life.

    4. Re:Doesn't matter by harperska · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. The car was a prototype, which by its very nature could be expected to fail in unexpected ways. Thus, you put a human in the car as a backup whose sole job is to remain attentive to react to any sudden failure of the car's self driving capabilities. Clearly, the emergency backup driver was treating the car as a complete functional autonomous vehicle rather than a prototype, so this is kind of on her.

    5. Re:Doesn't matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Exactly. The car was a prototype, which by its very nature could be expected to fail in unexpected ways. Thus, you put a human in the car as a backup whose sole job is to remain attentive to react to any sudden failure of the car's self driving capabilities. Clearly, the emergency backup driver was treating the car as a complete functional autonomous vehicle rather than a prototype, so this is kind of on her.

      No, no... this has been said so many times, that when people keep ignoring it, it's no longer funny.

      Not even if you paid people a huge salary to remain fully attentive, would you get an attentive driver. The brain is remarkably apt at learning not to care about the car when it drives itself. One learns that "something else will do this, I don't need to" most of the time, so that robs you of countless *seconds* of reaction time in an event like this. By the time you realize you really do need to act, the accident already happened.

      This is what everybody has been saying all along. No, human backups are unreliable and unworkable. You have to perfect the technology first in controlled conditions, because in the field the risk *is* high. This is NOT a task for agile methodologies.

    6. Re:Doesn't matter by amicusNYCL · · Score: 5, Insightful

      However, IF it was an electric car, she might have misjudged the vehicle's distance and speed.

      That doesn't matter. She was crossing a road with 4 lanes coming at her, and when she stepped off the curb she should have seen the car on the Mill bridge. That bridge is covered in lights, too, you can see the bridge lights on the internal camera behind her. There's no reason the woman crossing the completely dark section of road wouldn't have been able to look towards Tempe and see the car coming. And who crosses 4 lines, in the dark, with a car approaching, without looking at the car to see if they need to pick up the pace? She never looked at the car. The Uber car obviously experienced some sort of catastrophic failure, but in the same way that this is a case study for computer science or engineering students, it's also a case study on how not to cross a street. The woman easily could have avoided being hit. I expect her to avoid getting hit the same way I expect the autonomous car to not hit her.

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    7. Re: Doesn't matter by FF-Loucks · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Who cares what the victim was classified as. Seems like the car should know when it is about to hit something and preserve itself. What if it had been a lawn cart rolling across the road? Wouldn't you want to not hit something that might cause damage to your car? Reminds me of the story of the guy that saw a refrigerator box in the road and decided to hit it for fun - too bad it still contained the refrigerator. These cars need to recognize that they shouldn't hit anything in the road no matter if it is a person, pothole, or box

    8. Re:Doesn't matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There's a right and a wrong way of doing that. In this case, it's absolutely ridiculous that the government is allowing any of these companies to operate AI cars without first demonstrating that they can handle this very problem. Having a car sense something in the road in the same or adjacent lanes and slow or stop is one of the easiest tasks to get right.

      Obviously, it's not easy, but if you can't do that, then none of the rest of the stuff makes any sense. What good is keeping a car between the lane markers if it happily plows into whatever is said lane?

      Trying to do all of this at once is a large part of the problem. Obviously, the sensor array wasn't working properly as this wasn't somebody that just jumped out behind an obstruction, this is somebody wearing mostly dark clothes walking in a predictable way across the street. If the car couldn't figure out to apply the brakes until after hitting her, then something was terribly, terribly wrong with the system.

      We keep hearing about how these "experts" wouldn't do things that would endanger our lives, but the car was driving too fast for the conditions and didn't even attempt to slow down. Even a minor reduction in speed could have resulted in serious injuries rather than fatal ones.

  2. Re:An unfortunate coincidence of failures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I hope your whole shitty culture goes up in flames you fucking heartless cunt.

  3. You can't in shadow, at night by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When driving a car with normal headlights, can you genuinely not see what's the next lane over 150 feet ahead?

    Lots of cars fudge the headlights a bit to the right to keep from blinding oncoming cars. Combine that with her stepping out of a very dark shadow of the tree, as well as her dark clothing (jeans and black jacket) and it's very likely that because of the dynamic range of the scene (bright headlights making darker anything street lights shone on, then her being in the shadow from even the street lights) a driver would have been too blinded by available light to see the pedestrian.

    She didn't even have reflectors on the wheel of the bike, much less herself - even one might have saved her.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  4. Re: Yeah, no by c6gunner · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The lesson for the rest of us is that Uber's self driving technology is not ready for prime time, for whatever reason(s).

    I dunno ... I mean even if we assume that a human driver could have avoided this particular accident, that doesn't mean the technology isn't still an improvement over human drivers in other cases. You'd need a lot more data to reach that conclusion. It could very well be that lives saved in other, more common types of preventable accidents massively outweigh the lives lost in these types of abnormal occurrences.