Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#981

Post by masklinn » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

Spare_account wrote: post #712

Johnny555 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

Braking distance ... for a 30mph is 45 ft Apologies for going off topic here, but I'm curious about this. I've tested every car I've ever owned and all of the recent cars with all-round disc brakes have outperformed this statistic, but I've never been able to get agreement from other people (unless I demonstrate it to them in person). I'm talking about optimal conditions here, wet roads would change things obviously…

> I'm talking about optimal conditions here, wet roads would change things obviously but each of these cars was able to stop within it's own car length (around 15 feet) from 30mph, simply by stamping on the brake pedal with maximum force, triggering the ABS until the car stops

How did you measure that? Because plugging these figures into a uniform acceleration calculator, 50km/h to 0 in 4.47m requires a deceleration of 2.2g but "Analysis of emergency braking of a vehicle"[0] experimentally measured very best case deceleration as barely scraping 1g (with ABS at 80km/h, significantly lower at lower speeds or without ABS).

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/16484142.2007.96...

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#982

Post by moonbug22 » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

more_corn wrote: post #875

icc97 wrote: post #713

One aspect that comes from this is that now car crashes can be treated more like aircraft crashes. Each self-driving car now has a black box in it with a ton of telemetary. So it's not just "don't drink and drive", knowing that they'll probably reoffend soon anyway. Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated and should be prevented from ever happening again. Hopefully there's enough data in th…

Every lesson from aviation is earned in blood. This death wasn't necessary though. The Otto/Uber guys have been informed about their car's difficulty sensing and stopping for pedestrians. I know this because I informed them myself when one almost ran me down in a crosswalk in SF. Can't learn anything from your lessons unless you listen. Maybe they can pause and figure out how to actually listen to their reports of un…

When a car hits a person, the controller of the car is always in the wrong.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#983

Post by hvidgaard » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

daenz wrote: post #778

fudged71 wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it's comforting that this exact situation shouldn't happen again in an Uber autonomous car... there is no mechanism to share that learning with the other car companies. There seriously fucking needs to be a consortium for exactly this purpose: sharing system failures. Also my problem with this is that a human death is functionally treated as finding edge cases that are missing a unit test, and progressing th…

>There seriously fucking needs to be a consortium for exactly this purpose: sharing system failures. This implies they're using the same systems and underlying models. If one model hit a pedestrian because of a weakness in training data plus a sub-optimal model hyperparameter, and therefore was classified a pedestrian in that specific pose as some trash on the street, how do you share that conclusion with other compa…

They need to share situations that made systems fail, and ensure that it doesn't happen with their specific system.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#984

Post by masklinn » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 9:46 AM UTC

Moter8 wrote: post #334

TheGRS wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the people who programmed the first auto pilot for a major airliner were required to be on board the first test flight, so I have to think their testing methodology was pretty meticulous.

Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases.

> Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases.

A USAF C-54 made a complete transatlantic flight (takeoff and landing included) on autopilot back in 1947: https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1947/1947%20-%2...

Modern Cat IIIc (zero-zero) autopilots handle everything except taxiing and takeoff. And I think the takeoff thing is more political than technical.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#985

Post by Piskvorrr » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 9:58 AM UTC

greedo wrote: post #848

derefr wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are "normal" reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn't happen to us: "I don't drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk", "I don't text (much) while I drive", "I pay attention". Tangent: is there a land vehicle designed for redundant control, the way planes are? I've always wondered how many accidents would have been prevented if…

Pilots don't share control of an aircraft; the copilot may help with some tasks, but unless the captain relinquishes control of the yoke (etc.) he's flying it. So you'd still have issues where a cars "pilot" gets distracted, or makes a poor decision.

It's even more complex - there's the temporary designation "pilot flying" and "pilot not flying", with a handover protocol and whatnot: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/5078/how-is-air...

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#986

Post by untangle » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 10:13 AM UTC

utopcell wrote: post #944

goshx wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not apples to apples. How many cars account for the nhtsa number and how many for Uber’s program?

I'd say that miles driven is a good normalizer. In fact, NHTSA statistics includes miles driven under adverse conditions (rain, snow, etc) while I'd bet that this is not the case for Uber.

Statistically, I don't think that miles driven on lonely freeways equal those in Manhatten. And perceptually, running down city pedestrians at 40 MPH will impact public thinking more than highway fatalities.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#987

Post by df5t0rw » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 10:42 AM UTC

Jack000 wrote: post #237

df5t0rw wrote: post #109

[unconstructive but still..] So the day I could be emprisoned because of an error of coding... Like a segfault on an highway... as finally came :D Is the disclamer "no waranty of anykind" shield us from that kind of thing ? ;) (I code on some mainstream C libraries)

you already can? our lives depend on all kinds of software every day. In Canada at least you'd need a P.Eng to work on stuff that directly endanger lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Thanks for the Therac-25 reference :)

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#988

Post by ric2b » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 10:42 AM UTC

jryle70 wrote: post #949

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated" Would be better if the code and data was open for public review.

That's knee-jerk reaction that may open a can of worm. Do you need personal details of the victim as well as the driver? Says if the victim had attempted suicide before? at the same crossroad? Or the driver had history of depression? Would that be a violation of their privacy? Would that cause a witch hunt?

Code and data, not people's personal details.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#989

Post by ubernostrum » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 11:14 AM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #185

leggomylibro wrote: post #9

FTA: "The Uber vehicle was reportedly driving early Monday when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck. ... Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel." That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when some…

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road. Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of frict…

If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.

I mentioned in another comment that something I use to try to improve my own driving is watching videos from /r/roadcam on reddit, and trying to guess where the unexpected vehicle or pedestrian is going to come from.

Here's an example of a pedestrian suddenly appearing from between stopped cars (and coming from a traffic lane, not from a sidewalk), and a human driver spotting it and safely stopping:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI

Why can't a self-driving car do this?

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#990

Post by w_t_payne » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 11:15 AM UTC

kaennar wrote: post #117

w_t_payne wrote: post #51

To ensure that all automotive software incorporates lessons learned from such fatalities, it would be beneficial to develop a common data set of (mostly synthetic) data replicating accident and 'near miss' scenarios. As we understand more about the risks associated with autonomous driving, we should expand and enrich this data-set, and to ensure public safety, testing against such a dataset should be part of NHTSA /…

Dr. Mary Cummings has been working on talking to NHTSA about implementing V and V for autopilots/AI in unmanned vehicles for a few years now. She's also been compiling a dataset exactly like what you are talking about. I think the idea is to build a "Traincar of Reasonability" to test future autonomous vehicles with. You might want to check out her research https://hal.pratt.duke.edu/research

Thank you for that link. I will pass it along to my former colleagues who I suspect will be very interested in her work.