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

Wait, what now?

[Narcocide]

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?

Re:Wait, what now?

[MDMurphy]

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.

Re:Wait, what now?

[vtcodger]

"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.

None

[rsilvergun]

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.