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Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#321

Post by birken »

stevenwoo wrote: post #290
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.

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.

Even if those in-wheel reflectors are removed, the wheel rims are reflective and the seat post is reflective (at minimum). And additionally there are several things that are way less reflective than a bicycle that you don't want to hit in the middle of the road. Like a deer, or a pothole, or a pedestrian.

A bicycle shouldn't need to be covered in reflectors to be safe from getting run over by a car. However anybody who cycles at night (as I do frequently) should wear reflective clothing because the road is full of reckless drivers.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#322

Post by brokenmachine »

jonknee wrote: post #218
brokenmachine wrote: post #63

Wow, 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.

That pedestrian obviously didn't have good situational awareness, but are we happy to let self-driving cars mow down any unaware obstacle on the road? Broken-down cars/deer/children/roadworks?

Honestly, that video proves to me that this tech is nowhere near ready. That was the most obvious of obstacles and the car did not even slow down.

I believe a competent human would have at the very least slowed down in that situation, and likely stopped completely.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#324

Post by dmix »

51Cards wrote: post #90
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…

This is exactly it. I see people mentioning seeing the victim at the last second but these vehicles are supposed to be better. They scan in non visible spectrums with LIDAR. Lack of safety vest, lack of headlights, none of it is supposed to matter... or at least it shouldn't completely compromise the vehicle's systems. Camera's may not work as well but an obstacle directly in the path should still be detected. Especi…

I watched the video a bunch of times and I'm not 100% sure how the vehicle could have reacted at the upper maximum of time where she would have been visible to LIDAR, and maybe for Radar, to make a significant difference. At least given the two options where it could have slowed maybe 10km/hr at most (from the 40mph aka 64km/hr speed limit) but that's still an if and I'm not sure it would have ensure the survivability of the jaywalker OR safety of the people in the vehicle at that speed.

The other option is swerving which might have been a possible solution here as well, but that would also have been highly dangerous for the people in the car as well at those speeds, within that timeframe, possibly causing >1 fatality or serious injury.

Regardless I'm very much speculating here regarding reaction times based on watching a low quality video, I'm really looking forward to expert analysis here rather than speculation on the capabilities of LIDAR/Radar + computation speed at 60km/hr... even considering a human driver would have 100% hit this person.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#325

Post by stefan_ »

ubernostrum wrote: post #282
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 th…

Here is what even a GoPro can do at night:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HamWCVrFI

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#326

Post by matte_black »

mikeash wrote: post #173
Treblemaker wrote: post #32

The first question that comes to my mind watching this, is, why didn't the _pedestrian_ see the _car_? It looks as though she didn't even look up until the car was only a few feet away from here. I'm not just trying to "blame the victim". The car "should" have responded sooner. But see-and-avoid works both ways. If you're choosing to cross a road in the dark, you, too, have a responsibility to understand the drivers'…

I see a lot of people who cross the street without looking. I definitely don’t get it. I constantly check everywhere even when I clearly have the right of way. But that’s how people are.

These people need to watch more videos of people getting run right the hell over before it finally sinks in. I’ve watched enough that I never walk close alongside any road, and keep a good distance from an intersection while waiting for the cars to stop, because sometimes they don’t!

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#327

Post by ineedasername »

Okay, so Tempe police aren't going to be able to get & grok the raw data on how the AI was handling things. So how does that shake out in an investigation? It seems like they'll have to rely very heavily on the good faith of Uber (hah!) to honestly interpret & communicate the truth of that side of the story.

Releasing the video so soon without the equally important (probably more so) AI side is almost deliberately misleading, and at best shows Tempe ill equipped to deal with the investigation if they believe that video to answer any more questions than it raises, and I can't believe they don't know better. The video screams "Blame the poor light/lazy driver/idiot pedestrian!" at least for viewers that aren't more savvy on the tech involved.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#328

Post by twinkletwinkle »

fudged71 wrote: post #283
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?

At the absolute bare minimum, hit the brakes and reduce the impact. An attentive human driver would have at least started to hit the brakes. The software should have had plenty of time (I'm estimating a full second) to do something productive.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#329

Post by StavrosK »

fudged71 wrote: post #251

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.

The cars don't have to increase ISO to get detail, that's for human eyes. Increasing ISO only works because we can't see details in shadows, but computers don't have that limitation. A neural network wouldn't have to add 100 to each pixel to make out detail, like a human would.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#330

Post by walrus01 »

soperj wrote: post #76
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…

Not to the naked eye.. this is a video. No way does it appear that dark to your eye.

Have to agree with you. This is the automatic exposure control of the camera. my 1440p dash cam does the same thing. In its video it looks like everything outside of the cone of the headlights is pitch dark, but it is actually not. I have seen deer standing by the side of the road and later checked the dash cam, which did not pick them up at all.
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