Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident

Post by jiri » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 9:08 AM UTC

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…

Post by dogweather » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 9:11 AM UTC

perennate wrote: post #147

dogweather wrote: post #64

An alert human driver would still have had a bad crash, but might not have killed the pedestrian. In a two-lane road, you cannot simply swerve to the other lane w/out checking. I (and many other?) drivers would have just slammed on the brakes. But at that road's speed limit, I believe the brakes wouldn't have stopped in time, and a collision would still have occurred. The pedestrian+bicycle was a direct obstacle, not…

Although a collision may still have occurred if a human slammed on the brakes immediately after seeing the pedestrian, even a 10mph slowdown may have mitigated the fatality into a minor injury. ProPublica has a graph showing the frequency of fatalities in crashes for different impact speeds, showing a more than halving in the occurrence of fatalities in crashes between 38mph and 28mph impacts: https://www.propublica.…

Post by ImaCake » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 9:12 AM UTC

bambax wrote: post #773

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…

Probably the only explanation was that LIDAR was off, either on purpose (for testing?) or because it broke and there was no safety mechanism to prevent the car from operating if/when LIDAR is off.

Post by _pmf_ » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 9:16 AM UTC

jackpirate wrote: post #78

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 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…

Post by kakarot » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

crocowhile wrote: post #807

denkmoon wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real important question. Why didn't the sensor package detect this? Humans not paying attention can never be solved, but hopefully we can get to the bottom of this failure and then fix it systemically. Unfortunately given how shady Uber are, we will never be able to trust their technical analysis in the event one is ever released.

I have the very strong suspicion that the driver has turned autonomous drive mode off, perhaps to be able to watch tv or something. She seems extremely distracted by the dashboard and there is no way that sensors could not alert her of that presence. Also, apparently the car was driving at 38mph in an area where the speed limit was 35mph. Would the autonomous mode allow that?