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Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#181
post #168
post #74

Direct link: https://twitter.com/TempePolice/status/976585098542833664 The interior view tells you everything you need to know about why anything except perfection in self driving cars will lead to more accidents. The driver specially selected and trained for exactly this job, does not look at the road! If someone specially trained for that won't do it, the general public certainly will not. Also, in the video you ca…

> I have better night vision than this camera, I feel as a human I would have seen the bike. I'm not so sure. Under conditions where there is low light everywhere, so the eye has time to adapt, human low light vision is very good. But under the conditions shown in the video, where there are street lights present and the pedestrian comes out from a gap between the street lights, your eye won't be dark adapted and you…

This is literally the reason for high-beams. If the road is not illuminated enough you turn those on and drive as fast as you are comfortable being able to fully stop if a deer jumps out of left field (or in this case, a pedestrian is walking across the road).

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#182
post #74

Direct link: https://twitter.com/TempePolice/status/976585098542833664 The interior view tells you everything you need to know about why anything except perfection in self driving cars will lead to more accidents. The driver specially selected and trained for exactly this job, does not look at the road! If someone specially trained for that won't do it, the general public certainly will not. Also, in the video you ca…

Thanks for the link. I'm now fully expecting for regulators to call for airbags on the exterior of all AV's...

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#183

This is definitely not a case of someone jumping out in the road, as was previously reported. Sure, jaywalking at night is a bad idea, but this is exactly the type of thing an automated driving system should catch and avoid

But it wouldn't have sounded so cut and dry if they reported it as "a pedestrian slowly meandering across the road".

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#184
post #141
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know the vehicle didn't brake? There's no audio to tell us anything, and a car takes "almost a second" to rock forward on its suspension when reacting to brake input too. FWIW, I think I might see the nose bobbing a bit just before the collision, but honestly can't tell. I certainly don't think you can say "did not attempt to brake" based on the evidence at hand, basically.

Yes, that was in the original announcement

Literally every other statement of fact in the original police announcement was proven false by this video.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#185
Wow, the pedestrian just walked onto the road without so much of a glance at the direction of incoming cars.

Sure, it's the car's responsibility to stop. But still--it's almost like the pedestrian didn't care at all. She never saw the car throughout the entire incident. She never saw it coming. She didn't cared to.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. The dynamic range of the human eye is vastly better than a visible spectrum camera.

It's not so simple. Technically, you are not wrong but a video feed should have been sufficient here. It should also be considered that digital video has improved drastically over the last decade.

Even LIDAR aside, computer vision and a raw video feed should have been enough to have prevented this collision.

When a digital camera records an image, a gamma curve is applied to it before display, which makes up for our bias against the darker portions which the digital equipment does not have. We are very capable of guessing the results of bright conditions but not dark conditions via compressed video.

Moreso, these cars should not be using consumer CCDs with compression. They should be utilizing the full possible scope of video.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#188
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…

In pitch darkness, IR cameras can only see more than a visual light camera if you somehow had IR headlights that were more powerful than the visual headlights (they probably don't; that would blind other AVs just like high beams blind other drivers). It doesn't grant you the ability to see in the dark with infinite range. Lidar can sense shapes with more range, but at the cost of dramatically worse resolution and latency. It's conceivable the radar/lidar sensor caught the person in the left lane with a bike and decided that was a reasonable place for a person with a bike to be, then lost track of the person while she walked into the right lane (where the visual/IR system could not see her yet).

It's also entirely possible there was an egregious bug. This video doesn't really tell us much.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#189
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…

Indeed! To LIDAR, she was basically standing in the lane, with a bulky bicycle. To visible light, including the driver, who was apparently half asleep or watching the dashboard, she was in shadow until just before the collision. So yes, LIDAR should have caught this. Easily. So something was clearly misconfigured. And even if the driver had been carefully watching the road, he probably wouldn't have seen her in time.…

Even an extra visual camera or hdr setup should easily have caught this. Or a $20 webcam with IR for that matter.
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