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

Posted by BeauHD on from the finger-pointing dept.

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.

12 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Wait, what now? by Narcocide · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This can't be right. They are saying that Uber's self-driving car rig is neither designed to stop for nor alert the driver about pedestrians obstructing the path of the vehicle. It's just designed to... log them?!

    What part about this is considered "self-driving" then, exactly?

    1. Re:Wait, what now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I really liked that comment from the last story: "Oops, we left it in murder mode."

      Just sums up the whole situation so well.

    2. Re:Wait, what now? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This can't be right. They are saying that Uber's self-driving car rig is neither designed to stop for nor alert the driver about pedestrians obstructing the path of the vehicle. It's just designed to... log them?!

      Apparently the way they had it was that the computer would drive and the driver would stop it from driving, if needed. That doesn't seem like an obviously ridiculous arrangement, even if having the computer ping the driver would have been better.

      Except the driver they hired to do the stopping thing was texting instead of watching the road, from what the video looked like. So nobody was on the "stopping job". Results as expected.

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    3. Re:Wait, what now? by MDMurphy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A very poorly written article which resulted in a poorly written summary.

      Buried in the article: "Uber also disabled the Volvo's factory-equipped automatic emergency braking system when the vehicle is in autonomous mode, the report said."

      The Volvo XC90 comes with a feature they call "City Safety". https://www.media.volvocars.co...

      This is an auto-braking system with sensors. Uber's autonomous system has its own braking and sensors. It's understandable from a system perspective that they don't have two separate, independent, systems deciding when to apply the brakes operational at the same time.

      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. It does appear that Uber's system failed to either detect the pedestrian or to brake when detected.

      It's probably also true that when testing they don't use the factory cruise control to maintain speed on the highway. There are likely other standard functions not used when the autonomous equipment is under test.

    4. Re: Wait, what now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      HAL9000 was human error, too.
      So many people who watched that movie walked away from it with the wrong moral in their heads. It wasn't a tale of technology gone wrong, it was a tale about what happens when someone has no choice but to comply with all orders fully and completely, and you don't think things through.

      So yeah, this is a HAL9000 scenario. The AI was not allowed to slow down, stop, change lanes, or notify the driver. There were no available actions it could take to avoid the collision, because Uber did not allow it any actions.

    5. Re:Wait, what now? by Green+Mountain+Bot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Then again the pedestrian not wearing dark clothes or having reflectors on the bike while walking in front of a car at night would probably have helped more.

      How would that have helped? The car detected her and didn't brake, and the "driver" wasn't looking and so couldn't brake.

    6. Re:Wait, what now? by vtcodger · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "They are saying that Uber's self-driving car rig is neither designed to stop for nor alert the driver about pedestrians obstructing the path of the vehicle."

      What they seem to have done is taken a vehicle with substantial safety equipment, left the sensors operating, but turned off the accident avoidance features. Then they added a distracting task (monitor the system) for the driver. Then, SURPRISE!!!, something went lethally wrong.

      We'll have to wait until folks with time and full information perform an analysis. But it sure looks at first glance like this was/is a questionably well designed test program.

      --
      You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
  2. Re: $100 million? by saloomy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A hero implies courage. She didn't volunteer to test it. More like a martyr if you ask me.

  3. Re: $100 million? by Jarwulf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A martyr implies actively defending something either through sacrifice through active defense or acceptance of punishment without backing down for a cause.

  4. Car Development by Only+Time+Will+Tell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It goes to show that development of the next generation of self-driving or autonomous cars has to be undertaken by companies heavily driven by pedestrian and passenger safety. It seems like an engineering failure was partly to blame here when the car was aware of the pedestrian, but neither alerted the driver nor attempted to stop or redirect its path. A tech company masquerading as a car company strikes me as the exact conditions that could lead to this failure.

  5. None by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Insightful

    they originally had 2 people driving the car, one to watch the road and one to watch the numbers and make notes about the car's performance. As a cost cutting measure they dropped it down to 1 person doing both jobs. The woman behind the wheel was busy making notes on the screen when she should have been watching the road.

    Uber wants data and they don't care how they get it. You can't get data on risky events if you're too cautious. kinda like how they used to vivisect criminals.

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  6. Re:Split attention by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If she was sober she might have looked both ways before crossing a street or noted that an oncoming vehicle wasn't slowing to avoid her. If I was crossing the street at night sober and a car wasn't stopping for me I would stop and let it pass and then proceed once it was safe.