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Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

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Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#601

Post by peterwwillis »

Collisions between pedestrians, bicyclists and cars would be impossible if we restricted the roadway. Collisions of vehicles between lanes, including the opposite and crossing lanes, would also be impossible.

You don't even need self-driving cars to do it, and it would greatly reduce the number of serious accidents and fatalities. You could start with just the roads with the most accidents.

And by the way, nobody seems to have mentioned that assisted driving technology could be added to cars today. We already have cars that emergency-brake for us. They could also warn us of upcoming red lights, fast approaching obstructions in the roadway, or unsafe actions on the road, such as letting the car drift lanes without a turn signal.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#602

Post by hcknwscommenter »

ttul wrote: post #315
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.

That would be criminal. Nobody at Uber would risk that.

Are you joking? Uber has always flaunted laws. Even in their home town it was illegal to offer a taxi service without a license. They did it anyway. Later, the city decided to differentiate between ride hailing via app and sticking your arm out to hail a cab. That change happened after uber broke the law.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#603

Post by mdorazio »

osrec wrote: post #592
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…

The lady can be seen fairly clearly (even in this poor quality video) at 0.03 and impact occurs at 0.04. That's 1s, which means a distance of approx 17m. If the guy was watching (sort of the point of him being there really) he could have slowed the car significantly and probably even stopped it. These are test vehicles being treated like prod vehicles. They should probably not be on streets with pedestrians quite so…

You're massively underestimating human response time to visual cues and also the distance needed to stop a vehicle traveling at 35-40mph. It takes a full quarter of a second to respond to a visual stimulus on average, and more than that to also move your foot and depress a brake pedal. By that time the car was less than 50 feet from the pedestrian. At 40mph braking distance is about 80 feet in good conditions. There is absolutely no way a human driver could have avoided this accident assuming the same visual distance and dynamic range as the camera. Best case, the car may have slowed down a bit before impact.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#604

Post by hcknwscommenter »

StavrosK wrote: post #329
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.

You are confusing two things:

i) what human eyes need to do to get details from a dark image (increase ISO and risk washing out bright areas); and

ii) what human eyes do when looking out at the real world (rely on the huge dynamic range that the human visual system is capable of, which dynamic range is about an order of magnitude larger than any video camera sensor);

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#605

Post by lewis500 »

This is not what I expected at all. The original news reports based on the police comments made it seem like she was on the side of the road and then randomly darted out. That's not something I would really expect AV's to be able to cope with yet, if ever.

Instead what we see is a scenario that happens all the time: a pedestrian who is sleepy or perhaps with mental problems or on some substances...in any case not hyper alert...crossing a road without looking. It's not that busy at that time of night and I'm sure I have done the same thing. It's very discouraging and angering that these cars are being driven without the capability. I feel very disappointed. To me it's not super important whether an ordinary driver would've stopped: ordinary people drive drunk, exhausted and/or distracted all the time; but I hoped that AV's were already better than that.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#606

Post by abiox »

Balgair wrote: post #424
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…

> Wow, that self driving car is total crap if it can't pick up that obstacle. Not to nit-pick too much but 'that obstacle' is a person. A person that died because engineering hubris. I think we should be careful in our language in this situation, as it may get away from us. She was not 'an obstacle' or a 'thing to avoid' or 'hobo', she was a living person.

i'm not sure i follow what you're trying to communicate. what do you mean by "get away from us"? also, framing things as "obstacle" vs "living person" seems like a false dichotomy.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#607

Post by mercer »

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.

Did anyone bother to go to that exact spot at night to see what things are like from a human perspective? That strikes me as the first thing to do as a news agency...

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#608

Post by brokenmachine »

Balgair wrote: post #424
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…

> Wow, that self driving car is total crap if it can't pick up that obstacle. Not to nit-pick too much but 'that obstacle' is a person. A person that died because engineering hubris. I think we should be careful in our language in this situation, as it may get away from us. She was not 'an obstacle' or a 'thing to avoid' or 'hobo', she was a living person.

I 100% agree, however arguing about semantics is not productive.

I deliberately chose the word "obstacle" to hammer home the point that the car did not even need to identify that the object in front of it was a person.

If that obstacle had happened to be a fallen tree, it would be the car's passengers that would be dead instead.

Literally all it needed to do was stop, or at the very least slow down.

In this case, I believe the car performed much worse than an average human driver would have, and this video shows without any doubt that these cars are not safe to be on the road in their current state.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#609

Post by InclinedPlane »

URSpider94 wrote: post #486
dylan-m wrote: post #387

This is such a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion before the actual data appears. Even if Uber's software is ridiculously using visible light for its decision-making, it should definitely be taking into account what it doesn't know. A system like this should not be guessing. There is a giant swath of black in the video; the camera doesn't know what's there. So, the car should be moving so it has a short eno…

The police department released the video, not Uber.

In vehicle vs. pedestrian or bicyclist scenarios the criminal justice system is almost always tremendously biased toward the vehicle driver, unless the victim happened to have been a child in a residential area.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#610

Post by isaachier »

jeffmould wrote: post #135
jackpirate wrote: post #78

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…

I am pretty sure Uber uses an iPad app for its autonomous vehicles. The driver is looking at that iPad application periodically along with the physical windshield view.
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