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Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#281

Post by web007 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #134
csomar wrote: post #62

Is it me or the street lighting is beyond mediocre? It is weak and alternate between a "lighted" portion and a literally black portion. But even then, the driver was busy with his cellphone. The accident might have happened nevertheless due to bad lighting. But this could have been avoided was the driver on alert.

Coming from Europe, I've been surprised as how many places in the US that don't have streetlights at all. Driving between Maryland and Virginia, there are 4-lane highways that are completely dark for long stretches at a time. I'm assuming this is a money-saving concern, since the US has such a huge amount of area to cover. Back in many native, smaller habitat, I've only rarely encountered this kind of darkness, and i…

I prefer the situation of no lights other than headlights.

I'm from Maryland, and my neighborhood is off a country road with a single streetlight at the head of the neighborhood. If the weather is doing anything (fog, rain, snow) even a little bit then it's completely awful to drive through that intersection.

If the light didn't exist, I could keep my vision adaptation the same before / during / after, and could compensate for inclement weather the whole time. As-is, I go from very-dark to bright-light and back to very-dark over a hundred feet or so, and it makes it very hard to adapt safely.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#282

Post by ubernostrum »

nkurz wrote: post #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 he…

I'm a broken record here, but:

Seriously. Go spend some time in /r/roadcam on reddit to get yourself accustomed to what a typical dashboard camera video looks like. People here are drawing all sorts of conclusions based on seeing an unfamiliar type of video, and that's a really bad thing.

The two biggest things to get used to are:

1. Dashcams do a terrible job in dark or low-light scenes. The car's headlights, and the streetlights, were almost certainly functioning just fine; the scene only looks as dark as it does because that's the best the camera can do. A dashcam video of a dark/low-light incident will always look significantly darker than how a human would perceive it when actually present.

2. Dashcams often have a wider field of view than their human operators. Which means you often see obstacles in the video before they'd be in the field of view of a human driver (this causes no end of "well I saw that coming way before the driver did!" snark in /r/roadcam discussions).

And in theory this vehicle has infrared on board, and a LIDAR system scanning the road ahead for trouble. Any such system should have had zero difficulty detecting the pedestrian in time to stop or avoid. The fact that it didn't is a very bad sign for Uber's implementation.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#283

Post by fudged71 »

chrsstrm wrote: post #16

The 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…

What is striking to me is I haven't seen anyone talking about evasive maneuvers. The car must have been able to see the person, and the road looks empty, why not swerve?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#284

Post by stefan_ »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #237
stefan_ wrote: post #31

If there is something that isn't going to help the public perception of autonomous cars at all, it's releasing a compressed to shit capture of another video showing a single camera angle from dozens. I would say it's a deliberate attempt to manipulate if I didn't also strongly believe ignorance on part of the police department has lead them to believe that autonomous cars could even exit a parking lot without data fr…

I think releasing much higher quality and higher dynamic range and multi-spectrum video is going to be a LOT more damming of driverless car tech. Just look at all the commentators here saying they would have not been able to stop in time based on this terrible camera footage (ignoring the vastly better capabilities of their own human eyes).

I'm holding out hope that a good chunk of the public will understand this footage is not at all indicative of the vision capabilities of even the human eye, lest the actual sensor tech on that Uber car. Certainly a good number of people on Twitter do.

If Waymo understood how to stick a knife in they would have replicated this scenario yesterday and released a video. Hell, you could take a Mercedes S class with night view assistant and it would spot this, no problem.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#285

Post by burke »

ars wrote: 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…

> anything except perfection in self driving cars will lead to more accidents.

Only if perfection is defined as "statistically better than humans".

I do agree that these "assistive" technologies have the potential to do more harm than good, but the bar is actually far lower than "perfection".

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#287

Post by danso »

sydd wrote: post #267
jeffmould wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The footage from a normal camera should not matter, a self driving car is equipped with stuff that works regardless of light conditions like LIDAR oor IR cameras. This looks to me like a software failure.

The footage from the normal camera does matter in that it's the main way that we (humans) can process the scene. The parent comments are just pointing out that the camera footage is likely darker than the actual scene in person.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#288

Post by munk-a »

atonse wrote: 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 strikes me as extremely disingenuous if this is all Uber gave to the police. They should be making as much raw data as possible available. At the very least it'd let other companies test their AIs against the scenario and see if they would catch sight of and be able to avoid the pedestrian, if not then this is one more data point to train them on so it doesn't happen again.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#289

Post by philip1209 »

taneq wrote: post #272
philip1209 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if the bike itself was too spindly to be picked up, there's no excuse for missing the solid mass of a human body.

In principle, I agree. But, I wonder if holding a bike in front of you is almost like holding a mirror that obscures the lidar ability to detect a solid mass.

edit: but she is in front of the bike, so this shouldn't matter. Does the darkness of her clothing impact any of the sensors?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#290

Post by stevenwoo »

philip1209 wrote: post #254
chrsstrm wrote: post #16

The 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.

All bikes sold in the United States are required to have reflectors on the wheels for reflection to the right and left. Enthusiasts often remove them.
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