Uber is at fault.
Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#632IIRC, high-resolution thermal infrared cameras are ITAR controlled-- which means they are not available for consumer applications above an abysmal resolution (something like 320x280). Public safety like this seems like a great impetus to do what was done for GPS, and declassify this crucial (and now really quite mature) technology for the general public.
You can easily buy a VGA FLIR camera in the US. They'll probably run your name through the denied-party list to make sure you don't have a history of diverting products to countries we don't like.
FLIR will sell you cryo-cooled cameras domestically as well.
https://www.flir.com/browse/rd-and-science/high-performance-...
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#633After comparing the released video and a nighttime video [1] on the same stretch of road, I think the released video very likely showed a lot less visibility of the victim due to the dynamic range of the camera. In [2] the victim's shoes became visible. Note the lamp post with a traffic sign to the right. In [3] captured from [1] note the same lamp post on the right edge and the storm drains on the curb, not far from the lamp post and not that dark. [4] shows the victim was very close to the storm drains. The camera that captured the released video had to adjust to the bright headlight of the vehicle. IMO the victim would be a lot more visible to a human driver.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEaTdYJExq8&t=8m50s from user niftich's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16644146
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#634This is definitely not a case of someone jumping out in the road, as was previously reported. Sure, jaywalking at night is a bad idea, but this is exactly the type of thing an automated driving system should catch and avoid
I thought whole initial response from the police was weird. They went out of their way to basically say she jumped out in front of the car, and that the accident was unavoidable. They even told us that the women was homeless, which I viewed as a subtle way to hint that maybe she wasn’t in her right mind. It just felt like they were saying everything possible to absolve Uber, in a way that’s very different from how mo…
100% agree. The Police Chief even said the video would "potentially shift the blame to the victim herself, rather than the vehicle."
If that's not very strange language to use for a public servant describing a video that shows a fatal vehicle-vs-pedestrian accident, I don't know what is.
I'm not in the US so I don't know, but people in another thread were making comments that that is often how it is handled in the US, the crash victim is blamed somehow. It was implied by one person that police want to avoid paperwork.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#635Whatever the outcome of this case, autonomous cars are not going away. That cat is already out of the bag.
As for this accident, I think in time it will be shown in time that while machines can make mistakes, they make fewer mistakes than humans. Six years ago I heard that CSX (a major rail line in the U.S.) was actively pursuing autonomous trains. I thought the idea was horrible, until the programmer working on the project informed me that machines guiding trains have been proven to make fewer mistakes than humans guiding trains. It keeps the human element of error out of the equation.
There is a certain amount of fear these events generate, but did you notice that the same level of media coverage was not given for the dozens of similar accidents that happened in the past 24 hours with non-autonomous vehicles?
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#636The first question that comes to my mind watching this, is, why didn't the _pedestrian_ see the _car_? It looks as though she didn't even look up until the car was only a few feet away from here. I'm not just trying to "blame the victim". The car "should" have responded sooner. But see-and-avoid works both ways. If you're choosing to cross a road in the dark, you, too, have a responsibility to understand the drivers'…
I see a lot of people who cross the street without looking. I definitely don’t get it. I constantly check everywhere even when I clearly have the right of way. But that’s how people are.
Just remember, it's very likely that many of these people do the same thing when driving.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#637The first question that comes to my mind watching this, is, why didn't the _pedestrian_ see the _car_? It looks as though she didn't even look up until the car was only a few feet away from here. I'm not just trying to "blame the victim". The car "should" have responded sooner. But see-and-avoid works both ways. If you're choosing to cross a road in the dark, you, too, have a responsibility to understand the drivers'…
The pedestrian died, not the SDV developers. Calling this a “teachable moment ... also for pedestrians” is rather disrespectful.
I think the only circumstance where a pedestrian can cross a road without watching for cars is when protected by a traffic light, and even then that's not wise. A pedestrian crossing a road outside of any crosswalk at night and not watching for cars is playing russian roulette. Doesn't mean the driver (or self-driving system) shouldn't have spotted it as well to prevent the accident. But it is clearly a key driver enabling that accident.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#638How 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…
If any of you have a dash cam it's very obvious how the light levels of images captured at night look like this video and is VERY different from what you see as a driver - objects are much brighter than this with your own eyes.
Also - the car is driving way too fast.
I did some driving tonight and paid close attention to when I naturally slowed down - and albeit I'm probably on the higher curve of good drivers in that I don't tailgate, drive the speed limit and generally slow much slower than the speed limit when conditions are poor (fog/rain/snow, night, slick/wet roads, near curves/hills where I can't see the road). I noticed that many of the times I naturally slowed down on the roads here I slowed considerably under the speed limit by 10 to 20 MPH in some areas. It seems this Uber SDV is generally going as fast as it is possibly allowed to regardless of what it can see.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#639As presented, this looks like a pretty classic "overdriving your headlights" situation. Even though they're made of retroreflective material, only two lane divider dashes at a time can be seen in the video, indicating something like 50 feet of visibility. Stopping from 38 mph takes 70+ feet from the time the brakes are applied (and human reaction time adds quite a bit more). Things (people, animals, stopped cars, roa…
I agree. I regular drive in the country (unlit, forested, deer country) and believe that I have more visibility than this driver and car. And I'm typically going 45-50mph and have Xenon headlights from 2004.
Re: Tempe Police Release Video of Uber Accident
#640The first question that comes to my mind watching this, is, why didn't the _pedestrian_ see the _car_? It looks as though she didn't even look up until the car was only a few feet away from here. I'm not just trying to "blame the victim". The car "should" have responded sooner. But see-and-avoid works both ways. If you're choosing to cross a road in the dark, you, too, have a responsibility to understand the drivers'…
If you're choosing to cross a road in the dark, you, too, have a responsibility to understand the drivers' limited visiblity and act accordingly.
No kidding. This might be a somewhat controversial opinion, but I think the elephant in the room here is this general "pedestrian has right of way" notion. It's much easier for pedestrians to watch out for and evade cars than the other way around, and yet we seem to insist the opposite? That seems rather backwards and contrary to the laws of physics.