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The Uber Safety Driver behind the wheel when the incident occurred: Rafaela Vasquez, 44 She has convictions for attempted armed robbery after a plot with her Blockbuster video store co-worker to seize their own shop’s takings at gunpoint in 2001. Vasquez was convicted under her first name Rafael but she now identifies as a woman. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/934713/uber-self-drivin...
Sodium Vapour (monochromatic) lamps, then a large darker area with a pedestrian in dark clothing with car’s headlights dipped.
You will be alarmed at how much stuff you can put on the road and not see it because the road has a lighting pattern that makes it less safe than no lights at all.
With no lights at all, and a hedge between carriageways, the car would have had high beams on and the driver may have seen the pedestrian with plenty of time to brake and either avoid collision altogether or reduce the impact to non-fatal energy.
Now go recreate the scene for yourself and see how it works for you.
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…
You mean like the Mercedes system from 2007 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DMidknVCo ? I agree that IR should have caught the bicyclist earlier, and that it didn't suggests that these cars might also kill quite a few deer with a similar low light profile. (or this one from Cadillac : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPIpNG6mLCY )
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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?
From the reports of cars running red lights and then this I would imagine they have an extremely high level of "risk" (what it takes for the car to take actions in order to avoid something/stop) that is acceptable.
What would be far worse than a hardware or sensor failure would be to learn that Uber is instead teaching its cabs to fly through the streets with abandon. Instead of having cars that drive like a nice, thoughtful citizen we'll have a bunch of vehicles zooming through the streets like a pissed of cabby in Russia.
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…
I'm not sure, pls look that pic https://imgur.com/a/VfBck, you can clearly see there exists at least 10-15 meters b/w them right at the time when she pops up. Now I don't know the speed of the car, but I'd wager, a human driver (if s/he was alert) would have attempted a breaking at that moment.
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.
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…
I have to agree. Just like a normal camera has issues in low-light, it is clear that this camera is diminishing exactly how light the road ahead was. While I can't say confidently that I would have been able to stop to prevent hitting them, watching the video in full screen does lead me to believe that I would have seen them and been able to apply the brakes at least enough to reduce the impact. Also, watching the vi…
And given that it's Uber we can expect that there's an email chain where a programmer is told to ignore the map layer with speed limits on it.
I hope the prosecutor (best case) or plaintiffs lawyer (worst case) finds it and makes Uber suffer.
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The pedestrian died, not the SDV developers. Calling this a “teachable moment ... also for pedestrians” is rather disrespectful.
How exactly is it disrespectful to use this as a teaching aid for other pedestrians about the danger of crossing a road at night?
“Not trying to blame the victim... but this is a teachable moment not only for drivers, but for cyclists...”
... it would be a true statement, which is why I didn’t say the GP was making a false one, but a normal native speaker would at least recognize it as a strange thing to say.
Cyclists should wear helmets, and the cyclist certainly is partly to blame. But no one was suggesting that the cyclist is guilt-free, so the actual effect of the statement is to try and draw a false equivalence.
It’s like saying “sure, global warming is real, but let’s not forget the effects of gradual and natural cyclical climate change.” No educated person in the discussion “forgot” the second, but by phrasing it this way you’re implying we should be paying equal attention to a large effect and a much smaller one.
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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…
Human beings radiate IR do they not? Silly question, of course they do. Perhaps not above an Arizona level of thermal background?
Air has such a low thermal mass that it doesn't measurably affect most IR sensors. Hot pavement could be a potential issue, but that shouldn't have a major effect on forward-facing sensors.
Besides, it's only March. Even Arizona isn't that hot yet.