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Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#111

Here’s a better video: https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?... The car should have seen that.

How is this video "better?" This is clearly somebody holding a camera recording a screen and seems to have much more artifacting and brightness changes.

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#112

Two obvious things from the footages: the pedestrian is invisible until the last moment, and the "driver" is focused on something else, probably a smartphone. Given of how little time there was between the hitted woman became visible and the impact, a driver action may not have been able to avoid it, but what will be interesting is how his responsability will be engaged or not. Anyway one advantage of automous car is…

According to the videos of Waymo’s cars, their cars would’ve seen her. Lidar should be more effective at night.

I guess it’s obvious Uber didn’t steal their tech. I was on their side from the initial reports but there’s no reason that should’ve happened if that car was equipped with lidar.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#113
post #25

How did LIDAR and IR not catch that? That seems like a pretty serious problem. It's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum. When I argue for automated driving (as a casual observer), I tell people about exactly this sort of stuff (a computer can look in 20 places at t…

Maybe we just don’t have the tech yet to make it work. At the very least, Uber surely doesn’t. There’s no way the car didn’t see her, but it didn’t react, which means it failed to recognize what it was seeing.

This is pretty much the worst case scenario.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#114
post #25

How did LIDAR and IR not catch that? That seems like a pretty serious problem. It's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum. When I argue for automated driving (as a casual observer), I tell people about exactly this sort of stuff (a computer can look in 20 places at t…

It's clear from the video that a human driver actually would've had more trouble since the pedestrian showed up in the field of view right before the collision, yet that's in the visible spectrum. That's not at all clear to me. I don't know too much about cameras, but it looks to me like the camera is making the scene appear much darker than it actually is. In the video, you can see many street lights projecting down…

Which makes me wonder if the Uber autocar is just relying on camera vision to drive itself... If it is, and it's been lying to authorities (I don't know what they said to the authorities about their cars' capabilities), that could be big.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#115
1) I'd hope and assume that an autonomous vehicle would have better sensors than a single mounted video camera. It does have other sensors that it uses, right? Were they all operational? What do they show? Combined, do they have dynamic response comparable to the human eye?

2) The road seems really dark. Are the headlights intentionally dimmed here? At night, on a empty road with no opposing traffic, shouldn't the headlights normally be on bright, rather than dimmed? Does the autonomous vehicle control this switch or the human driver?

3) I feel like a human driver would have been likely to swerve left to avoid the human. They may still have hit the rear of the bicycle, but no one would have died. Does the car even attempt to prioritize collisions with inanimate objects over living ones? Does it at least attempt to slow down if a collision seems inevitable?

4) If you cannot stop in time to avoid an obstacle on the road after it is illuminated by your headlights, it would seem clear that you are travelling "too fast for conditions". Either you need brighter lights, or a you need to slow down. Is this in dispute?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#116
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A theory that occurred to me last night is that if she was homeless, she may also have had an untreated eye condition such as myopia.

What about sound? Also, with myopia you should still be able to see a light source traveling towards you.

I sometimes have trouble figuring out what lane an oncoming car is on, with glasses, in daytime. It wouldn't surprise me if she was absent-mindedly taking a familiar route to her homeless camp and mistakenly thought the car was on the left lane.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#117

An alert human driver would still have had a bad crash, but might not have killed the pedestrian. In a two-lane road, you cannot simply swerve to the other lane w/out checking. I (and many other?) drivers would have just slammed on the brakes. But at that road's speed limit, I believe the brakes wouldn't have stopped in time, and a collision would still have occurred. The pedestrian+bicycle was a direct obstacle, not…

"tldr; a human driver may or may not have done better."...that's not a very helpful summary. Sounds very oxymoronic.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#118
post #14

Wow, I had thought it impossible for the Uber AV to be in the right lane, and for the victim to be crossing left-to-right, for the police to claim that the victim couldn't be seen until it was too late. But I didn't expect the road to be so dark, given what we saw in the accident photos (which might have been over-exposed?) and Google Maps, which showed a lot of street/sidewalk lighting. In the moment that we can ful…

Digital image quality is generally far inferior to naked eye visibility, but even in the image, the pedestrian can be seen for at least a full second. The driver clearly was unfortunately not paying attention. She clearly reacts within a few hundred milliseconds of looking up, which is to say immediate reaction time in terms of mental processing. That means that we cannot use her reaction time to gauge how early she…

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#119
post #37

However bad the car was or wasn't at detecting the victim, it's nothing compared to how bad the human victim was at detecting the car (which presumably had its lights on coming down an empty street at night). Imagine if the victim was driving a car...

What's your point? She wasn't driving a car. Imagine if the uber hardware was installed into a petrol tanker. It just just as pointless a discussion.

If self driving cars can't be trusted to not smash into any obstacle that appears such as a deer/roadwork/child/runaway shopping cart, then they shouldn't be permitted on the road.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#120
post #27

This seems like a simple case. I would have expected the driver assist in my 2017 Subaru to have reacted to something in the road. I'm surprised that the much more sophisticated self driving system did not.

I didn't know that new Subaru's can come with driver assist. How does it work? What's your experience with it? I've got a 2013, and am thinking about trading in.

The EyeSight system uses a pair of cameras — black and white, I think — mounted on the interior roof. With it, you get front collision avoidance.
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