Bikes are mainly curved, small pieces of metal, and absorptive pieces of rubber. Their reflectors are designed for viewing them from the front or rear, not the sides. I wonder whether lidar can even differentiate a sideways bike from noise.
All bikes sold in the United States are required to have reflectors on the wheels for reflection to the right and left. Enthusiasts often remove them.
I don't think this is true. I would be surprised if there were much federal regulation about bicycles.
Someone on Reddit posted a comparison of the same spot at night but with a good camera: https://m.imgur.com/a/PM7uu from a video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 That paints the whole accident in a very different light from the video from Twitter. Would any human not notice someone crossing in the good camera screenshot?
I wonder if the moon phase or clouds had anything to do with the lighting conditions.
Don't know why this is being downvoted, it's an interesting point.
There's a significant difference in lighting between a night with a clear sky and full moon versus an overcast night and new moon. Not saying that's the case here, but it's not a valueless comment.
According to this article, the algos only track objects that have been classified as "moving" and the initial classification is what matters. "Let’s say that there is a huge red fire truck idling at the side of the road. An autonomous car can’t see the fire truck if the fire truck suddenly pulls out into traffic. Why? Autonomous cars have a stop and start problem. They don’t have unlimited processing power, so they c…
That's worrying. If that's really the case, autonomous cars shouldn't be on the road.
I don't understant people telling that the car should have done everything to escape this situation and thus could have generate more problem.
What I see but I'm not sure about is:
The poor guy or girl is not crossing a pedestrians passage, have no lights.
END OF THE STORY.
This was and are the worst scenario most of the times when I drive on the road at night. People without light that we see at the last moment. When that happen sorry but you could not blame only the driver. People should use their brain too.
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…
I too think visibility is better than it appears in the video, but I'm not so sure it's good enough to help all that much. However, even with visibility as bad as in the video, I'm confident in my ability to handle the situation. I would probably not be able to break in that short amount of time and from that speed, but neither would I drive at that speed. When there are less than ideal conditions (in this case visibility), it is our responsibility as drivers to adapt and lower the speed, possibly dramatically. This goes for autonomous cars too. If the road in front of me and the areas next to it are not clearly visible, I'd drive at such a speed that a collision would in all likelihood only result in scrapes.
Yep. I live half a mile away and just drove the same path tonight around 10pm, it's nothing like the video. There are spots that are darker than others, but they don't look nearly as dark. Nowhere on the street looks pitch black, there's ambient light everywhere. For anyone who's interested, try taking your phone with the camera app open into a dark room and comparing what you see to what's on the screen. Which shows…
Out of interest-- can you take a pic while the lighting outside is similar (assuming weather hasn't changed dramatically?) and maybe adjust exposure to what your eyes see? Or take a camera phone pic for comparison?
pic at 9pm of the spot taken out of a video circulating here earlier, sorry for the meme format
Yep, also this HDR image of the scene at night: https://imgur.com/gallery/XQrAB Really hope the cops didn't just look at the low-dynamic range dashcam video and decide it's case-closed here. I would not want one of these Uber cars on the streets with me.
NTSB is investigating the crash, so surely they'll conduct adequate forensics work.
I think Uber should be forced to share all of the sensor data.
Historically, building and engineering codes advance in response to disasters. This mindset needs to be applied to robots that are going to be operating in public spaces. Incidents like this are an opportunity for all self-driving car developers to get better and there's a public safety interest in that happening.
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 coll…
I'm really surprised that we're even talking about the pedestrian's clothes or lighting or even the driver. Isn't the entire point of sensors like LiDAR to detect things human beings can't? The engineering is clearly off.
LIDAR works by shining a laser beam of certain wavelength. If some object completely absorbs that wavelength, there's no way LIDAR can see it.
