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Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

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Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#371

Post by ajross »

ttctciyf wrote: post #321
ajross wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own story disproves your conclusion. Your driving instructor, like many (many) other drivers, didn't make the infererence that you did. People don't drive well. Cars are dangerous. The criterion (really the only criterion) for whether or not automatic vehicles "should be on the road" is whether or not they are safer than the alternative. And that certainly doesn't include "being as good a driver as jdavis703 was…

The instructor, though, wasn't the one driving. Being engaged in a particular role relative to a situation can (I believe) alter one's capacity to perceive and respond to it. This isn't to say that for definite the instructor would have had the insight described in the parent post, but it is to say that you can't rule this out just based on the information that as a passenger they didn't have the insight.

> This isn't to say that for definite the instructor would have had the insight described in the parent post, but it is to say that you can't rule this out just based on the information that as a passenger they didn't have the insight.

That's a senseless digression though. Again, the criterion to use when deciding whether autonomous vehicles are safe is whether autonomous vehicles are measurably as safe as human drivers and very much not whether we can "rule out" the possibility that the machine might be subject to failure modes that human driver are already known to have anyway.

For every scenario and hypothetical like this one you can imagine where an autonomous vehicle would fail, I can come up with an equally hypothetical reason why they're better (hell, just read any of the media coverage of them). Both arguments are meaningless without numbers and analysis, c.f. this very article we're discussing.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#373

Post by jaclaz »

As a side note, I find - as always - this part disturbing:

>The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records.

He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind of relevance would have this?

Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was not under the effect of alcohol or drugs.

Having committed armed robbery has seemingly no connection (I mean it isn't like he was condemned for having killed someone while driving a car or something like that), and even if that was the case some State must have issued (or renewed) his driving license, meaning that he was legally authorized to drive the car.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#374

Post by ekovarski »

falcolas wrote: post #365
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #317

Some of the commenters here think they can do a better job reconstructing the incident from newspaper cartoons than actual investigators who are working at the scene. You guys can just as well make up a story in which a murderous Uber robot chased a pedestrian off of the sidewalk and onto the road and then intentionally ran her over.

Why are we resorting to reconstructing a scene when Uber's Robot caught the whole thing on camera and LIDAR? The police statement seems quite premature, especially when the NTSB is running an investigation into the accident.

+1; Time will tell what happened as there should be enough data onboard. These systems are essentially in training mode and new scenarios will need to be accounted for.

I am curious as to why the driver didn't react. I wonder if the system keeps track of the driver as well as I would imagine it has to be mind numbing to sit behind a wheel for hours on end and not do anything... So in this situation, how attentive and alert was really the driver who is supposed to be the fail safe mechanism.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#375

Post by lancepioch »

jaclaz wrote: post #373

As a side note, I find - as always - this part disturbing : >The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records. He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind of relevance would have this? Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was…

In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your life, even after you paid your time and money.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#376

Post by stillsut »

Was the car electric? I've had a close call with a silent electric car which would have been my fault. The scenario goes like this: I'm saying goodbye to Joe and about to cross the street and notice there is no traffic around. I realize as I'm about to leave Joe, I forgot to mention something, so I turn back to him and say "By the way, blah blah", and with that, I then step off the curb onto the street without checking for oncoming traffic again, probably thinking about some chore I have to get done when I get home. If I heard cars, I would instinctually check again, but the silent electric mode does not allow for this.

I'd be interested in any studies about this: how much more often do pedestrian-at-fault collisions occur in silent electric mode?

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#377

Post by s73v3r_ »

lojack wrote: post #184
s73v3r_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person pushing a bike is far, far from a "weird scenario", though.

To a computer that’s never encountered this scenario before it might be.

Then that is the fault of Uber for not exposing it to this extremely common scenario beforehand.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#378

Post by s73v3r_ »

stevenwoo wrote: post #187
s73v3r_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person pushing a bike is far, far from a "weird scenario", though.

It may depend if the test cars are used on routes with lots of homeless people or not, for the Mountain View test center I know of a handful of regularly seen homeless people on loaded bikes nearby in downtown Los Altos/Mountain View but it's not close to the level of San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland/Los Angeles/Anaheim/San Diego.

A person pushing a bike is quite a common scenario, and it falls to the Uber engineers to account for it.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#379

Post by Maybestring »

danso wrote: post #192
eddieplan9 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop spreading rumors and speculations. The graphic is an illustration and does not necessarily place the car in the actual lane. It clearly contradicts with the police chief’s statement that the victim walks right into traffic from center medium. It even contradicts with the left arrow pointing to the impact location in the same picture.

Please don't accuse me or other commenters of spreading "rumors and speculations", without evidence or logical arguments. I didn't state a bunch of claims, I linked to a NYT published article. If it turns out that the NYT depicted the incorrect lane, then I expect we'll see a correction. But they published this graphic staked on their reputation for accuracy, not on just "rumors". Moreover, it does not contradict wha…

>I didn't state a bunch of claims, I linked to a NYT published article. If it turns out that the NYT depicted the incorrect lane, then I expect we'll see a correction. But they published this graphic staked on their reputation for accuracy, not on just "rumors".

My experience with the NYT (and basically every news outlet) on technical no issues that I'm familiar with, is that they are not particularly concerned with getting the details 100% correct.

I don't expect better from them in the discipline of auto accident reconstruction.

Re: Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

#380

Post by sushisource »

stefan_ wrote: post #140
sushisource wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you saw that video and it really did show a So whether or not the police understand self-driving systems is not relevant to the fundamental physics problem. The key question is how long was the ped visible.

By the time that pedestrian has even traversed a single lane, the LIDAR on top has generated gigabytes of point cloud data showing her moving, assuming constant velocity of both car and ped, on a straightforward collision path. I don't see how from a single forward-looking camera you want to deduce this crash was "physically impossible". That isn't even half of what we expect from human drivers. We expect them to swi…

Where did I say just "camera"? By visible I mean visible in any way to the systems.
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