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How 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

by atonse 9y ago

How 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 the same time, a human can't. a computer can see in the dark, a human can't). Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction.

ahelwer 9y ago
It isn't at all clear from the video. Video cameras of this quality vastly underperform human vision in low-light conditions.
- darkerside 9y ago
  Like parent said, it's low-light in the visible spectrum, but I'd totally expect these vehicles to scatter tons of light in non-visible spectrums, making these conditions well-lit in those spectrums. Like a bat using echolocation.
  - eyeing_see 9y ago
    I think the point GP was making is that an attentive human driver may have been able to see the pedestrian much earlier than when she becomes visible on the video.
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - itronitron 9y ago
      this, the human visual system adapts to darkness. Consider that the victim who obviously is crossing the street as part of their lifestyle has likely done this many times before, and of all the vehicles that could have hit the victim, the one that did happened to be one of uber's self-driving vehicles with a clearly inattentive driver behind the wheel. A driver paying attention to the road would have at least hit the brakes well before impact.
      - wnkrshm 9y ago
        Intermittent street lights reduce the adaptation though and add glare - the human visual range for scotopic ('dark adapted') and mesopic (twilight conditions) vision is about 4 orders of magnitude of luminance (cd/m²) that the retina can perceive simulataneously from 0 to saturation, without adaptation (dilating pupil). Dark to light adaptation is very rapid and happens in fractions of a second, light to dark adaptation happens over minutes. The eye will adapt to a mean level of light in the larger FOV (not fovea only) - that is why instrument clusters on cars need to be low-level lit, to not disturb this adaptation. Exterior light sources like headlights and street lights further influence adaptation and veiling glare can lead to light sources overshadowing smaller luminance signals and pushing them out of the range that the eye is adapted for.
- extralego 9y ago
  I don't think modern digital sensors actually under perform human vision, or it's at least not obvious. They have made huge improvements in the last decade. Also, When a digital camera records an image, a gamma curve is applied to it before display, which makes up for a bias against the darker portions which the digital equipment does not inherently have. Considering the streetlights, I cannot imagine any excuse. This video will sadly give them the benefit of public doubt but anyone familiar with lighting digital video will be unconvinced that the video feed was the culprit.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    I take a photo with my iPhone in night conditions and the image I see on the screen comes out way darker than I saw with my eyes. That has to be corrected for, no?
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      Yes, but if you take a photo with a Sony A7s it will vastly outperform your eye.
      - fermienrico 9y ago
        No. The term we need to introduce here is "Dynamic Range". It is pointless to say "Sony A7s can vastly outperform the eye" where it could have been set for a low light exposure. Human eye has an amazing dynamic range - I don't know the exact number today, but last time I checked was like 3 years ago and the cameras at the time (D800) were not even close to human dynamic range.
        joefourier 9y ago
        That's because you're comparing a single exposure from a digital camera. You can have dynamic range far in excess of the human eye with HDR techniques, by combining difference exposures and/or by exposing different pixels on the same image differently.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Don't forget compression artifacts. A dark object against a dark background in a highly compressed video is going to get compressed into just looking like the background.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    I downloaded the video directly and it looks like it's 133 kbps for the video data at about 360p, which is just abysmally low. So it's not surprising that it's difficult to pick out detail in such a contrasty scene given the degree of compression and the resolution.
arduinomancer 9y ago
I would think the car would have been able to at least do something in this situation? It looks like it didn't react at all.
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Yeah releasing the sensory data beyond human visible spectrum would be way more informative about if a better designed AV would have dealt with this better. I'm glad it was not me driving down that road that night, I don't think I could have prevented it.
- hcknwscommenter 9y ago
  I think you sell your driving skills very short here. Assuming you have normal eyesight, you would have likely a 10-fold higher dynamic range than the visible camera footage shown. The gap between streetlights would have been easily discernible with your eyes, unlike in the camera footage.
- zrb05293 9y ago
  See I wonder about that. In compromises conditions (many) drivers will drive slower and be more cautious. Perhaps computers need to be given a sense of fallibility? Computer can sense low light conditions and drive even more cautiously as a result.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
You mean like the Mercedes system from 2007 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DMidknVCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DMidknVCo ? I agree that IR should have caught the bicyclist earlier, and that it didn't suggests that these cars might also kill quite a few deer with a similar low light profile. (or this one from Cadillac : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPIpNG6mLCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPIpNG6mLCY)
- fudged71 9y ago
  You either kill a deer or get killed by a moose... at highway speed.
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    Indeed, if they can't spot moose at these speeds, it's a non-starter in parts of the country.
jackpirate 9y ago
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 onto the ground, and the person was walking the the gap between two streetlights. The gap between street lights (and hence the person) was in the field of view of the camera the entire time; they just weren't "visible" in the camera because of the low lighting. I'm confident my eyes are good enough that I would have been able to see this person at night in these lighting conditions. (Whether I could have reacted in time is another question.) It seems to me like the camera just doesn't have the dynamic range needed for driving in these low light conditions, which is a major problem.
