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What do you think based on this video: https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?s=21 https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/97659185138474

What do you think based on this video: https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?s=21 https://twitter.com/brianawhitney/status/976591851384745984?... The woman with the bike wasn’t moving fast at all. I dunno...

lhorie 9y ago
Isn't that the exact same video in poorer quality? I think the question now is how well a LIDAR is supposed to work in the dark. I keep hearing people saying that the hardware should've "seen" her, but speaking purely in terms of physics, how exactly is that supposed to work? Doesn't night vision still require a minimum threshold of light in order to work? How much light?
- brokenmachine 9y ago
  LIDAR sends out pulsed laser beams to measure the distance to things. It should work in complete darkness.
  - lhorie 9y ago
    > It should work in complete darkness If that's true, this would certainly suggest a big failure from the LIDAR system in this incident. I wonder how that claim is tested. Would city lights interfere with testing (similar to how you can't see stars in the middle of cities)?
    - brokenmachine 9y ago
      Someone in another comment rightly mentioned that LIDAR might just be one input with visual/radar being others. So it may have ignored the LIDAR because of whatever was coming from the other inputs. It will be interesting to find out what actually happened. It is clearly a major malfunction or deficiency in the sensors, no doubt. For a self-driving car to not even apply the brakes at all in this situation is inexcusable.
nemothekid 9y ago
Even in that over-exposed video, at 35mph, I think you would have to be extremely lucky to not hit her. From her coming into view to collision is ~700ms. Subtract average human reaction time (250ms), and that leaves a little less than half a second to swerve. A human would have made this mistake, but I don't know enough about LIDAR to understand if a computer should have made this mistake. Is night vision poor on these machines?
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Then slow down. If you can't stop or swerve when something becomes visible to you then you're driving too fast regardless of the posted speed limit. Period.

lhorie 9y ago

Isn't that the exact same video in poorer quality? I think the question now is how well a LIDAR is supposed to work in the dark. I keep hearing people saying that the hardware should've "seen" her, but speaking purely in terms of physics, how exactly is that supposed to work? Doesn't night vision still require a minimum threshold of light in order to work? How much light?

brokenmachine 9y ago
LIDAR sends out pulsed laser beams to measure the distance to things. It should work in complete darkness.
- lhorie 9y ago
  > It should work in complete darkness If that's true, this would certainly suggest a big failure from the LIDAR system in this incident. I wonder how that claim is tested. Would city lights interfere with testing (similar to how you can't see stars in the middle of cities)?
  - brokenmachine 9y ago
    Someone in another comment rightly mentioned that LIDAR might just be one input with visual/radar being others. So it may have ignored the LIDAR because of whatever was coming from the other inputs. It will be interesting to find out what actually happened. It is clearly a major malfunction or deficiency in the sensors, no doubt. For a self-driving car to not even apply the brakes at all in this situation is inexcusable.

nemothekid 9y ago

Even in that over-exposed video, at 35mph, I think you would have to be extremely lucky to not hit her. From her coming into view to collision is ~700ms. Subtract average human reaction time (250ms), and that leaves a little less than half a second to swerve. A human would have made this mistake, but I don't know enough about LIDAR to understand if a computer should have made this mistake. Is night vision poor on these machines?

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Then slow down. If you can't stop or swerve when something becomes visible to you then you're driving too fast regardless of the posted speed limit. Period.