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Uber Ordered To Take Its Self-Driving Cars Off Arizona Roads (nytimes.com)
After failing to meet an expectation that it would prioritize public safety as it tested its self-driving technology, Uber has been ordered to take its self-driving cars off Arizona roads (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). "The incident that took place on March 18 is an unquestionable failure to comply with this expectation," Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona wrote in a letter sent to Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive. "Arizona must take action now." The New York Times reports: Uber had already suspended all testing of its cars in Arizona, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto. "We proactively suspended self-driving operations in all cities immediately following the tragic incident last week. We continue to help investigators in any way we can, and we'll keep a dialogue open with the governor's office to address any concerns they have," said Matt Kallman, an Uber spokesman. The rebuke from the governor is a reversal from what has been an open-arms policy by the state, heralding its lack of regulation as an asset to lure autonomous vehicle testing -- and tech jobs. Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out from Google, and General Motors-owned Cruise are also testing cars in the state. Mr. Ducey said he was troubled by a video released from the Tempe Police Department that seemed to show that neither the Uber safety driver nor the autonomous vehicle detected the presence of a pedestrian in the road in the moments before the crash.
Testing is done for finding problems. They found one. Don't stop testing now!
Testing is also done (or should be done) in controlled environments until you get way past the alfa and beta stages. Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision and it can deal with normal traffic conditions in day and night with the same performance as that of a human driver.
I seriously have no idea why autonomous cars in pre-alfa stage are on the roads.
Unfortunately most people are treating autonomous cars as software. And we know how software engineers think. Throw the alfa software to the public and fix mistakes afterwards. Oh and we're not responsabile for anything the software might do that brings down your house, empties your bank account etc....
Because the driver in this instance is a bogus legal device to pretend that self driving cars running self driving tests are somehow not doing the driving.
He can only judge the cars choices by the outcome of those choices and that would be too late to intervene. He is not making the driving decisions, he is not driving the car.
Instead of testing self driving cars until they are safe to unlease on public roads, they let car makers get away with this bogus legal device.
More troubling in this case is the doctored video they released. A normal car recorder video in the dark, would have the gain turned up, and would be bright but grainy. That video was dark, suggesting it had been darkened. I ask again, did the police obtain the video from the car recorder themselves, or did they ask Uber's technical assistence, because the video shouldn't be dark. Especially darker around the edges which suggests intentional vignetting.
I guess you're not aware that the governor of Arizona is a Republican? I don't know much about him, but I'd presume that means he leans conservative, not liberal. Self-driving cars are being tested in California as well, and now perhaps you see why you can't always trust a corporation to self-regulate in the absence of government oversight. This is, sadly, how government regulations tend to come about.
The pedestrian was technically in the wrong, but we've heard a lot of rumors recently that Uber's self-driving software was being pushed forward recklessly. And given the wonderful people at Uber and their stellar track record, this isn't exactly hard to believe. A competently programmed car with a properly functioning lider probably should have seen that woman on the bike and reacted to it by braking far earlier than it did.
Yes, deaths will inevitably occur, but let's at least try to make sure there are as few as possibly going forward. This is a good reminder that machines can be just as fallible as the humans who create them.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Flash a dim light on the windscreen at random intervals, and ensure the human responds. No mobile phone usage then. This sort of thing has been done for trains for ages (I'm not talking about dead man, but attention monitors.)
Uber did not care. And that video they released was dubious, someone else took a dash cam of the area and it was reasonably well lit, even if there was no Lidar.
Uber were totally negligent. And I suspect they did not pay that driver very much. Monitoring a test car should not be a minimum wage job.
proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
Hire people operate vehicles on closed tracks to simulate traffic and specific scenarios.
Or, better yet, orchesate dozens of other self driving cars to move in fixed choreographed patterns that the autonomous vehicle must recognize and react appropriately to.
What's your proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
Perhaps they should focus first on not killing pedestrians on an otherwise empty road, and worry about "normal traffic conditions" later.
autonomous cars have already caused less accidents per miles driven than your average human driver
Statistics are like bikinis. What they show is not anything special. What they conceal is vital.
Self driving cars only operate in a very subset of extremely limited conditions. When you compare like for like, limit the stats on human drivers to the same limited conditions that self driving cars, do you sell that have killed (3 people killed so far) and been the cause of far more accidents than human drivers.
Perhaps they should focus first on not killing pedestrians on an otherwise empty road, and worry about "normal traffic conditions" later.
And will you apply the same standard to human drivers, who kill 270000 pedestrians per year on average?
Since the driver was unable to detect this incident too, they better remove all drivers as well!
If a driver was caught behaving like the one in the Uber video - not holding the wheel, concentrating on something in their lap and only glancing occasionally at the road, or otherwise not fully in control of their vehicle - they probably would be removed (and/or have their house removed by the civil courts if death/injury was involved).
Why are people implying that there is some double standard being applied against Uber here? They were already granted an exception that allowed them to test cars in "hands off" mode provided theyn had a safety driver ready to intervene - they've blown that by not taking steps to ensure that their safety drivers stayed on task (which anybody with a grain of nous knew was likely to be an issue).
Option A: the dashcam shows that there was nothing physically blocking the pedestrian from view, and in a street-light area either the driver's Mk1 eyeball or the car's sensors should have spotted them long before the low-sensitivity dashcam or, Option B: Uber's dashcam video does give an accurate impression of visibility at the time (flap, oink) - in which case the car was dangerously outdriving its headlamps and should have slowed down (or been slowed down by the driver) without needing to see the pedestrian. Pick one. If a human-driven car had had that accident, the driver would stand a good chance of facing - at least - careless charges and/or a civil lawsuit.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Yes they would have seen her and so would you. The video released is overly dark. If you headlights only saw two stripes ahead you would be hitting a lot more things. But also check out other examples of the exact stretch of road.
On top of that why didn't the car even attempt to break? I don't care about human reaction time, I would just expect my self driving software to be able to pick up an obstacle that big in sub 1.5 seconds. And that is just off crappy video, what the hell was the lidar doing?
Uber obviously has shitty software. Force them to make it better before trying again.
Sorry ass-hole, responsibility is on the driver. Read the traffic laws.