The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi... This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in…
Not just crossing all those lanes, since the damage is to the right side, she crossed in front of the vehicle. And yet it never braked.
That's a failure on every level, from prediction to just sheer radar obstacle detection. You don't hit things right in front of you, mid-class vehicles you can buy today already have sensors to emergency brake when the driver won't but an obstruction is ahead.
At the risk of sounding macabre, the engineers will be pouring over thousands of lines of logs and if Uber self driving cars ever do survive to make it onto the roads again, the circumstance of woman's death and the after analysis will mean it will never ever happen again. I expect that during the coming years we will analyse car crashes with the same scrutiny as airplane crashes with the hope to solve every single e…
That's a very optimistic view of what will happen -- or I suppose a pessimistic one. I agree that there will be a lot of scrutiny of the logs, but unless they identify an actual bug ("Oh shit, we had a buffer overrun right here!") it's not necessarily going to be possible to preclude this or something very similar from happening again.
The driving of an autonomous vehicle is an emergent event of large numbers of complicated and in some cases opaque subsystems. Changing the interactions of these subsystems in a narrow way to preclude this particular kind of event is not necessarily something they'll be able to figure out a way to do without causing more problems.
Probably the human wasn't paying close attention. That is the problem with level 3-4 automated vehicles: a human who is not in primary control of the vehicle has trouble paying attention and is unable to take over control quickly if it is needed.
Wait, are you now blaming level 3-4 automated vehicles for the inattention of the human?
It’s a problem people knew about back when “autopilot” was just for aircraft, not cars.
It was going 3mph over the speed limit, a perfectly reasonable speed that is still probably lower than almost everyone else on the road.
That actually really sucks to hear, I was hoping that SDVs would adhere and never break the speed limit. 3 MPH at the forces we're talking about can actually make a difference in life or death.
Going at or below the speed limit would cause autonomous vehicles to be a hindrance to traffic as real humans know that it's safe to exceed the limit by 5-10 mph. If you hard code the vehicles to arbitrarily go exactly the posted speed then adoption will likely be very difficult and it would actually make the roads a more dangerous place to be as normal traffic would need to veer around the car.
Yes, the report you'd hope to be hearing from Uber is along the lines of "0.2 seconds after the pedestrian entered the travel lane the automated system identified her as a hazard and initiated an avoidance maneuver. Despite braking and beginning to swerve away, the car impacted the pedestrian 1.2 seconds later." Thats the promise the automated vehicle people are selling. But in this case it seems the car was clueless…
If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer is able to process the information from the sensors. There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are just as clueless.
The woman cannot go from being "not in path" to "in path" instantaneously unless you believe in teleportation. Supposing the woman got about 1 foot into the path of the car before being struck, the car would have had a minimum of 1 ft / seconds to react, assuming total blindness until the woman was "in path" (I can't think of a real world scenario where this assumption would be strictly true). Suppose a speed of 12 ft/s (~8mph), the car would have had a minimum of 8/100ths of a second to react. Supposing 3 ft of visibility before in path (about the distance from edge of car to lane), the car would have a minimum of ~1/3 second to react. That's assuming the woman was biking along at a good clip already, which is unlikely given that she was crossing a road. So, in all likelihood, the car had over 1/3 of a second to do something. That's just above the typical reaction time of a human (~1/4 second), but I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation for an autonomous vehicle.
The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi... This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in…
If the car was really in the right lane, I don't think an autonomous vehicle has any excuse for not reacting in this situation. A real person might not see the crossing pedestrian in bad light, but a self-driving car should have plenty of sensors capable of detecting a pedestrian crossing three lanes until they're actually in the fourth lane where the car was driving.
Per this old article from 2016, yes: https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-car-c26f...
Clarification - the article you posted is about the Waymo technology, not the Uber technology. It's possible that Uber does not use those capabilities.
Could people start wearing small transmitters that nearby autonomous vehicles can read?
I like that idea! Gonna buy a bunch of those, amplify their signal and spread them throughout the city I live in. That will ensure that there's not going to be a single crappy autonomous car being beta-tested in my vicinity!
Another idea would be to just throw them right in front of an autonomous vehicle at full speed. Let's test those brakes!
(sorry, but the original idea is just so ridiculous that I am incapable of responding in a non-sarcastic way to this...)
If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer is able to process the information from the sensors. There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are just as clueless.
”If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided” Likely, but not necessarily. Depending (hugely!) on what actually happened, it might be that the car should have started slowing down before the woman changed course. As an extreme example, if you’re driving at 50 mph and come up behind a kid cycling at the side of the road with a foot separati…
or that at 50mph, a foot away, you're likely to blow the cyclist over ....