8 ms·
> “The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
by blakesterz 9y ago
> “The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
I don't know if that is supposed to make anyone feel better about this, if anything it makes it seem worse. I thought one of the big benefits of these systems was they were supposed to be better at exactly these kinds of situations?
More like "autonomous cars are better than people at stopping in a flash" rather than "just like people this car didn't stop in a flash".
I'm really not trying to trash these systems, I'm just surprised at this explanation. Though, I guess based on the other comments now, maybe I shouldn't be.
- halflings 9y agoIf somebody jumped in front of the car at the last second, it would be physically impossible to break in time. I assume what people mean by "stopping in a flash" is closer to taking the right actions faster (e.g 40ms vs 800ms) when there's still a chance of changing the outcome.
- fthssht 9y ago800ms is pretty slow for a sober human I think https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics
- Trundle 9y agoIsn't that linking to the results of people playing a game where they're paying attention and looking for something to react to?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vvanders 9y agoThat's with people expecting to click, ~500ms is more realistic for a scenario where you need to recognize, decide and react.
- tzs 9y ago800ms looks like it is actually pretty fast for a sober human driving [1]: "This study examined the effect of brake and accelerator pedal configuration on braking response time to an unexpected obstacle. One hundred subjects drove in the Dynamic Research, Inc. (DRI) Interactive Driving Simulator through a simulated neighborhood 21 times, each time with a different pedal configuration. Each subject was presented with an unexpected obstacle only one time, for one of three previously selected pedal configurations, to which he or she was instructed to brake as quickly as possible. Foot movements were recorded with a video camera mounted above the pedals. Data were analyzed manually, using time and course location information superimposed on the video data. Response times were analyzed using ANOVA to determine effects of pedal configuration and various driver factors. Response times ranged from 0.81 sec to 2.44 sec with a mean of 1.33 sec and a standard deviation of 0.27 sec. There was no significant effect of pedal configuration on response time. Driver age was significant, with increased age corresponding to increased response time. Car normally driven, gender, driver height, and shoe size had no significant effect" [1] "Braking Response Times for 100 Drivers in the Avoidance of an Unexpected Obstacle as Measured in a Driving Simulator" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274973324_Braking_Response_Times_for_100_Drivers_in_the_Avoidance_of_an_Unexpected_Obstacle_as_Measured_in_a_Driving_Simulator https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274973324_Braking_R...
- userbinator 9y agoIf somebody jumped in front of the car at the last second, it would be physically impossible to break in time. ...and if somehow the car was able to stop that quickly, its occupants would likely be the ones fatally injured if they weren't solidly strapped in.
- Jordrok 9y agoIf only there were some sort of safety harness system installed in the car to prevent that sort of thing... (Yeah, I get what you're trying to say, but I couldn't resist.)
- stevenwoo 9y agoShe was walking a bicycle and had several bags of stuff on the bicycle or her person, probably wasn't darting in and out of traffic, but don't need to move that far from a median to get struck by a car.
- showerst 9y agoA X,000lb car going 38mph takes a certain amount of time and distance to stop, even with a perfect reaction time. If she really did step out in front of the car with less than that distance to spare, than there wasn’t much to be done, sadly.
- portofcall 9y agohttps://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17140936/uber-self-driving-crash-death-homeless-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17140936/uber-self-drivin... The brakes didn’t even start to engage. Just how fast do you think this woman moved exactly?
- goshx 9y agoIf she was behind another parked car and stepped in front of the car that hit her, she could have been at a normal walking pace. The police stated that the car did not show signs of slowing down before the accident. I doubt the police had the records from the car’s system.
- portofcall 9y agoI doubt the police had the records from the car’s system. With all due respect, then why are they using their bully pulpit to blame this woman for her death at this early stage? The vehicle made no attempt to stop, which seems worrying if the sensors and algorithms were working as intended, so maybe it would be worth looking at those systems.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ACow_Adonis 9y agoWhat is the driver supposed to say in this scenario? "Actually officer, I saw her coming from miles away, but I thought to myself: let's just see what happens..." Of course a "driver" in such a vehicle is going to report the victim came out of nowhere, otherwise they're basically committing homicide or implicating themselves in not paying attention and the car in not sensing them...it literally adds nothing to the evidence base...
- slaymaker1907 9y agoSince it was dark out, the story seems pretty plausible. It's really difficult to see pedestrians at night, even when they use a crosswalk much less if they are crossing in the middle of the road.
- brokenmachine 9y agoYou would think LIDAR might help in such a situation...
- ACow_Adonis 9y agoThe point isn't that its plausible (which it is), its that its the only story you would expect a driver who wasn't already confessing to negligence/manslaughter to say: irrespective of what actually happened. Because if he had seen her before hand (i.e. she didn't "come out of nowhere"), he would have presumably taken control, breaked, swerved, etc. We already know that the car appeared not to have done that, so the profession from the driver literally adds no further evidence, since that is exactly what we would expect every driver who mows down a pedestrian unwillingly to say...
- jakeogh 9y agoPersonally, I am constantly scanning for people near the edge of the road and anticipating their movements. I bet most of us have had the experience where someone stepped out unexpectedly but you already took action because you could tell they were not paying attention. Good luck programming that.
