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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.
Since the driver was unable to detect this incident too, they better remove all drivers as well!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
SAE Level 3 automation should be illegal. Period. The backup driver simply cannot be expected to go from "no interaction with the vehicle for 1500 miles on average" to "rescuing the vehicle from an emergency".
Automation should be locked at Level 2 (ProPilot, Autopilot, Supercruise, etc, etc) until vehicles are at least ready for Level 4, if not Level 5. Level 2 = hands on the wheel, ideally with eye tracking, ideally making the user drive for themselves for at least a couple minutes every hour to stay alert.
And it should not be up to companies when their vehicles are ready to put them on the roads, as they're in a race to be seen as first movers. Governments should have their own review and testing processes, which involve both code audits (in the case of neural nets, audits of the net core and how the nets are trained) and real-world testing of simulated hazard scenarios.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, at least as of 2016 [azdot.gov], there were 952 fatalities in car accidents in Arizona, or approximately 2.61 deaths per day.
So far so good - now look up the number of cars in Arizona (about 2.4 million) and the number of Uber self-driving cars (200 across 4 cities). Now apply "appropriate precision" in Uber's favour - 200 out of 2 million = 1/10,000 of AZ cars are uber self-drivers. So, with 1000 fatalities/year, Uber get to kill someone every 10 years - they've used that up in one. (Of course, that's an unspeakably crude and dubious calculation, but its better than yours).
Then, of course, of those 1000 regular fatalities, many will be attributed to drunk-driving, speeding, texting (or other forms of reckless driving), non-roadworthy vehicles etc. all of which carry potential criminal penalties - including possible driving bans - so its not the case that nothing is being done about them.
Uber were allowed to test experimental vehicles on the condition that they'd have a safety driver ready to take over - and one thing that the video clearly shows was that the safety driver was not paying attention (to the surprise of absolutely nobody except, apparently, Uber). The video also shows that the pedestrian was crossing the road in clear line-of-sight, in a street-lit area, from left-to-right yet the car made no attempt to brake or swerve. If you believe that the video truly represents what the Mk 1 eyeball and/or the car's sensors could "see" then all that proves is that the car was going too fast for the conditions - outdriving its headlights - and the driver should have taken action to slow it down.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Level 3 is fine if there is plenty of warning to take over, say a minimum of 30 seconds. Time to put away your phone, pack away the sandwich and slip your shoes back on.
Unfortunately what we have is crap like this from Audi: https://youtu.be/WsiUwq_M8lE
Note the way it disengages suddenly and the guy has to instantly take over. That's dangerous and unacceptable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It gets better, hereis what the street really looks like at night. About 1 second before the accident there is a yield to bikes sign due to all the bicycle traffic in the area.
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.
Might be pointless but one recommendation I would have to the automated car companies is any warning sign, like yield to bikes, should have a visual and audible alert by from the car to "wake up" the human monitoring the car. Though given how often nothing would happen after that alert, it would probably get ignored after a while.
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.
Shadow operations. Don’t control anything, just observe. If software action deviates from human action, review and analyize. It appears that this is the stage in product development that Uber needs to be in.
Once the shadow driving has advanced to a point where there are no negative deviations in a control environment, define that envelope and test rigorously within the envelope. Continue to shadow outside the envelope and slowly expand the envelope. Within test envelope, thoroughly validate performance with external telemetry— were there any cases where nothing bad happened, but the action taken should have been different.
This is not a person who suddenly jumped out onto the road here.... while she was jaywalking, she was also *WALKING*... I've seen an overhead view of the section of road where the incident occurred, and there's no significant occlusions there; ordinarily, vision seems that it would be pretty good there in daylight conditions. It's my understanding that self-driving cars use lidar sensors, and should even be able to detect a person in an absence of any visible light at all, so the fact that it was night should be immaterial. Reasonably, the car should have seen that she was on the sidewalk long before she stepped out into the road, and the very *instant* that she started to go off of the sidewalk should have been detected by the car, and the car should immediately begin to slow down.
Yet, by all reports I've heard, the car did not even see this pedestrian at all, and had not even tried to slow down until after the collision. Why? What the fuck happened?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'