- netsharc 9y ago
  Which makes me wonder if the Uber autocar is just relying on camera vision to drive itself... If it is, and it's been lying to authorities (I don't know what they said to the authorities about their cars' capabilities), that could be big.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - jonknee 9y ago
    Far more likely is that this is a standard dash cam that the police know how to pop the SD card out of and access the video...
    - hcknwscommenter 9y ago
      The point is not germane. What is germane is that a car that supposedly uses LIDAR and infrared, and presumably was approved by the regulators on the basis of such, should have had no problem seeing the pedestrian as LIDAR and infrared are unaffected by night and at least shown some indication of braking but did not. This suggests that the car does not in fact utilize any of those fancy (non-vis) detection methods. Alternatively, these fancy detection methods were fooled by the bicycle and thus misclassified as an error or something.
51Cards 9y ago
This is exactly it. I see people mentioning seeing the victim at the last second but these vehicles are supposed to be better. They scan in non visible spectrums with LIDAR. Lack of safety vest, lack of headlights, none of it is supposed to matter... or at least it shouldn't completely compromise the vehicle's systems. Camera's may not work as well but an obstacle directly in the path should still be detected. Especially an obstacle that would reflect LIDAR and give off a very obvious infrared signature. This video also shows another point I made recently in a conversation. People need stimulus to keep them alert and focused. I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect someone to sit idly with almost no interaction or responsibility and expect them to stay alert. The human brain doesn't function that way.
- dmix 9y ago
  I watched the video a bunch of times and I'm not 100% sure how the vehicle could have reacted at the upper maximum of time where she would have been visible to LIDAR, and maybe for Radar, to make a significant difference. At least given the two options where it could have slowed maybe 10km/hr at most (from the 40mph aka 64km/hr speed limit) but that's still an if and I'm not sure it would have ensure the survivability of the jaywalker OR safety of the people in the vehicle at that speed. The other option is swerving which might have been a possible solution here as well, but that would also have been highly dangerous for the people in the car as well at those speeds, within that timeframe, possibly causing >1 fatality or serious injury. Regardless I'm very much speculating here regarding reaction times based on watching a low quality video, I'm really looking forward to expert analysis here rather than speculation on the capabilities of LIDAR/Radar + computation speed at 60km/hr... even considering a human driver would have 100% hit this person.
  - 51Cards 9y ago
    If the vehicle can't detect objects in the non visible spectrum (even just IR) at least as far away as a human can in the visible spectrum then that is a showstopper right there for the technology. Additionally if it can't then it shouldn't be traveling at a speed where it can't react in time.
jey 9y ago
> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. Seems more likely that it's a software problem. Especially given the rest of Uber's behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if they're aggressively shipping incomplete/buggy software in the name of catching up to more careful competitors like Waymo.
mirimir 9y ago
Indeed! To LIDAR, she was basically standing in the lane, with a bulky bicycle. To visible light, including the driver, who was apparently half asleep or watching the dashboard, she was in shadow until just before the collision. So yes, LIDAR should have caught this. Easily. So something was clearly misconfigured. And even if the driver had been carefully watching the road, he probably wouldn't have seen her in time. But I wonder, is there a LIDAR view on the dashboard?
- jjeaff 9y ago
  Even an extra visual camera or hdr setup should easily have caught this. Or a $20 webcam with IR for that matter.
- neom 9y ago
  Right, so assuming LIDAR caught her: I'd imagine the algorithm presumed that she wouldn't cross the center line till she did cross the line, I don't know what to think the algorithm would do there after?
  - bigiain 9y ago
    Presumably the algorithm had a pretty good idea of where the lanes were, and if the LIDAR detected a non moving object in an adjacent lane and decided it was fine to ignore it because it presumed it was not going to start moving, that's a pretty broken algorithm. I don't have the link handy, but I was reading a webpage yesterday (related but not about this crash) which showed Google's self driving car's "view" of a road scene - it's clearly painted different color boxes and identified pedestrians, bicycles, other cars - along with "fences" where it had determined it'd need to slow or stop based on all those objects. Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public), it was faulty (but being used anyway, either because its self test is also faulty, or because the driuver/company ignored fault warnings) - or _perhaps_ Google's marketing material is faked and _everybodies_ self driving tech is inadequate?
    - domevent 9y ago
domevent 9y ago
Maybe we just don’t have the tech yet to make it work. At the very least, Uber surely doesn’t. There’s no way the car didn’t see her, but it didn’t react, which means it failed to recognize what it was seeing. This is pretty much the worst case scenario.
vkou 9y ago
> 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. This was taken by a video camera - which has a much lower range of detectable brightness then the human eye. The pitch-black spots in the video are almost certainly not pitch-black if you were to look at them.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  This car should have slowed down below the speed limit if it cannot safely stop or maneuver upon seeing something enter its field of view.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    This is drummed into students during the motorcycle training syllabus here (Sydney Australia) - "Do not ride beyond your field of view. It you can't see beyond a curve, crest, fog, rainstorm, queue of traffic or whatever - make sure you're going slow enough that you can stop before you get to the end of where you can see". I always explain it to friends starting out "you need to assume that just around every corner there's a stationary shipping container that's fallen off a truck. If you cant stop in time by the time you see it - it's your fault for going too fast."
