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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.
How much will Uber be paying that family?
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?
Criminal negligence, then.
Classy.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It's time for regulatory control - like how the FAA regulates the skies, the autonomous car industry needs to have sensible regulations. Right now it just seems like a bunch of cowboys in the wild west are trying to one-up each other.
Get this: The car "saw" the person 6 seconds before striking the person. The emergency system was disabled. The emergency system was not set up to alert the driver. So many things wrong here that would have been avoided had there been sensible regulations written by sensible engineers.
most of whom are probably pedestrians on account of the cost of owning a car.
EVERYONE is a pedestrian. And we have a society with specified rule of law carving out certain precautions DRIVERS of dangerous vehicles must take to help pedestrians stay alive. One of those being the operator of a vehicle is legally responsible to account if they kill a pedestrian that they had 6 seconds warning about
Take your bullshit elsewhere, streets are for people's benefit.
Cheap storage VM.
Streets that are paid for with things like gasoline tax, and sales tax on automobile purchases...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Hmmn
on an FYI basis, my self-driving car (written in Python using PyTorch) does not work either...
Just saying !
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
The New Uber Terminator Car will eliminate any unwanted pedestrians.
Ask us how!
There was a human in the Uber car. Theoretically she was there to provide a human element that backed up the self-driving. But she was not giving her full attention to safety.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17388696/uber-self-driving-crash-ntsb-report
I think Uber should change their procedure. Have two humans in the car: one to provide safety backup to the driving, and one to manage the iPad app. That will cost more than just having one human in the car, but would have saved a life in this case.
Note that the NTSB says the pedestrian was crossing unsafely, which contributed to the incident. Again quoting from the above-linked article in The Verge:
I don't see what the drugs in her system had to do with anything; I think this would have happened the same way even if she was completely sober. But she was doing an unsafe thing when she died.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Except they didn't really have six seconds of warning... while it's true that the car saw the person 6 seconds before the collision, the car did not alert the driver in any way of this, so in fact the driver did not have any warning at all.
That said, the driver was not being attentive, and it is possible that the driver might have even not responded to a warning quickly enough if one had been given, but it's still entirely true that the driver did not have any warning about the collision.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled
Sensors on the fully autonomous Volvo XC-90 SUV spotted Herzberg while the car was traveling 43 miles per hour and determined that braking was needed 1.3 seconds before impact, according to the report.
A diagram in the NTSB report shows that the Uber system determined that the SUV needed to brake when it was at least 20 meters (65.6 feet) from Herzberg; it was traveling 39 mph (63 kilometers per hour) at impact. Kornhauser said that was enough distance for the SUV to stop, or slow considerably to mitigate damage from the crash.
Uber also disabled the Volvo's factory-equipped automatic emergency braking system when the vehicle is in autonomous mode, the report said.
So what was disabled? The factory auto brake, or Uber's auto brake? Surely they weren't allowing a car that wasn't able to brake itself out on the roads. Does the Uber system have a separate "emergency braking" subsystem?
Headline says the system "saw" her 6 seconds before impact, but it determined that it needed to brake just over 1s before impact? (traveling at about 59fps at impact)
This article sucks.
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.
Let's see how much you mouth off about it when it's someone you know, or when it's a kid.
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.
A bit of system engineering discipline, FMEA , might have prevented this. It helps when innovators are trained to manage complexity, capability, and risk.
Or common sense, but such things can be on short supply on large projects run by program managers who have an 'MBA' mentality: https://www.inc.com/nathan-fur...
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
So it's ok to kill people in every state except Arizona? Ridiculous! If you aren't operating in Arizona then you shouldn't be operating anywhere.
This is utter madness. I would say 'pants on head' crazy but there's something a tiny bit endearing about that phrase, suggesting a gentle kind of crazy. No, this is 'dissociative, dig out your own eyeballs and eat them, psychotic break' insanity.
How about this: lets make a machine gun that's just always shooting bullets. It chooses which direction to point, and it's usually right. Sometimes, though, it might point at random civilians, but that's okay, because there will be a man standing nearby who could push a button that makes it stop shooting. If he's paying attention.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Might still happen though, if the manufacturers keep up the shoddy security we've come to expect from them.
The driver is at fault, unless a law has been past in Arizona that says a driver in an autonomous car is not require to pay attention to the road while testing.
If Uber told the driver to monitor the system instead of the road, they're telling the driver to break the law.
Just because your boss told you to break the law, doesn't get you off the hook.
The law of man says the person controlling that big hunk of high speed metal needs to make sure they do so safely, and defines a set of rules to make it explicitly clear what is regarded as safe.
It says if you're negligent in your responsibility to driver safe and you kill someone, you go to jail.
Look both ways. Also don't run over pedestrians.
The driver was not a computer, the computer had no way to stop the car in an emergency. The person behind the wheel had that responsibility.
If I was driving my non-autonomous car and didn't pay attention to the road, would I be responsible for killing someone, despite not seeing them walk infront of my car?
Yes, I would.
If my car had the capability to keep to a lane, maintain speed and stop at traffic lights, would I still be responsible?
