Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#391

Post by imtringued » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #351

ubernostrum wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of left turn is less an "asshole thing" and more a "drivers compensating for poor design" thing. Typically, the "Pittsburgh left" is used in places where there should be a protected left turn as part of the signal cycle, but there isn't, and at times of high traffic flow it's the only way for any traffic to complete the turn (since waiting for oncoming traffic to clear on a green essentially means waiting u…

it's the only way for any traffic to complete the turn As someone else pointed out, you can do three right turns instead.

Or turn right and then turn around.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#392

Post by jakelazaroff » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:09 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #383

jakelazaroff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a bad call on the part of the police. You're only allowed to drive as fast as conditions permit. If it's dark enough that you can't avoid an obstacle by the time your headlights illuminate it, you need to slow down .

A self-driving car doesn’t need visible light to see a pedestrian. Between Lidsr and IR, she would have lit up like a Christmas tree.

Sure, but my point is that whether or not the video was darkened (and regardless of how the car "sees") overdriving your radius of obstacle detection is an unsafe way to operate a vehicle.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#393

Post by iambateman » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:28 PM UTC

krainboltgreene wrote: post #329

iambateman wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this question. And while I’m sure it’s a two way street , I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does. Pedestrians (and culture in general) will wrap itself around the technology. It’s sort of analogous to how wagon roads were different until fast cars required some standardization. The new technology shapes expectations for what normal means in Te…

> I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does In this case normalizing means running people over less and less?

One can only hope. We're in a safety arms race, where to win, the car companies have to emphasize how much more safe they are than everyone else.

It's a nice change from the horsepower arms race of the past.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#394

Post by nmca » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:34 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #369

nmca wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I agree that the system was insufficiently tested to be operating on public roads and endangering lives, and that lack of testing was negligent; I also agree with your comment about their engineering culture. But those two points seem distinct from the idea of disabling a system in order to have a better understanding of what's going on. Suppose they had built a car that was safe, conditioned on the presence a bla…

Even with the red herring about the safety overrides being a black box, yes, it would be satisfactory - see my other post. Not only would the triggering of the safety override generally indicate a failure of the autonomous system, the use of failsafe overrides to catch corner cases should be a feature of the final system. If Uber could demonstrate, through the analysis of a statistically significant number of events,…

Replying to your other comment here as well - the inclusion of conceptually simple safety mechanisms is important (eg I agree), as is the broader scheme of including both hardware and algorithmic redundancy to improve safety. I also agree that "live" initial testing of such safeguards is inappropriate, and as above Uber clearly failed to do appropriate testing.

However you describe the (potential) black box nature of the existing system as a red herring -> to be honest, this is what I'm most interested in. My opinion is that including a black box component into a saftey-critical system would be inappropriate. Do you disagree with that? If your answer is "probe it until it's no longer a black box and then include it", would you not consider that to be overall semantically equivalent to "don't include a black box"?

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#395

Post by sulam » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

IggleSniggle wrote: post #365

Ajedi32 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought we were talking about the Pittsburgh-left. That's not what you're describing. The Pittsburgh-left occurs immediately after the light turns green, when both the oncoming traffic and the person making the turn have a green light. My point was, why do you need to do that when you can just enter the intersection during the green light and complete your turn once the light turns red?

Having driven in the single lane thoroughfares of Pittsburgh, I’m grateful for the people in front of me that take a “Pittsburgh-left.” Otherwise the entire lane would be stopped for every left turner each green light. This way it’s only stopped for every other left turner in the cases where a left-turner ends up in front of the line. It’s an improvement to everyone’s traffic flow.