    - cozzyd 9y ago
      Many people don't seem aware that the reduced speeds at curves aren't because your car can't take the curve at that speed (most can) but because you can't tell if there's an obstruction from a sufficient distance.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    Also, it should have been using its brights to increase the visible range, to provide backup for the LIDAR that should've caught this.
  - manfredo 9y ago
    This does not seem reasonable. Should it drive at < 35 MPH on highways at night? That's probably even more dangerous.
gok 9y ago
In pitch darkness, IR cameras can only see more than a visual light camera if you somehow had IR headlights that were more powerful than the visual headlights (they probably don't; that would blind other AVs just like high beams blind other drivers). It doesn't grant you the ability to see in the dark with infinite range. Lidar can sense shapes with more range, but at the cost of dramatically worse resolution and latency. It's conceivable the radar/lidar sensor caught the person in the left lane with a bike and decided that was a reasonable place for a person with a bike to be, then lost track of the person while she walked into the right lane (where the visual/IR system could not see her yet). It's also entirely possible there was an egregious bug. This video doesn't really tell us much.
- hcknwscommenter 9y ago
  Human beings radiate IR do they not? Silly question, of course they do. Perhaps not above an Arizona level of thermal background?
  - gok 9y ago
    Thermal imaging and near-infrared imaging are not the same. Waymo/Uber/etc are not using thermography for their autonomous vehicles.
    - Balgair 9y ago
      We see a nIR video of the driver. Those weird eyes everyone seems to have are the tell-tale sign of nIR as it interacts with the retina. So, we know that nIR sensors are being used in the interior, at least. That said, Arizona in the summer is going to play havoc with lIR and thermography in erms of false positives and negatives. The sensor suite probably should be using lIR at night for this reason and the switching it off in the day. But given Uber's history, the lack of lIR reeks of cost-cutting.
  - rwbcxrz 9y ago
    I'm not an expert in IR or computer vision by any means, so take this with a grain of salt. Air has such a low thermal mass that it doesn't measurably affect most IR sensors. Hot pavement could be a potential issue, but that shouldn't have a major effect on forward-facing sensors. Besides, it's only March. Even Arizona isn't that hot yet.
skywhopper 9y ago
The video here is misleading. A human driver has a much wider field of view and better low-light vision than this video renders the situation. That's not to say that this would have been prevented by an attentive driver. But it's also clear that the safety driver was not paying attention, so it's even harder to know.
- IndrekR 9y ago
  Humans have amazing low-light adoption, but not if the human is blinded by/staring at a bright cell phone screen as seen on this video.
sv12l 9y ago
> 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. I'm not sure, pls look that pic https://imgur.com/a/VfBck https://imgur.com/a/VfBck, you can clearly see there exists at least 10-15 meters b/w them right at the time when she pops up. Now I don't know the speed of the car, but I'd wager, a human driver (if s/he was alert) would have attempted a breaking at that moment.
- sp332 9y ago
  At 38 MPH, the car would cover that distance in 0.7 seconds. That is on the low end of human reaction times for braking, so an average person might not have time.
munk-a 9y ago
It strikes me as extremely disingenuous if this is all Uber gave to the police. They should be making as much raw data as possible available. At the very least it'd let other companies test their AIs against the scenario and see if they would catch sight of and be able to avoid the pedestrian, if not then this is one more data point to train them on so it doesn't happen again.
- vlozko 9y ago
  The NTSB is also involved and I’m sure they’ll have more than than video to go by.
  - munk-a 9y ago
    I hope so, but I'm not certain what sorts of legal precedents could be leveraged here. Uber, for instance, might try and avoid sharing non-visual recording data on the basis that it's proprietary information. IANAL but I'm very curious if companies can be compelled to share proprietary formats and tools for examining those formats or translating them into non-proprietary formats (which... is that even a thing legally speaking?) in a case like this. For instance, if law enforcement had testimony and other warrant allowing things that indicated that a user had stored some vital secret plan in a password field what could the government compel a company to do, assume the disk it relies on is also encrypted for extra fun time 1. Hand over the physical disk 2. Hand over the disk image 3. Hand over the decrypted disk image 4. Hand over the unobfuscated (enc or hashed) string of interest from the decrypted disk image 5. Compel the company to decrypt the string if it was encrypted with a common algorithm (i.e. AES) 6. Compel the company to decrypt the string if it was encrypted in a proprietary manner (i.e. in-house custom encryption) 7. Compel the company to devote resources (how much?) to brute force a one-way common hashed string (i.e. bcrypt) 8. Compel the company to discover a hash salt assuming the company doesn't store it locally but may be able to procure it from the user to do the above. 9. 7 & 8 if the one-way hashing algorithm is proprietary (and weak) and the company raises objections that the process of breaking this string will reveal key components of how the algorithm works (i.e. the hash is just md5(string) XOR "IMMA SECRET_STRING") 10. 7 & 8 if the proprietary algorithm is not weak but the company raises objections over trade secrets for other reasons.
CodeWriter23 9y ago
It's pretty clear to me (from the second half of the video) the driver was looking down at her phone and glancing up at the road periodically. IMO if she had been focusing on the road, she would have at least started braking before hitting the pedestrian. Or perhaps actually stopped before that happened.
- nraynaud 9y ago
  My more generous interpretation is that they were looking at the computer screen where the car shows its interpretation of the situation, people tend to lift their phone towards their face.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  This is only a fig-leaf of a driver (for catching legal flak by sitting in the front left seat), not actually operating the vehicle at all. This part was inevitable, given the unbounded technooptimism.
