Uber's Self-Driving Car Saw Pedestrian 6 Seconds Before Fatal Strike, Says Report (tucson.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Arizona Daily Star: The autonomous Uber SUV that struck and killed an Arizona pedestrian in March spotted the woman about six seconds before hitting her, but did not stop because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled, according to federal investigators. In a preliminary report on the crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that emergency braking is not enabled while Uber's cars are under computer control, "to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior." Instead, Uber relies on a human backup driver to intervene. The system, however, is not designed to alert the driver. The report comes a day after Uber announced it will be ending it's self-driving vehicle testing in Arizona. The full NTSB report is available here.

Comments

Re:Wait, what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the driver they hired to do the stopping thing was texting instead of watching the road, from what the video looked like.

If you RTFA (I know, I know), you'll see that the backup driver said she was monitoring the self-driving interface, not fiddling with a phone.

No, you are wrong.

[thesupraman]

And I suspect intentionally so.

It has been clearly stated, BY UBER that they both disabled the Volvo emergency braking AND their own emergency stop/avoidance code.
To imply it was just the Volvo system is trying to avoid the fact that Uber had intentionally removed their own code that would make emergency stops.

They had intentionally made a system that had NO automated method of making an emergency stop, and no method of warning the secondary driver that one was needed (which would be stupid anyway,. they are supposed to be testing a system for future use without such a driver).

They should be hammered for this - it would be the equivalent of removing the emergency brakes from a buildings lifts, or the airbags from a car, without telling anyone.

Re:Wait, what now?

[Kjella]

The poorly written article makes it sound like Uber's system either didn't have a feature for braking for obstacles or that it was disabled. This is not accurate.

No, you're the one spreading misinformation. To quote the NTSB report directly:

According to Uber emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.

Basically they had a system that calculated it would crash, but did nothing and warned no one. In other words, the same as having no system at all.