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Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

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Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#711

Post by SilasX »

jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

>Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads?

Some phase of testing will necessarily be of public roads. The fact that they started that phase prematurely doesn't somehow mean that "private for profit companies" should never test on public roads.

Boeing tests new airplanes in the public airspace too, over public areas.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#712

Post by Spare_account »

Johnny555 wrote: post #240
pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

Braking distance ... for a 30mph is 45 ft

Apologies for going off topic here, but I'm curious about this. I've tested every car I've ever owned and all of the recent cars with all-round disc brakes have outperformed this statistic, but I've never been able to get agreement from other people (unless I demonstrate it to them in person).

I'm talking about optimal conditions here, wet roads would change things obviously but each of these cars was able to stop within it's own car length (around 15 feet) from 30mph, simply by stamping on the brake pedal with maximum force, triggering the ABS until the car stops:

2001 Nissan Primera SE

2003 BMW 325i Touring (E46)

2007 Peugeot 307 1.6 S

2011 Ford S-Max

I can't work out how any modern car, even in the wet, could need 45 feet to stop. In case it's not obvious, this is only considering mechanical stopping distance, human reaction time (or indeed computer reaction time which is the main topic here) would extend this distance, but the usual 45 feet from 30mph statistic doesn't include reaction time either.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#713

Post by icc97 »

One aspect that comes from this is that now car crashes can be treated more like aircraft crashes. Each self-driving car now has a black box in it with a ton of telemetary.

So it's not just "don't drink and drive", knowing that they'll probably reoffend soon anyway. Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated and should be prevented from ever happening again.

Hopefully there's enough data in the investigation so that Tesla / Waymo and all other car companies can include the circumstances of the failure in their tests.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#714

Post by lsh123 »

robterrell wrote: post #692
cbhl wrote: post #675

The last time I visited Phoenix, I recall being shocked at far apart traffic lights were in the city. Between the Wal-marts and the giant four-to-six bedroom homes, it might be normal to see a major street have a mile between traffic lights (and presumably, crosswalks). It was very different from, say, driving in New York, San Francisco or Seattle. I'd be curious whether "walking outside of the crosswalk" turns out t…

I hope they aren't expecting people to only appear at intersections: "The California Vehicle Code says you can actually cross any street as long as you aren't a hazard to vehicles. It is also legal to cross mid-block when you're not between two intersections with signals." [1] The article points out that LA has a different rule. Uber's going to need to geofence locations and use different rulesets for different citie…

"Uber's going to need to geofence locations and use different rulesets for different cities."

May be not. Regardless of the street crossing law in a specific city, it is a bad idea to kill pedestrians.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#715

Post by hnal943 »

cubano wrote: post #367
untog wrote: post #311

This opens up an interesting question going forward. We can't rely on Uber themselves to analyse the telemetry data and come to a conclusion, they're biased. So really, we need self driving car companies to turn over accident telemetry data to the police. But the police are ill equipped to process that data. We need law enforcement to be able to keep pace with advances in technology and let's face it, they're not goi…

Don't we already have a huge infrastructure of police, the courts, and insurance companies in place to decide these very things everyday? I mean, how is this different then all of the other accidents that occur every day? Yes a self-driving car is involved, but do people really think autonomous cars aren't going to be involved in fatal accidents? Of course they are...but I've always thought that autonomous vehicles o…

Who would be liable? The owner of the AV? The manufacturer?

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#716

Post by arkh »

jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

I'm for a middle-of-the-road way of doing things at first: make some highway lanes for autonomous cars only. Separate those lane physically. Remove the speed limit there to encourage people to get cars which can use those lanes.

Implement a way for the highway operator to affect the cars on it: make way for emergency vehicles, adapt to infos the operator can aggregate and transmit, change the speed of cars to the slowest one around etc.

Once the majority of people have self driven cars and those have been proven in this controled environment you can think about allowing them on open roads. Or not. Or adapt those open roads to what self driven cars need.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#717

Post by dlwdlw »

Johnny555 wrote: post #240
pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

If self driving cars are limited to speeds that allow them to stop within their lidar max range is that too slow? Humans don't have the pinpoint accuracy of lidar but our visual algorithms are very flexible and robust and also have very strong confidence signals e.g driving more carefully in dark rain.

Cameras are not accurate enough though, their dynamic range being terrible. Wonder how humans would fare if forced to wear goggles that approximated a lidar sensors information.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#718

Post by supertrope »

jakobegger wrote: post #629
dalbasal wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another quirk of people, particularly acting via "People in Positions of Authority" is that they will need to do something to prevent next time. Why did this happen? What steps have we make sure it will never happen again? These are both methods of analysing & fixing problems and methods of preserving a decision making authority. Sometimes this degrades into a cynical "something must be done" for the sake of doing, b…

It‘s amazing how quickly things can happen after an accident. In a nearby town, people have petitioned for a speed limit for a long time. Nothing happened until a 6 year old boy was killed. Within a few weeks a speed limit was in place.

Safety rules are written in blood. Often someone has to die before action is taken. But eventually people forget, get sloppy, or consider the rules completely useless. See: nightclub fires.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#719

Post by TomMarius »

IgorPartola wrote: post #443
orbitur wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular…

I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me. Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won't take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, b…

> the reason today's cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn't because the free market decided so, but because of regulation.

All safety functionality was introduced and used way before regulators even knew that it's possible.

Edit: please explain the downvotes, ideally with examples

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#720

Post by PantaloonFlames »

Johnny555 wrote: post #240
pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

The advantage self-drivers have is in 1. minimizing distraction / optimizing perception 2. minimizing reaction time.

Theoretically self-drivers will always see everything that is relevant, unlike a human driver. And theoretically a robot-driver will always react more quickly than even a hyper-attentive human driver, who has to move meat in order to apply the brake.

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