Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#671

Post by danso »

siliconwrath wrote: post #502
erobbins wrote: post #220

A straight road, in dry conditions, obstructed by an entire person and a bicycle with REFLECTORS on it, and the car doesn't see her? I think whoever wrote this code should be in prison, quite honestly, along with their entire management chain. I suspect many people will feel the same way. This is a really really bad look for automated vehicles in general. It also backs up my contention that anything less than full 10…

It certainly does look bad for self driving vehicles, and I definitely feel terrible that a life was lost from this. However, how does one develop a self driving vehicle that’s 100% automated without the ability to test in real driving conditions? Despite this accident, self-driving vehicles have a fairly safe driving record for the number of miles and time they have been active. Details on California accident rates…

It's a difficult question. Because we cannot just dive into it assuming that the toll (in life/safety) of beta testing AVs on public roads will result in a net benefit within a reasonable timespan. The human driving fatality rate is ~1 death per 100 million miles. Uber has 2 million miles driven and 1 fatality. It's obviously unfair to extrapolate and say that Uber has 50x the fatality rate of normal driving. But that means we have to keep testing Uber AVs on public roads.

What if an Uber AV accidentally kills someone at the 2.5M mark? That's still not enough data to statistically compare apples to apples. Maybe the next 100M miles of Uber testing is fatality free...that still wouldn't be completely enough (right? I'm not great at stats but I would think we need at least a billion?). Of course, it could go the other way, with Uber AVs killing someone every 1M miles.

As a general tech optimist, I'm inclined to think tech will get better, overall. But let's face it, that's not a given. And in the meantime, it's likely the tech upper-class won't be the ones who suffer the most while tech improves. The case at hand being the prime example: a homeless recently-imprisoned woman was killed.

Earlier today someone submitted an interesting RAND study that argued that the testing time for autonomous vehicles to meet statistical reliability for safety testing would be on the order of decades, or even centuries, and there would still be no guarantee that AVs would be safer. I'm hoping RAND is just being really pessimistic here...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#672

Post by static_noise »

Do you remember the reaction test where a ball is rolling onto the road and you have to hit the breaks?

This situation is more akin to a ball laying on the road already and you drive over it.

This situation is very clear cut. There is an object (a subject even) on the road directly in front of the vehicle and the car just straight forward drives into it. It doesn't even swerve. It doesn't break. Nothing. This is a total fail of the system.

What if there is an accident and people are standing on the road for some good reason? What if it is a deer in the headlights? What if a kid is running loose? Is the vehicle supposed to just hunt them down?

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#673

Post by Ajedi32 »

schreiaj wrote: post #651
Animats wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did LIDAR and IR (?) not catch that? That seems like a pretty serious problem. Something is badly wrong there. That should have been detected by LIDAR, radar, and vision. Yes, they need a wide dynamic range camera for night driving, but such things exist.[1][2] They're available as low-end dashcams; it's not expensive military night vision technology. Radar should pick up a bicycle at that range. The old Eaton VO…

LIDAR also has limitations on angular resolution just as a function of how the sensor works. It's entirely possible that the size of the person/bike on LIDAR was just too small until it was too late to stop. Why it didn't even appear to try to stop? You got me, refresh rate on the LIDAR? LIDAR flat out being mounted to high and relying on optical sensors instead for collision avoidance of small targets (like a human…

Why even bother having a LIDAR system on your self driving car if it doesn't have sufficient resolution to detect a person standing right in front of it?

This doesn't seem like an edge case at all. Pedestrian crossing the road at a normal walking pace, and no obstructions in the way which would block the car's vision. The fact that it's dark out should be irrelevant to every sensor on that car other than the cameras.

Something obviously went terribly wrong here; either with the sensors themselves or the software. Probably both.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#674

Post by rdiddly »

philip1209 wrote: post #240
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…

What is displayed on the center console? Is it possible that the driver was looking at a live video feed? I believe that some standard cars show their night vision feed there.

I'm skeptical of that possibility, because if that were true, you would see the driver gasp in surprise while looking down (and a lot sooner BTW, given that it's supposedly night vision), instead of roughly one human-reaction-time after looking up at the road.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#675

Post by jaccarmac »

tedmiston wrote: post #668
jaccarmac wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the comments in this thread are ridiculous, and your comment throws them into sharp relief. Even if the video is a perfectly faithful reproduction of the scene and the dark parts are that dark, why in the world would the software assume a space it has next to no information about is safe to drive into at the current speed?

> a space it has next to no information about The car is equipped with more than just an RGB camera sensor wise, such as the Velodyne LiDAR, so it does have information about the scene despite being pitch black to the naked eye. http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-custom-lidar-tech-not-re... http://velodynelidar.com/hdl-64e.html https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/11/ford-lidar-autonomous-car/

> even if

That's why I specified. In any case thanks for clarifying.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#676

Post by galdosdi »

beachy wrote: post #538
cozzyd wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Police are also nearly always pedestrians, so what?

Baloney. In most USA cities the vast majority of police officers on patrol are in radio motor patrol cars, not footposts. Are you even from the USA? Or is there a city that is an exception?

Or are you repeating the trite idea that all motorists are also pedestrians because they have to walk a few feet in a parking lot or driveway at the start and end of their trip? That is ridiculous if so -- travelling a few feet in a parking lot, a place designed to be safe for pedestrians, is very different from having no choice but to walk miles of dangerous high speed roads like the one in question today because it's the only way to get home

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#677

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#678

Post by hartator »

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’s what high beams are for. It would have been easy to avoid.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#680

Post by vanattab »

hcknwscommenter wrote: post #604
StavrosK wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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);

It's worth pointing out however that humans can't make use of that whole order of magnitude range at the same time. The visual system has to gain up and down as the average light in the field of view changes. This takes several minutes or even a half hour to fully dark adapt.
Post reply on HN