Driving in California, the best roads literally make it illegal to turn left during rush hour when the intersection doesn’t have a left turn lane. People still get where they’re going.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#396

Post by sulam » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #115

freditup wrote: post #18

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…

NPR had a story about how self-driving cars in Pittsburgh wouldn't be adhering to the "Pittsburgh-left": "Even harder for autonomous cars to master are local quirks; things like "the Pittsburgh left." That's a custom unique to the city that allows the first driver trying to make a left turn to do so before oncoming cars pass through an intersection. It's one thing that Emily Duff Bartel says Uber's fleet of self-driv…

Pittsburgh needs to do what we do in (some intersections in) California — ban left turns during rush hour on intersections with no left turn lane. Everyone still gets where they need to go and traffic moves much more smoothly.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#397

Post by imtringued » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

wilburTheDog wrote: post #62

If I understand it right, this is the biggest blind spot of all the automated driving systems. The software just ignores stationary objects because the sensors don't have the resolution to determine whether they are in front of the car or on the side of the road. And if it didn't ignore stationary objects the car would come to a halt at every garbage can, mailbox, and bush along the road. Until they can work lidar in…

Tesla doesn't build self driving cars. They have a very fancy adaptive cruise control and lane assist. Tesla's don't have LIDAR. They cannot see stationary objects on the road. They are also prone to killing the driver but usually nobody else. There is also no potential for improvement without hardware upgrades.

Sure. Uber's cars have been involved in a deadly collision but they don't suffer from the same problems as Tesla. The primary problem with Uber is that the company is acting recklessly to gain a competitive advantage. If they had multiple fail safe mechanisms then accidents like this could be prevented.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#398

Post by Symmetry » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

wilburTheDog wrote: post #194

Symmetry wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't the case at all for this collision. As the article says, the sensors had detected the woman but the information had been disregarded. And the moving object thing is exclusive to radar, vision systems don't suffer from it though vision systems have their own problems.

The article linked mentioned "B was the problem", meaning it ignored the sensor input. Another article(1) about it mentions that Uber had reduced the number of LIDAR sensors from five to just one rooftop sensor. The president of the company that builds the sensors even said you would need side sensors to see pedestrians, especially at night. But LIDAR is expensive. So it seems that, like Tesla, they were trying to re…

I haven't worked with automotive radars but the way it works in aeronautical radar is that you apply frequency binning in the electronics and ignore returns that have the wrong Doppler shift at the waveform level, long before step A in the article. If you didn't do it this way your computer would be overwhelmed considering every tree and house you can see but only moving objects like airplanes.

It's the same principle as the way your eyes only report things that move over your retina as your eye moves, letting you filter out imperfections in the lens of your eye and your blind spot.

Similarly, I assume that the computers in a car would be overwhelmed by the task of taking the returns from every single post on a guardrail and sorting them into distinct objects before deciding to ignore them due to relative velocity so I'm fairly sure that a similar mechanism is at work within the hardware of the radar unit the Uber car.

So given that the woman showed up on Uber's sensors she would have been detected by the camera system or the lidar. And apparently she was detected.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#399

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 08, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #15

tlb wrote: post #4

The disturbing thing about this crash is that it's such a basic thing to test on a test track. A pedestrian walking in front at night, with nothing else unusual happening, should be on the list of scenarios to get 5 9s reliability on before taking it out in public. The things you have to test in public are the complex real-world interactions, like these: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...

> get 5 9s reliability That's it? Humans have greater than 7 9's reliability when driving. (As measured by fatalities per time of driving, and assuming a fatality takes 5 minutes, and average speed is 30mph.) If the cause of a fatality is 10 seconds of failure, not 5 minutes, humans have greater than 9 9s of reliability. Math: 10 seconds / (1.13 / (30 miles/hour / 100 million miles)) Fatality rate is 1.13 per 100 mil…

[deleted]

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#400

Post by scaryclam » Tue, May 08, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

bencoder wrote: post #186

zamber wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Poland there's an unwritten custom of saying thanks by flashing emergency stop lights for two ticks. The most common use case is when someone lets you through when they don't have to. On freeways the same is used by cars coming from the opposite direction if there's a radar ahead. Still, in peak hours pretty much everyone is a dick, even usually chill Uber drivers. Edit: it's also used as a "sorry" signal too. Als…

Also seen in London

And the rest of the UK :)