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

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#791

Post by lolc »

wklauss wrote: post #785
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…

> Also, watching the video of the interior it is clear the driver was looking at his phone or doing something else. Probably checking the computer installed for diagnostics of the autopilot system. If it's in self driving mode and you are the engineer in charge, you'd want to constantly check what the system is seeing vs the actual conditions on the road.

If you're the driver of a car you're supposed to ensure safety by looking out, not verifying sensory information. If Uber designed their cars to show a rendering of the computer's perception to the driver, or other sensory output, they would violate that principle.

To me it looks like the guy is just falling asleep at a boring job. In all likelihood that was not an engineer more than any other taxi driver is an engineer.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#792

Post by Slartie »

noobermin wrote: post #707
aecs99 wrote: post #700

I currently work full-time in the self-driving vehicle industry. I am part of a team that builds perception algorithms for autonomous navigation. I have been working exclusively with LiDAR systems for over 1.5 years. Like a lot of folks here, my first question was: "How did the LiDAR not spot this?". I have been extremely interested in this and kept observing images and videos from Uber to understand what could be th…

Alright, so given your observations, which I don't doubt, here's a question I have: why have a pilot on public roads? If uber's software wasn't robust, why "test in production" when production could kill people?

> If uber's software wasn't robust, why "test in production" when production could kill people?

Because it's cheap. And Arizona lawmakers apparently don't do their job of protecting their citizens against a reckless company that is doing the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" move, with "profits" being the improvements to their so-called self-driving car technology and "losses" being random people endangered and killed during the process of alpha-testing and debugging their technology in this nice testbed we call "city", which conveniently comes complete with irrationally acting humans that you don't even have to pay anything for serving as actors in your life-threatening test scenarios.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#793

Post by _up »

adamweld wrote: post #411
maxerickson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this seems like exactly the scenario that autonomous driving vehicles are intended to prevent. may be optimistic. Lots of people are hoping they will prevent such scenarios, the motivation for fielding them is more related to making lots of money.

I disagree, if you look at any of the Waymo videos you can see they have great recognition of every car, pedestrian, and obstacle within 100 meters of the car, and most of that data (point cloud lidar/radar at the very least) would work in pitch black without even headlights. Thus it's extremely reasonable to expect that autonomous vehicles will easily prevent scenarios like this. Inclement conditions, defensive driv…

There was also a recent lawsuit where Uber pledged to not use any lidar tech and software from Waymo anymore. Maybe they had to deactivate Lidar.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#794

Post by wklauss »

aecs99 wrote: post #700

I currently work full-time in the self-driving vehicle industry. I am part of a team that builds perception algorithms for autonomous navigation. I have been working exclusively with LiDAR systems for over 1.5 years. Like a lot of folks here, my first question was: "How did the LiDAR not spot this?". I have been extremely interested in this and kept observing images and videos from Uber to understand what could be th…

I'm assuming LiDAR is not the only sensor installed in self-driving cars. Isn't that the case? And in this scenario, the software didn't have a lot to process. Road was empty, pedestrian was walking bike in hand perpendicular to road traffic...

Even if the detection box changed in size, it should have detected something. Tall or short, wide or narrow, static or moving... at least it should apply brakes to avoid collision.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#795

Post by eyeing_see »

rmu09 wrote: post #781

State of the art emergency assist systems in normal driver-operated cars would have seen this woman/bike and started to brake the vehicle. Even without any assist systems, it should be possible for a human driver to see this bike/woman. It was dark, but otherwise conditions were excellent. I would suppose that sensory capabilities of a driverless vehicles are above those of normal cars. There is clearly something ver…

And due to human vision being better than a dashcam, this car's emergency-assist system, the safety driver, could probably have caught this as well, if they had paid attention to the road.

Which is something that that production-grade technology can ensure with head and eye-tracking. Some non-autonomous cars have this feature to stop people from dozing off, and good semi-autonomous systems, like GM's SuperCruise will refuse to go into or stay in self-driving mode unless the driver is paying attention.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#796

Post by whiskyant »

aecs99 wrote: post #700

I currently work full-time in the self-driving vehicle industry. I am part of a team that builds perception algorithms for autonomous navigation. I have been working exclusively with LiDAR systems for over 1.5 years. Like a lot of folks here, my first question was: "How did the LiDAR not spot this?". I have been extremely interested in this and kept observing images and videos from Uber to understand what could be th…

Maybe the question isn't why the LIDAR didn't spot it. I feel it's more likely it did spot it, but couldn't make the correct decision.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#797

Post by amarant »

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…

lidar would've, but Uber had to trash all lidar sensors since they were stolen from waymo!

or so it would seem... ;)

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#798

Post by kybernetikos »

u801e wrote: post #510
RobLach wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that a human would be able to see in those conditions. It's a lit street with a car with functioning headlamps. It wasn't foggy or rainy. I've personally driven down country roads without any lighting except my headlights and saw deer poking their head out of the woods a ways away for which I slowed down in case they darted across the street. Someone slowly walking their bike would be trivial. Reminds me of…

> It's a lit street with a car with functioning headlamps. The headlamps may have been functioning, but they appeared to be aimed way too low. You can see that the car is able to traverse the distance lit up by the headlamp in about a second at 38 mph. If the headlamps were aimed properly, it should light up the road about 5 seconds ahead of the car.

> If the headlamps were aimed properly, it should light up the road about 5 seconds ahead of the car.

A system with this rule baked in would be driving slower.

People adjust the way they drive based on what their environment is doing, how well their equipment is working and their own alertness. Except in the extremes we should not accept misconfigured equipment as an excuse. And if a system detects that there is no acceptably safe speed for it to go then it should not move at all.

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#799

Post by ptaipale »

hartator wrote: post #678
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.

How is it in America? Over here (North Europe), one may not use high beams when there is street lighting (even though in this case the lighting seemed not very good).

Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

#800

Post by manmal »

jcims wrote: post #578
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…

I wonder if the driver grabbing the wheel disabled the response from the car.

I think the car should have reacted way earlier with a hard brake or starting a lane change. If the lidar detection had worked.
Post reply on HN