- mattigames 9y agoYeah there are a lot of subtleties that are hard to program; that's why it must be extremely effective on things that _can_ be programmed such as quick breaking, quick steering; prefer lanes that are farther away from pedestrians near-by, beep when entering a non-illuminated zone and hundreds of other details.
- jakeogh 9y agoI don't think it will work. Instead the failing effort will be cover to add more and more rules in an attempt to hide the obvious while blaming the victim(s) for breaking the rules. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEIn8GJIg0E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEIn8GJIg0E
- brokenmachine 9y agoQuick braking is the one thing you would have thought they could get right for sure, and they didn't manage even that on this occasion.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amelius 9y agoQuick braking can also be dangerous. Perhaps even LiDAR has to deal with false positives every now and then.
- chopin 9y agoThen it shouldn't be deployed. I had several occasions where I overlooked somebody (luckily without consequences) but never one where I falsely registered someone or something to warrant to brake.
- m3kw9 9y agois pretty hard to beat human drivers in the danger category. But ok let’s play this out a little longer before you start dismissing it
- inverse_pi 9y agoHere's what my hypothesis: when it's physically impossible to stop (which sounds like it was the case, car moving at 38mph and you have a split second), my hypothesis is that the robot would plan to swerve around the obstacle instead of trying to stop. But the car can't turn 90 degrees immediately either so that could also be dynamically infeasible, but maybe it has higher probability to avoid the collision?
- archi42 9y agoYou're opening yet another can of worms when you try to evade. Sometimes it's the right/optimal thing to do, sometimes it's worse (e.g. switch to the lane going in the opposite direction because it seems free - until another car your computer eyes could not see comes quickly around a corner and there are four dead instead of one; that's one of the reasons driving instructors tell us, at least in my country, to do a full brake and avoid evasion).
- Erlich_Bachman 9y agoBut that is due to the limited ability of humans to asses all those conditions instantly in a sudden unpredictable situation. The machines should in theory be much better at that.
- archi42 9y agoGrab some introduction to ethics book and think how you would implement what's written in there - and how you choose which one is the right ethical theory for the situation you're in. We had a lecture on that (lecturer had MSc in C.S. and was doing a PhD in philosophy), and many problems are very hard to reason about. Even if you don't plan to build such software, I can really recommend any computer scientist to get an idea of ethics; in addition to the lecturers slides we used the book "The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics". Research in that direction is only gaining traction right now (not only, but also the "how do you implement an ethical decision automaton?"-part). Remember: We humans can be lucky to have intuition and reflexes, which kind of put us out of the ethical issue: Usually accidents happen so fast, you can't think about the ethically acceptable reaction and just act more or less random/whatever your training and reflexes tell you to do (or you're so in shock when you realize what's about to happen you can not react at all). If you run over a child because you evade an elder person that's a bad situation to be in either way (assuming your driving was within legal parameters); if the computer actively decides to run over person X instead of person Y due to some algorithmic decision (or coin flipping, doesn't really matter) that's basically worse - because it ultimately decided person Y deserves the right to live more than person X. That's why there was/is that large hype involving the trolley problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
- morogop 9y agoDon't trash all the systems based on Uber's system. I bet my mercedes would've jammed on the brakes. I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that Mercedes' "driver assists" are safer than Uber's stolen garbage.
- viraptor 9y ago> More like "autonomous cars are better than people at stopping in a flash" rather than "just like people this car didn't stop in a flash". It's a single example. You can't extrapolate to better or worse from it. A self driving system better than people by 2 orders of magnitude will still kill people. But that's neither a comfortable thought, nor something media will get used to over the next decade or so. This specific car shouldn't matter outside of engineering analysis, which is happening now. What should matter for others is a good statistic over millions of miles.
- portofcall 9y ago3.2 fatalities per billion km driven by humans. So far 1 fatalities per 4 million miles by automated vehicles, which when you do the conversions... isn’t better. It’s not a lot to work with, but for the people speaking in stats, the actual stats don’t support them. A lot people in this thread seem to be cashing in a human life against future hypothetical gains which have in no way been demonstrated. I sincerely hope that I’m not the only one disturbed by that.
- viraptor 9y agoNot sure it's that clear. Using data from Wikipedia, I got 11 deaths per billion km. The 4 million miles are just from Weymo, not all autonomous cars in total. (6 million+ https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/miles-driven-677bda21b0f7 https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/miles-driven-677bda21b0...) And the confidence level on the 1 event over 6+ million miles is not great either.
- portofcall 9y agoAgain, I’m responding to people touting the safety of autonomous vehicles based on a tiny sample. Live by the sword, die by the sword. At this point the truth is that we’re surrounded by unknowns, and yet post after post features people claiming inhuman safety records for a nascent technology. The data, such as it is, does not support that.
- girvo 9y ago
- tejasmanohar 9y agoSelf-driving cars are supposed to be a better driver than you on average, not primarily on the rare cases. There are lots of accidents that are due to carelessness with manual driving.
- yesiamyourdad 9y agoThe point is that if someone runs in front of your car, physics dictates that you can't stop a 1,000+ pound vehicle on a dime. You can lock the brakes up and stop the axle from moving (ABS braking won't actually allow this usually) and the car will still continue forward for some time. In addition many other avoidance strategies won't work. Sure, you could swerve, but what's in your path then? Machines don't get tired or bored, they don't screw around with the radio or put on eyeliner, or get distracted by text messages. They have other issues but we hope they'll be less prevalent.