danso 9y ago
> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. It's a bit too early to make that conclusion. For all we know, the equipment was malfunctioning. Which I guess technically leads to your point, but we'll have to wait for the investigation to actually know what failed vs. what met expectations (I worry that expectations and tolerances, as set by the car companies, will be revealed to not be as comfortable as we might assume).
- donarb 9y ago
  It was also a bit too early for the police to release a statement less than 24 hours after the incident saying that it appears that Uber/the car/observer was not at fault.
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    Jaywalkers ar at fault in Arizona in the case of an accident so it doesn't seem too early. On the subject: this lady I used to know hit someone who ran out in front of her and started freaking out (thinking they were in some serious trouble) until the police told her "you're fine, they were jaywalking".
aerovistae 9y ago
> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. Because the software is still critically flawed, of course...this only represents a present-day failing, not some sort of permanent obstacle for the future.
solresident 9y ago
The bike --rofl
vadimberman 9y ago
In addition to that, even if we were limited to the "last moment", there was about half a second or a second time to react. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that should be enough for the car to at least try something. Isn't the car supposed to brake to minimise the collision, if the swerving is too dangerous (and it wasn't in this case, as the road wasn't too busy)?
kappi 9y ago
check the below article and embedded video, talks about the Uber ADAS https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/not-too-fast-not-too-furious-self-driving-uber-atg?utm_term=.wmmMKkRWX#.xmkrlNx7Z https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/not-too-fast-not-too-f...
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
The code isn’t perfect obviously. The software is probably programmed to avoid anything in the opposite lane.
Animats 9y ago
How did LIDAR and IR (?) not catch that? That seems like a pretty serious problem. Something is badly wrong there. That should have been detected by LIDAR, radar, and vision. Yes, they need a wide dynamic range camera for night driving, but such things exist.[1][2] They're available as low-end dashcams; it's not expensive military night vision technology. Radar should pick up a bicycle at that range. The old Eaton VORAD from about 2000 couldn't, but there's been progress since then. LIDAR has its limitations; some materials, including the charcoal black fabric used on some desk chairs, are almost nonreflective to LIDAR. But blue jeans, red bike, bare head? Expect solid returns from all of those. The video shows no indication of braking in advance of the collision. That's very bad. There simply is no excuse for this situation not being handled. The NTSB is looking into this, and they should. I hope the NTSB is able to pry detailed technical data out of Uber and explain exactly what happened. In the first Tesla fatal crash, they didn't get deeply into the software and hardware, because it was clear that the system was behaving as designed, unable to detect a solid tractor trailer crossing in front of the Tesla. The result of that investigation was that Tesla had to get serious about detecting driver inattention, like all the other carmakers with lane keeping and autobrake do. This time it's a level 4 vehicle, which is supposed to be able to detect any road hazard. The NTSB has the job of figuring out what went wrong, in detail, the way they do for air crashes. Again, there is no excuse for this. [1] https://youtu.be/gWqzJF9tOhw?t=211 https://youtu.be/gWqzJF9tOhw?t=211 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as12rjzCQnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as12rjzCQnY
- jcims 9y ago
  I wonder if the driver grabbing the wheel disabled the response from the car.
  - grafporno 9y ago
    Fun thought experiment: 1. Release video to police (with obvious shots of driver/passenger/whatever not paying attention to the road) 2. Investigation reveals accident was caused by driver/passenger/whatever reaction 3. ???? 4. Profit (PR win/rescue)
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Scoundreller 9y ago
And this is why I have retroreflective tape on my bike’s forks. It’s legally required while riding at night too.
nodesocket 9y ago
You are the same type of person that would have halted the industrial revolution at the first report of a human casualty or injury in a machine.
- dang 9y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack on HN.
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drawkbox 9y ago
Arizona and Tempe especially have lots of darker roads. The LIDAR/computer vision tuning at night doesn't seem right. Maybe it was adjusting for the changing street light brightness but yes this is one situation and the vehicle had just come from the Mill bridge that has festive lights that are strung along the bridge [1]. This is a situation though where the LIDAR should have clearly been better than it was. Maybe it was in a strange state after having seen all the lights and then complete darkness, looks like they were headed north on Mill Ave over the bridge [2] just past the 202 where it is indeed very dark at night and probably the spot right here [3] which matches up with the building in the background, the other way is South and is busy/urban by ASU. They had just crossed a lit up bridge, then dark underpass, then into this area [3]. The area that it happened in [3] does have bike lanes, sidewalks and a crossing sidewalk close by [4] but is by a turn out so not a legal crossing however there are lots of trails through there. This video is worse than expected by far and may be forever harmful to the Uber brand in terms of software. In AZ I usually see the self-driving cars out in the day, maybe there is lots of night tuning/work to do yet. [1] https://i.imgur.com/kwxjW36.jpg https://i.imgur.com/kwxjW36.jpg [2] https://goo.gl/maps/ey1RA47tKBJ2 https://goo.gl/maps/ey1RA47tKBJ2 [3] https://goo.gl/maps/gpugzAZKxcS2 https://goo.gl/maps/gpugzAZKxcS2 [4] https://goo.gl/maps/Ni18GfjMP962 https://goo.gl/maps/Ni18GfjMP962
- cozzyd 9y ago
  What the heck are those trails doing in the median if it's not a legal crosswalk?
  - baking 9y ago
