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Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

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Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#71

Post by Taniwha »

danso wrote: post #5
alistproducer2 wrote: post #3

Call me crazy but isn't a big part of the promise of these systems supposed to be they see things humans wouldn't or couldn't? If they're just as surprised as the human behind the wheel, that feels like a problem.

Yes, to me, this is the most relevant part of the posted article: > “It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swe…

it could be that they never saw someone pushing a bike across a road in tests before, maybe it confused that with someone riding on the road at a different angle

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#72

Post by Zitrax »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #59
GoToRO wrote: post #12

Are these systems designed to honk?

Per this old article from 2016, yes: https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-car-c26f...

The culture of using the horn differs a lot between countries. Would they use locale aware honk schemes?

And similarly are self driving cars listening? Will they detect emergency vehicles by the sirens, or even listen to other cars honking at them?

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#73

Post by retsibsi »

GhostVII wrote: post #9
DanBC wrote: post #8

> "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” But it's made harder if you're speeding.

It was going 3mph over the speed limit, a perfectly reasonable speed that is still probably lower than almost everyone else on the road.

Serious question: how are speed limits enforced (or not) in the USA? From what I read on the internet, it seems like they are 90% unenforced, 10% arbitrarily enforced by cops who choose who they want to pull over from the masses who are routinely speeding.

If they are mostly unenforced, how does the system work? Does everyone implicitly add 20% to the posted limit, or do they just go whatever speed feels right to them given the road and the conditions?

(In my part of Australia, speeding is fairly common, but not speed limits are not a joke. You can expect most people to stick within ~5km/h of the limit, and if you choose not to then there's a real chance you'll get done by a hidden camera. The idea of everyone ignoring the limits sounds terrible: of course they are a bit arbitrary, but that's unavoidable for any unambiguous law, and the alternatives of arbitrary enforcement or no enforcement seem much worse.)

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#74

Post by bitcurious »

branchan wrote: post #16
dzdt wrote: post #6

Yes, the report you'd hope to be hearing from Uber is along the lines of "0.2 seconds after the pedestrian entered the travel lane the automated system identified her as a hazard and initiated an avoidance maneuver. Despite braking and beginning to swerve away, the car impacted the pedestrian 1.2 seconds later." Thats the promise the automated vehicle people are selling. But in this case it seems the car was clueless…

If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer is able to process the information from the sensors. There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are just as clueless.

An accident might have been unavoidable, but fatality is the big question. The risk of pedestrian fatality jumps by ~4x between 30mph and 40mph.[0] So the question is - did the car start breaking as soon as possible?

As an aside, that statistic is why I never speed in pedestrian zones.

https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#75

Post by ksk »

Self-driving cars are still a fantasy. I don't want the AI to be comparable to an average driver (who collectively get into 6 million accidents) . I want the AI to meet/exceed the skills of the best driver. There is no way anyone would trust an "average" driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#76

Post by [deleted] »

danso wrote: post #44

The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi... This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in…

[deleted]

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#77

Post by lukeschlather »

danso wrote: post #43
Roodgorf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not have had good enough information to tell that she was a cyclist at all, and instead interpreted her to be something static/non-human altogether (in parent's example, a bush). Of course, without seeing the data its sensors gathered, and what that data registered as, it's all speculation. The problem is with misidentification, not bad priorities.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of classification problem involved. But wouldn't the AV by default treat a solid object on the road as a hazard to brake for? There's no possible way to specifically train for every variation of thing that could be encountered on a city street (imagine Halloween, for starters).

It was a 3-lane highway. It wouldn't really make sense to break if the system detected a immobile object in a different lane. The problem is more that the system failed to detect the woman moving between lanes.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#78

Post by retsibsi »

Mantipath wrote: post #26
rhacker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually really sucks to hear, I was hoping that SDVs would adhere and never break the speed limit. 3 MPH at the forces we're talking about can actually make a difference in life or death.

Sure. 3 MPH would have made a difference. So would 3 MPH less after that, and 3MPH more... heck, if it had been going 2 MPH total she'd probably be fine! In the aftermath of a front collision it would always have been safer if the car had been going slightly slower, regardless of the speed limit. The strangest part of watching this story unfold has been discovering that some people have faith that speed limits are an…

I see this attitude a lot, but it seems strange to me. Of course any hard line will be somewhat arbitrary, but we need to draw hard lines if we want unambiguous, consistently enforceable laws. What's special about speed limits that makes it okay to ignore them?

To me they seem analogous to age-of-consent laws, which of course are not perfectly chosen for every individual -- and of course there's no magical change that occurs on a person's birthday -- but the law reflects society's best judgment of the balance between (protecting the vulnerable and allowing people to make their own choices :: safety and efficiency).

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#79

Post by mirimir »

danso wrote: post #44

The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi... This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in…

Right, so now she's crossing three lanes. So that's about 9 meters. At 1-3 meters per second for her, and 17 meters/second for the Uber SUV, it should have seen her 3-9 seconds (50-150 meters) before impact.

That's a pretty clear fail.

I wonder what the Uber's field of view is. At what distance should it have detected stuff about 9 meters off track?

But she did likely walk out from landscaping. So perhaps she initially "looked" like waving branches or whatever. And there must be some mechanism to suppress such false positives, or vehicles would brake when it's windy.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#80

Post by dragonwriter »

bitcurious wrote: post #74
branchan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer is able to process the information from the sensors. There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are just as clueless.

An accident might have been unavoidable, but fatality is the big question. The risk of pedestrian fatality jumps by ~4x between 30mph and 40mph.[0] So the question is - did the car start breaking as soon as possible? As an aside, that statistic is why I never speed in pedestrian zones. https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

> did the car start breaking as soon as possible?

“braking”; “breaking” is something else, and not a desirable response.

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