I do wonder if perhaps Uber made the video darker before releasing. Or used a camera that is not the main sensing camera. Because I would hope the cars are smart enough to increase ISO to get more detail at night time.
Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#252Direct 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…
"The driver specially selected and trained for exactly this job, does not look at the road!" Humans gonna human. Our brains are trained by millions of years to not pay attention to things not directly important. It's hard enough sometimes to keep our attention on the road when we're doing the driving and the driving is too easy, like being alone on a highway at night. Expecting humans to passively observe driving whi…
Although this video will no doubt throw that driver under the, um, bus it wouldn’t matter if this were some rock star Uber engineer. You could see the exact same result.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lat…
Humans radiate in IR. A midrange FLIR can pick out a human against a cold background from miles away.
Long IR. No one is using that for AVs. (that might change after this incident!)
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#254The description given before the video was released painted a picture in my mind that the woman was on the median and "suddenly" entered the roadway in front of the vehicle. I pictured someone darting across the road directly in front of the car, with no way to stop in time. This video shows a completely different scenario. The woman started on the median, but the vehicle was in the #2 lane. She wasn't visible to the…
Bikes are mainly curved, small pieces of metal, and absorptive pieces of rubber. Their reflectors are designed for viewing them from the front or rear, not the sides. I wonder whether lidar can even differentiate a sideways bike from noise.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#255Wow, that self driving car is total crap if it can't pick up that obstacle. Doesn't get much more obvious than that. Slowly walking from the left lane into your lane on a fairly straight road. I bet it was more visible to the human eye than on that video as well. You'd have to see someone crossing the road like that. Of course the pedestrian wasn't doing the smartest thing but I believe a human driver would have at l…
> You'd have to see someone crossing the road like that. You could say the same thing about a car with headlights on coming towards you... From the little evidence we have it seems like the pedestrian, driver/monitor and the car all should have done better.
The pedestrian in this case isn't equipped with computer-activated motors and brakes. Yeah, it would've been best had she not crossed there at all. But that issue is entirely independent of how the AV should perform, assuming that Uber AVs are touted as being significantly safer and faster to react (day or night).
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#256How 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…
The video here is misleading. A human driver has a much wider field of view and better low-light vision than this video renders the situation. That's not to say that this would have been prevented by an attentive driver. But it's also clear that the safety driver was not paying attention, so it's even harder to know.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#257This 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.
2017 Legacy with "Eye Sight." I have had one or two situations where the car emergency braked on my behalf. It happens when the car in front of me turns off the road and is nearly clear. I don't brake because I know that the car will clear the roadway before I get there but the system doesn't see it that way and brakes. I anticipate that now and avoid anything close enough to cause braking so I don't wind up the front end of a rear end collision.
The other thing this system does is to provide adaptive cruise control. If I'm behind a vehicle that results in slowing down and then switch lanes (to where there is another vehicle in front of me) the car seems to think it can resume speed and slip between the two vehicles. I've come to expect that too and disengage the speed control before switching lanes.
It also provides a warning when approaching the lane markings (unless I have indicated a lane change.) Occasionally it triggers on seams in the pavement. It also provides steering input if the land deviation increases. I've only experienced when I tested it in purpose. I'm not sure it would reliably keep the vehicle in the lane.
Overall the system seems to be pretty good and though not perfect, is a net asset.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#258That is one super dark patch, but lack of visible light shouldn't be a problem for IR?
And whether the human driver/observer could have reacted fast enough to prevent death is a question, but it would help if the human in the car had been looking out the window more than looking down at her? phone.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Right, so assuming LIDAR caught her: I'd imagine the algorithm presumed that she wouldn't cross the center line till she did cross the line, I don't know what to think the algorithm would do there after?
Presumably the algorithm had a pretty good idea of where the lanes were, and if the LIDAR detected a non moving object in an adjacent lane and decided it was fine to ignore it because it presumed it was not going to start moving, that's a pretty broken algorithm.
I don't have the link handy, but I was reading a webpage yesterday (related but not about this crash) which showed Google's self driving car's "view" of a road scene - it's clearly painted different color boxes and identified pedestrians, bicycles, other cars - along with "fences" where it had determined it'd need to slow or stop based on all those objects.
Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public), it was faulty (but being used anyway, either because its self test is also faulty, or because the driuver/company ignored fault warnings) - or _perhaps_ Google's marketing material is faked and _everybodies_ self driving tech is inadequate?
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#260I've noticed that pedestrians in the US tend not to look at cars coming their way when they cross intersections - I'm not sure if it's an attitude of "you're supposed to stop for me" and and they're willing to bet on that happening every time, or if they're really unaware of the danger of a few tons of steel coming at them.
This always struck me as very strange as someone from Europe - they teach kids in elementary school to look both ways and not to underestimate the speed of a car.
There are about 2500 pedestrian deaths in the US every year [1], it's just tragic and some of these fatalities could certainly be avoided :/
Edit: Since sgc mentioned 6-6.5k pedestrian deaths per year in the EU, which didn't sound any better than the US, I tried to come up with pedestrian fatalities per 100k population (data for 2012 or 2013):
| Country | Fatalities per 100k | % pedestrian | Pedestrian fatalities per 100k |
|---------+---------------------+--------------+---------------------------------|
| USA | 10.6 | 14.1 | 1.4946 |
| Italy | 6.1 | 16.2 | 0.9882 |
| Germany | 4.3 | 16.7 | 0.7181 |
#+TBLFM: $4=$2*$3/100
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A997?lang=en
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A998?lang=en
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a-record-i...