Yes, I would.
That's about the limit of the capabilities of the Uber car. I assuming it can stop at traffic lights...
The street was lit perfectly well. The video they released was of poor quality.
Any person paying attention while driving would have seen them.
Cellphone cameras would have seen them, proven by people driving the exact same road at night and posting it to youtube.
Uber released the footage as media damage control. I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately reduce the dynamic range to make it look like it wasn't entirely their fault, which it is.
At least when the machines are actively trying to kill us, we can be fairly sure that once in a while they'll screw up and leave their victim alive.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
According to the FA she wasn't texting, she was minding the screen in the car, per Uber's instructions, to take notes on interesting events for later research. Uber used to have two people, one to watch the road and one to take the notes and they did away with the second one to cut costs.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If the backup driver was paying attention, she would have been likely able to avert the situation.
Instead, it appeared she was looking down in her lap doing "something".
She's there to prevent these situations from happening. She was negligent.,
From what I read above, that is the way Uber set up the car. The driver was checking some sort of console as part of the driving test procedure.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The driver was looking down at their lap because Uber required them to check an ipad mounted on the dash as part of the test procedure.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Seems like something that needs to go through the court to figure out who's liable, Uber or the driver.
Most driving laws around the world would place the blame with the driver for not paying attention while driving.
It's probably going to depend on what Arizona set out when they allowed the testing on public roads in the first place.
humans. What's up Doc?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
and hardtime for the CEO/VP's at uber!
they're not up on charges of obstruction of justice.
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My point is only that while I agree that the operator is most definitely responsible,. they did *NOT* actually have 6 seconds of warning about the collision because the car did not actually provide any such warning. Whether the operator should have been paying attention to the roadway to have made such a warning superfluous is irrelevant.
It does come to mind, however, that head tracking software might be possible to enable in these cars, particularly during this testing and development stage, before the software can be trusted to be fully autonomous, and if the software can tell that a driver is looking away from the road for an extended period (say more than 3 or 4 seconds or so... plenty of time to quickly glance at things like speed or other gauges, or mirrors) while the vehicle is in autonomous mode, an audible alarm could sound, not overly obnoxious, but perhaps similar in style to a "door is open" alert, to gently remind the driver that they should not leave the operation of the vehicle so unattended. Uber could then track how often driving attendants in these so-called "self driving" cars are actually being inattentive and reprimand or dismiss drivers that are not paying attention too often.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It wasn't a doctored video. Just a bad quality video.
Go outside at night to a lit street similar to the one where the accident occurred. You should be able to see things some distance away pretty clearly.
Based on her facial expressions in the video, she must've found that diagnostic information very amusing.
"autonomous Uber SUV" "did not stop because the system used to automatically apply brakes in potentially dangerous situations had been disabled"
Then it wasn't autonomous at all.
So even advertising it as a "self-driving" or "autonomous" car, even for a test, is a huge amount of fraud.
Uber will likely change this automatic kill feature
Yeah, it'll become a premium upsell.
(basing this purely on historical decisions made by Uber management)
"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"
Sue them out of existence. That is totally ridiculous. They disabled a safety system designed to fulfill one of the most important duties of a driver...
I don't know that I could say that the driver of this vehicle is responsible. They were effectively put in an impossible position by their employer: do an attention occupying task AND watch the road at the same time. Uber is negligent for even allowing such conditions to exist. As so many have pointed out, there used to be 2 people in the car so one could ALWAYS be watching the road.
I can't think of any other driving/piloting situation where someone who is supposed to be paying attention is also supposed to be actively doing something else simultaneously. The circumstances made this event INEVITABLE, and that's on Uber.
pretty soon. If she was entering data on a screen there will be a log of it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If Uber told the driver to do that, then they are entirely at fault here... I had thought that the person was not paying attention to the road of his own accord, not because he was instructed to do so.
That said, the driver should have also had the common sense not to listen to such an obviously impossible (not to mention illegal) request.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You're my favorite Slashdotter. And I'll be in Reykjavik May 27, May 28 and June 7... may I buy you lunch?
(Sorry to spam a bunch of your posts, but I wanted to be sure you saw my invitation.) Reply to GPSpilot1@NOsPam.gmail.com.
And you're right... it's ridiculous that we can't type a thorn here.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You're my favorite Slashdotter. And I'll be in Reykjavik May 27, May 28 and June 7.... may I buy you lunch?
(Sorry to spam a bunch of your posts, but I wanted to be sure you saw my invitation.) Reply to GPSpilot1@NOsPam.gmail.com.
And you're right... it's ridiculous that we can't type a thorn here.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Come on, you don't need to 'REALLY THINK' in order to drive a car.
Well, that would certainly explain why there are so many shitty drivers on the roads, which ironically is why they're trying to push shitty half-assed so-called 'self driving cars' on everyone.
If you unironically believe that crap you just wrote, then you're either part of the problem, or you're TROLLOLOLOLing. Nobody who is capable of actually thinking would really believe that.
Plenty of time for HER to not be in the way on a highway.