    I've been staring at those myself for a couple of hours. My best guess is the crosswalk was moved, but the paths were left. There's a lake nearby and tons of parking under the overpasses, with trails and picnic areas. Also, the woman was right under a working street lamp. And as was stated in an earlier article the car continued on at 38 mph after the accident. The bike ended up 50 yards down the street. EDIT: "That spot is east of the second, western-side Mill Avenue bridge that is restricted to southbound traffic, and east of the Marquee Theatre and a parking lot for the Tempe Town Lake. It can be a popular area for pedestrians, especially concertgoers, joggers, and lake visitors. Mid-street crossing is common there, and a walkway in the median between the two one-way roads across the two bridges probably encourages the practice." "Pedestrians can cross a street without using a crosswalk in many instances without risking a jaywalking ticket, but Arizona law requires pedestrians not using a crosswalk to yield to traffic in the road." http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/cops-uber-self-driving-car-didnt-brake-much-in-arizona-pedestrian-death-10247629 http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/cops-uber-self-driving-c...
scythe 9y ago
It seems like this perspective may come from the idea that processing camera input is a formality. But the best estimates of the practical computing power of the brain are based on its visual processing capacity, because we know that's a hard problem. CAPTCHAs all depend on humans' ability to process images semantically faster than a computer (spambot). While it probably isn't unsolvable, I don't think it's surprising that this is consistently a challenge.
tbabb 9y ago
IIRC IR is ITAR controlled and not available above abysmal resolution. I am curious if this limitation applies to self-driving cars, too. If so, then it's really time to do what was done for GPS and declassify it for use by the general public. It's a public safety/public good issue.
- Tossrock 9y ago
  You can get 320x240 60hz for $2000 as a consumer[1]. On the one hand I wonder what kind of resolution the military grade version is, but I also wonder if the bandwidth/dollar is actually better. I imagine Raytheon basically just makes up a number when they're setting the price of a helicopter gun cam. [1]: eg https://www.amazon.com/FLIR-Systems-III-320-Thermal-Detector/dp/B01BE2JZ9O/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1521704146&sr=8-18&keywords=flir https://www.amazon.com/FLIR-Systems-III-320-Thermal-Detector...
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  No. ITAR controlled, in the context of IR imaging, means that you can't export any thermal imaging systems above 9fps. You can use whatever you want inside the US, and 60fps systems are available for consumers today.
osrec 9y ago
The lady can be seen fairly clearly (even in this poor quality video) at 0.03 and impact occurs at 0.04. That's 1s, which means a distance of approx 17m. If the guy was watching (sort of the point of him being there really) he could have slowed the car significantly and probably even stopped it. These are test vehicles being treated like prod vehicles. They should probably not be on streets with pedestrians quite so soon.
- mdorazio 9y ago
  You're massively underestimating human response time to visual cues and also the distance needed to stop a vehicle traveling at 35-40mph. It takes a full quarter of a second to respond to a visual stimulus on average, and more than that to also move your foot and depress a brake pedal. By that time the car was less than 50 feet from the pedestrian. At 40mph braking distance is about 80 feet in good conditions. There is absolutely no way a human driver could have avoided this accident assuming the same visual distance and dynamic range as the camera. Best case, the car may have slowed down a bit before impact.
  - osrec 9y ago
    Or swerved perhaps? I think the Uber employee developed a false sense of security with respect to the car's capabilities.
  - Steeeve 9y ago
    Human would have had significantly longer than this video. It's not that dark there at night. (Not as dark as the camera would lead you to believe). Swerving distance to avoid death is well within possibility. Aside from that, the possibility of death was further exacerbated by the vehicle not reacting to impact.
  - nraynaud 9y ago
    You absolutely don’t need to brake in this situation, there are 5 lanes, you release the gas to give the pedestrian more time to finish crossing and if it’s a bit short you go to the next lane over, aiming behind the pedestrian. That’s what everybody was doing in France, now that I am in Arizona the drivers are just murderous towards pedestrians, they don’t release the gas or move to aim behind them, like it’s perfectly ok to kill someone. (Don’t get me started on right on red and exiting from a drive in, I think I will get killed on a sidewalk here)
donpdonp 9y ago
I agree thats a textbook case for the non-visual-specrum sensors. Its possible that lidar DID catch it, but the avoidance logic decided to continue forward. For example if it decided a collision was immpossible to avoid, swerving might make things worse. Also its possible the logic thought the timing was such that the bike would pass after the car crossed where the bike was going, so slowing down would actually cause a collision.
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hartator 9y ago
It’s what high beams are for. It would have been easy to avoid.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  How is it in America? Over here (North Europe), one may not use high beams when there is street lighting (even though in this case the lighting seemed not very good).
senectus1 9y ago
totally agree. I've seen crash detection catch an impending crash two cars ahead of the car in front of the car watching. If that crash detection can detect shit going on two cars ahead why couldn't LIDAR see that? having said that. wth was she doing?
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IncRnd 9y ago
> 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. Actually a human driver would be expected to have less visual trouble in this case. People's eyes are far more adaptable to low light conditions than a camera's video. If you've ever tried to take a picture on a visible night using your phone, you've seen this effect. > 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 the same time, a human can't. a computer can see in the dark, a human can't). Except that the computer did not do that in this case. This car also uses LIDAR and should have noticed the pedestrian long before the accident occurred. > Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. Either the sensor equipment or the software was defective, otherwise the pedestrian would have been detected.
DisruptiveDave 9y ago
