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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.
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?
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.
A hero implies courage. She didn't volunteer to test it. More like a martyr if you ask me.
A martyr implies actively defending something either through sacrifice through active defense or acceptance of punishment without backing down for a cause.
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.
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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.
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.
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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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.
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She has the legal right to walk anywhere, against any light, under any conditions, and even leap out in front of a car in traffic.
ItÃ(TM)s the law.
Kellogg's called and they want you to return your law degree. It was a mixup; you were supposed to receive a decoder ring.