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Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#531

Post by buvanshak »

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.

It is not uncommon for pedestrian to notice in coming traffic, and still cross the road, in the expectation that the car ll just slow down for them to cross..A human driver, without exception, will slow down in this case. Sadly the same thing might have happened here. The lady took one look before crossing, and expected the car to slow down..

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#532

Post by [deleted] »

cameldrv wrote: post #389

Pathetic and sad performance by the vehicle and "safety" driver. The woman does not "appear out of nowhere", she was in the roadway for some time. The woman was not wearing all black, had red hair, and her shoes were reflective. Even if we are to believe that their camera is this crappy, they still have the lidar, and it appears brakes were not applied. Even 500ms of braking * 0.8g = 9mph. That might have saved her l…

[deleted]

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#533

Post by rootusrootus »

Regardless of how suddenly she appears in the camera, it is pretty logical that she was probably visible to the human driver if he had been watching the road. That's not nearly fast enough on a stretch of road like that to be overdriving the visibility provided by the modern headlights of a brand new Volvo. I bet she was visible to the driver in plenty of time to have stopped.

I'm an optimist, but still I think we are much farther away from legitimate self-driving cars than a lot of people think. And every accident like this where the computer vastly underperforms a human driver is a huge PR blow to the technology.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#534

Post by u801e »

usaphp wrote: post #508
u801e wrote: post #491

Based on the video, it took about 1.5 seconds from when the pedestrian came into view till the vehicle collided with them. At 38 mph, a car is traveling about 56 feet/second. That means that the car traveled about 84 feet in that timeframe. VOL (Visual Aim on Left) headlamps are supposed to be aimed 2.1 inches below headlamp level at a distance of 25 feet [1]. If the headlamps on the vehicle were about 2 feet off the…

> they should have been able to light up the roadway about 286 feet ahead But when that person was 286 feet away from the vehicle - she was also way off to its left. Headlights mostly light up what’s ahead of you, not what’s on your side. Unless I am missing something.

> Headlights mostly light up what’s ahead of you, not what’s on your side.

Good headlamps should have a uniform and widely distributed beam pattern which should be able to light up at least the lane of traffic you're in, as well as the shoulder and several lanes to the left.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#535

Post by emodendroket »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #273
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.

I wouldn't be one bit surprised. The antics of this company are well known. This incident has my wondering: of all the companies working on this, why is Uber trusted to be testing this technology?

https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ube...

> Levandowski seemed to struggle in other ways as well. In December, Uber dispatched 16 self-driving cars, with safety drivers, in San Francisco without seeking a permit from the California DMV. The test went poorly—on the first day, a self-driving car ran a red light, and the DMV ordered Uber to halt its program in the state.

> The company suffered further embarrassment when a New York Times article, citing leaked documents, suggested that Uber’s explanation for the traffic violation—that it had been caused by human error—wasn’t complete. The car malfunctioned, and the driver failed to stop it.

> The misdirection came as no surprise to the Uber employees who’d spent time at Otto’s San Francisco headquarters. Someone there had distributed stickers—in OSHA orange—with a tongue-in-cheek slogan: “Safety third.”

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#536

Post by snowpanda »

slavik81 wrote: post #65

Why is the car driving at full speed if it can't see the road ahead? Does the car know that visibility is low? What other sensors are they using? Did the car notice the pedestrian once they were fully lit up? This video raises so many questions. I think we're going to be revisiting this incident over and over again in papers, reports and eventually textbooks.

>Why is the car driving at full speed if it can't see the road ahead?

This is the best question to ask.

Why? Because going through all the comments, there seem to be 2 trains of thought:

1) LIDAR should have seen it. (car's fault).

2) It's the pedestrian's fault.

Neither of these questions matter. Because the real question is like you said: if the car couldn't have seen it, then why drive at full (or actually above legal) speed?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#537

Post by linkregister »

Balgair wrote: post #438

A lot of comentors are talking about the differences between the eye and a sensor. Here is a brief overview of those differences with references at the bottom: https://medium.com/photography-secrets/whats-the-difference-...

I didn’t see anything about light adjustment time in that article. Can the human eye adjust between high and low light conditions faster than a camera?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#538

Post by beachy »

cozzyd wrote: post #379
xvf22 wrote: post #299

It's very disingenuous to release this video. This is not the picture the car saw nor the human. That coupled with the fact that no radar or lidar data was released makes me wonder why the police seem to be bending over backwards to absolve Uber.

Police are nearly always primarily motorists and therefore biased to the motorist perspective.

Police are also nearly always pedestrians, so what?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#539

Post by WiseWeasel »

ScottBurson wrote: post #380
danso wrote: post #14

Wow, I had thought it impossible for the Uber AV to be in the right lane, and for the victim to be crossing left-to-right, for the police to claim that the victim couldn't be seen until it was too late. But I didn't expect the road to be so dark, given what we saw in the accident photos (which might have been over-exposed?) and Google Maps, which showed a lot of street/sidewalk lighting. In the moment that we can ful…

> I hope that the driver isn't the sole focus of punishment As sad as this accident was, I don't see how the driver or Uber is legally at fault. Pedestrians crossing outside of a crosswalk are supposed to yield to traffic. The victim in this video is stunningly oblivious to the fact that she's on a roadway. Obviously we want self-driving tech to be good enough to avoid such an accident, particularly since a human pro…

> Pedestrians crossing outside of a crosswalk are supposed to yield to traffic.

Pedestrians always have the right-of-way. They might get a ticket for jaywalking in some cities, but it's never permissible to hit someone with your car, regardless of whether they're in a crosswalk. Vehicular manslaughter is no minor infraction, and Uber can expect a civil suit from the victim's family even if there are no criminal charges.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#540

Post by cmurf »

URSpider94 wrote: post #472
hcknwscommenter wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not exactly. The dynamic range of the eye in a single scene is around 12-14 stops, about the same as a high-end digital sensor, like the one in the Canon EOS 5D or Sony Alpha. https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human... The eye can gain a lot more stops through adaptation (irising, low-light rod-only vision), but those mechanisms dont come into play when viewing a single scene -- and cameras can a…

A camera captures the entire scene in a frame with a fixed dynamic range. Human vision builds the scene with spatially variant mapping, the scene is made from many frames with different exposures stacked together in real time.

I'm concerned about poor scotopic adaptation due to the rather bright light source inside the car - maybe it's the display he's looking at. I see a prominent amount of light on the ceiling all the way to the back of the car and right on his face. It's really straight forward to collect the actual scene luminances from this particular car interior and exterior in this location, but my estimation is the interior luminance is a bigger problem for adaptation than the street lights because the display he's presumably looking at has a much wider field of view, and he's looking directly at it for a prolonged period of time. It's possible he's not even scotopically adapted because of this.

And also why is he even looking at the screen? He's obviously distracted by something. Is this required for testing? Ostensibly he's supposed to drive the car first. Is this display standard equipment? Or is it unique to it being an Uber? Or is it an entertainment device?

Retest with an OEM lit interior whose driver is paying attention. We already know the autonomous setup failed. But barriers are in place than also increase the potential for the human backup driver to fail.

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