Serious question: What is the argument for the need for autonomous driving? I haven't really pushed this question so figured I'd start here.
whiw 9y ago
Speculating: IR interference might have jammed this vehicle's LIDAR for an instant as it sampled the vicinity of the hazard. Any power in the passband of the detector might have been sufficient to saturate it and make it less sensitive to the returning LIDAR signal. This could come from another LIDAR unit in the vicinity. Other possible jammers might include IR laser pointers, TV remotes, or IR camera illuminators.
codedokode 9y ago
The car also had headlights on and I think they should give enough light to see the pedestrian in 20-30 meters ahead even without street lights.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> How did LIDAR and IR not catch that? The LIDAR can catch anything it wants. If the car's AI doesn't know how to deal with it, it won't.
martin_bech 9y ago
Im conviced 99-100% that the Automatic Emergency Brakeing (AEB) on my Tesla would have braked for that. The promise of these systems, as you also point out, is that they can see things, humans cant. The "real" cameras on this car (not this dashcam footage), and the LIDAR, should be fine with it beeing near pitch black.
- boznz 9y ago
  I can almost guarantee every variation on the above accident is being tested now by waymo, tesla et-al..
amarant 9y ago
lidar would've, but Uber had to trash all lidar sensors since they were stolen from waymo! or so it would seem... ;)
manmal 9y ago
Regarding how the LIDAR did not catch that, there are 4 possibilities I can think of: 1. A software bug failed to recognize the obstacles, or misclassified them, or it fell below some probability threshold. 2. LIDAR didn’t work at the time, and the car did not shutdown. 3. The victim‘s clothing absorbs the LIDAR‘s wavelength pretty much completely, such that it appeared as a „black hole“ and was ignored by the algorithm since this occurs commonly. Unlikely though since the bike itself would surely have registered? 4. It’s hard to see on the video, but is the car going up a slope? In that case, if the LIDAR didn‘t look up far enough, it could have failed to see the victim for optical reasons.
- stormthebeach 9y ago
  4) That portion in particular is a slight down slope
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  For years, I've been told by AV technooptimists that these are all "never happens" scenarios. I have a feeling we have a Therac-class failure here.
- CabSauce 9y ago
  Another option (related to your #1) could be disagreement between the visual field cameras and the LIDAR. Which could result in a lower confidence of an object being a pedestrian.
jonathanstrange 9y ago
The human driver appears to be reading. I know that's a pretty hefty accusation, but I can't shake off the impression.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. A human is not an "obstruction", dammit. I mean, literally- it's not like hitting a wall. The driver's life will never be in danger and the care may not even be significantly damaged. There's a very special reason why we want self-driving cars to avoid humans, that has nothing to do with the reason we want to avoid obstacles. And because this special reason is very, very special indeed, we need much better guarantees that self-driving vehicle AI is extremely good at avoiding collisions with humans, than we do for anything else.
coding123 9y ago
I'd like to see an Uber SDV drive on Waymo's test tracks (where they have the employees pop all the shit at it). And just see what it does. I'm guessing it will be ridiculous and nightmarish.
vicpara 9y ago
The lady was walking the bike at the edge of a light cone. The inner cam was actually filming in IR. Uber cars have IR cameras, LIDAR and an also multiple radar sensors. My guess is that the algorithms have never met a person crossing the street with a bicycle during night time so they just ignored it or considered it to be a glitch. You can have to approaches regarding labeling driving situations. Either you label with positive tags the situations where the car needs to react. Or you label with positive tags the normal situations when the car does nothing. Depending on the two approaches you can have a car that kills pedestrians that appear in weird circumstances. I also bet a pedestrian that ducks in the middle of a lane would 100% be killed by a car. Or two people having sex while standing in the middle of a lane. The other situation you have cars avoiding invisible obstacles that may appear due to some aberrations from sensors (which are far from perfect).
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  Which is exactly the reason this is nowhere near production: "kinda works, sort of, in trivial cases" is not quite the SDV promise I keep hearing: "my car will also go reasonably straight when I let go of the wheel on a wide, straight stretch of the road, and won't even run over anyone if there is nobody on the road. Therefore, autonomous driving!"
samdoidge 9y ago
The pedestrian is a lot more obvious to the eye than I suspected, and it's actually quite shocking. They are correct to stop all road tests until they have investigated why they are missing this.
naskwo 9y ago
Mercedes has used thermal imaging commercially for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d03SuJ0TVcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d03SuJ0TVcY I would be very surprised if there is no thermal imaging in autonomous vehicles.
sly010 9y ago
I don't work on self driving cars or even vision, but I have heard when you are on a highway you start with filtering out small stationary reflections, since they are almost certainly not cars. (Which is maybe why the tesla didn't see the big red firetruck - it was not visible). It's not a big leap to imagine that Uber's LIDAR ignored the bike because it was not recognized as a person, was moving perpendicularly at a low speed, so got pre-filtered as a puddle. We can only guess and Uber will report whatever they want.
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yayr 9y ago
There is already some analysis of the footage, that claims the police video is manipulated, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBy4_3azBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBy4_3azBg also there are videos showing the real conditions with simple smartphone cams, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 Imo this is a clear attempt to shift public opinion. Also for everybody it should be clear, that a car should only drive as fast to be able to break once something comes into sight. For the whole industry it is very unfortunate, that some just don't understand the responsibility that comes with new technology and it's limitations.

by atonse 9y ago

ahelwer 9y ago

It isn't at all clear from the video. Video cameras of this quality vastly underperform human vision in low-light conditions.

darkerside 9y ago
Like parent said, it's low-light in the visible spectrum, but I'd totally expect these vehicles to scatter tons of light in non-visible spectrums, making these conditions well-lit in those spectrums. Like a bat using echolocation.
- eyeing_see 9y ago
  I think the point GP was making is that an attentive human driver may have been able to see the pedestrian much earlier than when she becomes visible on the video.
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  - itronitron 9y ago
    this, the human visual system adapts to darkness. Consider that the victim who obviously is crossing the street as part of their lifestyle has likely done this many times before, and of all the vehicles that could have hit the victim, the one that did happened to be one of uber's self-driving vehicles with a clearly inattentive driver behind the wheel. A driver paying attention to the road would have at least hit the brakes well before impact.
    - wnkrshm 9y ago
      Intermittent street lights reduce the adaptation though and add glare - the human visual range for scotopic ('dark adapted') and mesopic (twilight conditions) vision is about 4 orders of magnitude of luminance (cd/m²) that the retina can perceive simulataneously from 0 to saturation, without adaptation (dilating pupil). Dark to light adaptation is very rapid and happens in fractions of a second, light to dark adaptation happens over minutes. The eye will adapt to a mean level of light in the larger FOV (not fovea only) - that is why instrument clusters on cars need to be low-level lit, to not disturb this adaptation. Exterior light sources like headlights and street lights further influence adaptation and veiling glare can lead to light sources overshadowing smaller luminance signals and pushing them out of the range that the eye is adapted for.
extralego 9y ago
I don't think modern digital sensors actually under perform human vision, or it's at least not obvious. They have made huge improvements in the last decade. Also, When a digital camera records an image, a gamma curve is applied to it before display, which makes up for a bias against the darker portions which the digital equipment does not inherently have. Considering the streetlights, I cannot imagine any excuse. This video will sadly give them the benefit of public doubt but anyone familiar with lighting digital video will be unconvinced that the video feed was the culprit.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I take a photo with my iPhone in night conditions and the image I see on the screen comes out way darker than I saw with my eyes. That has to be corrected for, no?
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Yes, but if you take a photo with a Sony A7s it will vastly outperform your eye.
    - fermienrico 9y ago
      No. The term we need to introduce here is "Dynamic Range". It is pointless to say "Sony A7s can vastly outperform the eye" where it could have been set for a low light exposure. Human eye has an amazing dynamic range - I don't know the exact number today, but last time I checked was like 3 years ago and the cameras at the time (D800) were not even close to human dynamic range.
      - joefourier 9y ago
        That's because you're comparing a single exposure from a digital camera. You can have dynamic range far in excess of the human eye with HDR techniques, by combining difference exposures and/or by exposing different pixels on the same image differently.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Don't forget compression artifacts. A dark object against a dark background in a highly compressed video is going to get compressed into just looking like the background.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  I downloaded the video directly and it looks like it's 133 kbps for the video data at about 360p, which is just abysmally low. So it's not surprising that it's difficult to pick out detail in such a contrasty scene given the degree of compression and the resolution.

arduinomancer 9y ago

I would think the car would have been able to at least do something in this situation? It looks like it didn't react at all.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

Yeah releasing the sensory data beyond human visible spectrum would be way more informative about if a better designed AV would have dealt with this better. I'm glad it was not me driving down that road that night, I don't think I could have prevented it.

hcknwscommenter 9y ago
I think you sell your driving skills very short here. Assuming you have normal eyesight, you would have likely a 10-fold higher dynamic range than the visible camera footage shown. The gap between streetlights would have been easily discernible with your eyes, unlike in the camera footage.
zrb05293 9y ago
See I wonder about that. In compromises conditions (many) drivers will drive slower and be more cautious. Perhaps computers need to be given a sense of fallibility? Computer can sense low light conditions and drive even more cautiously as a result.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

You mean like the Mercedes system from 2007 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DMidknVCo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DMidknVCo ? I agree that IR should have caught the bicyclist earlier, and that it didn't suggests that these cars might also kill quite a few deer with a similar low light profile. (or this one from Cadillac : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPIpNG6mLCY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPIpNG6mLCY)

fudged71 9y ago
You either kill a deer or get killed by a moose... at highway speed.
- cozzyd 9y ago
  Indeed, if they can't spot moose at these speeds, it's a non-starter in parts of the country.

jackpirate 9y ago

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 onto the ground, and the person was walking the the gap between two streetlights. The gap between street lights (and hence the person) was in the field of view of the camera the entire time; they just weren't "visible" in the camera because of the low lighting. I'm confident my eyes are good enough that I would have been able to see this person at night in these lighting conditions. (Whether I could have reacted in time is another question.) It seems to me like the camera just doesn't have the dynamic range needed for driving in these low light conditions, which is a major problem.

netsharc 9y ago
Which makes me wonder if the Uber autocar is just relying on camera vision to drive itself... If it is, and it's been lying to authorities (I don't know what they said to the authorities about their cars' capabilities), that could be big.
- deleted 9y ago
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- jonknee 9y ago
  Far more likely is that this is a standard dash cam that the police know how to pop the SD card out of and access the video...
  - hcknwscommenter 9y ago
    The point is not germane. What is germane is that a car that supposedly uses LIDAR and infrared, and presumably was approved by the regulators on the basis of such, should have had no problem seeing the pedestrian as LIDAR and infrared are unaffected by night and at least shown some indication of braking but did not. This suggests that the car does not in fact utilize any of those fancy (non-vis) detection methods. Alternatively, these fancy detection methods were fooled by the bicycle and thus misclassified as an error or something.

51Cards 9y ago

This is exactly it. I see people mentioning seeing the victim at the last second but these vehicles are supposed to be better. They scan in non visible spectrums with LIDAR. Lack of safety vest, lack of headlights, none of it is supposed to matter... or at least it shouldn't completely compromise the vehicle's systems. Camera's may not work as well but an obstacle directly in the path should still be detected. Especially an obstacle that would reflect LIDAR and give off a very obvious infrared signature. This video also shows another point I made recently in a conversation. People need stimulus to keep them alert and focused. I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect someone to sit idly with almost no interaction or responsibility and expect them to stay alert. The human brain doesn't function that way.

dmix 9y ago
I watched the video a bunch of times and I'm not 100% sure how the vehicle could have reacted at the upper maximum of time where she would have been visible to LIDAR, and maybe for Radar, to make a significant difference. At least given the two options where it could have slowed maybe 10km/hr at most (from the 40mph aka 64km/hr speed limit) but that's still an if and I'm not sure it would have ensure the survivability of the jaywalker OR safety of the people in the vehicle at that speed. The other option is swerving which might have been a possible solution here as well, but that would also have been highly dangerous for the people in the car as well at those speeds, within that timeframe, possibly causing >1 fatality or serious injury. Regardless I'm very much speculating here regarding reaction times based on watching a low quality video, I'm really looking forward to expert analysis here rather than speculation on the capabilities of LIDAR/Radar + computation speed at 60km/hr... even considering a human driver would have 100% hit this person.
- 51Cards 9y ago
  If the vehicle can't detect objects in the non visible spectrum (even just IR) at least as far away as a human can in the visible spectrum then that is a showstopper right there for the technology. Additionally if it can't then it shouldn't be traveling at a speed where it can't react in time.

jey 9y ago

> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. Seems more likely that it's a software problem. Especially given the rest of Uber's behavior, I wouldn't be surprised if they're aggressively shipping incomplete/buggy software in the name of catching up to more careful competitors like Waymo.

mirimir 9y ago

Indeed! To LIDAR, she was basically standing in the lane, with a bulky bicycle. To visible light, including the driver, who was apparently half asleep or watching the dashboard, she was in shadow until just before the collision. So yes, LIDAR should have caught this. Easily. So something was clearly misconfigured. And even if the driver had been carefully watching the road, he probably wouldn't have seen her in time. But I wonder, is there a LIDAR view on the dashboard?

jjeaff 9y ago
Even an extra visual camera or hdr setup should easily have caught this. Or a $20 webcam with IR for that matter.
neom 9y ago
Right, so assuming LIDAR caught her: I'd imagine the algorithm presumed that she wouldn't cross the center line till she did cross the line, I don't know what to think the algorithm would do there after?
- bigiain 9y ago
  Presumably the algorithm had a pretty good idea of where the lanes were, and if the LIDAR detected a non moving object in an adjacent lane and decided it was fine to ignore it because it presumed it was not going to start moving, that's a pretty broken algorithm. I don't have the link handy, but I was reading a webpage yesterday (related but not about this crash) which showed Google's self driving car's "view" of a road scene - it's clearly painted different color boxes and identified pedestrians, bicycles, other cars - along with "fences" where it had determined it'd need to slow or stop based on all those objects. Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public), it was faulty (but being used anyway, either because its self test is also faulty, or because the driuver/company ignored fault warnings) - or _perhaps_ Google's marketing material is faked and _everybodies_ self driving tech is inadequate?
  - domevent 9y ago

domevent 9y ago

Maybe we just don’t have the tech yet to make it work. At the very least, Uber surely doesn’t. There’s no way the car didn’t see her, but it didn’t react, which means it failed to recognize what it was seeing. This is pretty much the worst case scenario.

vkou 9y ago

> 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. This was taken by a video camera - which has a much lower range of detectable brightness then the human eye. The pitch-black spots in the video are almost certainly not pitch-black if you were to look at them.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
This car should have slowed down below the speed limit if it cannot safely stop or maneuver upon seeing something enter its field of view.
- bigiain 9y ago
  This is drummed into students during the motorcycle training syllabus here (Sydney Australia) - "Do not ride beyond your field of view. It you can't see beyond a curve, crest, fog, rainstorm, queue of traffic or whatever - make sure you're going slow enough that you can stop before you get to the end of where you can see". I always explain it to friends starting out "you need to assume that just around every corner there's a stationary shipping container that's fallen off a truck. If you cant stop in time by the time you see it - it's your fault for going too fast."
  - cozzyd 9y ago
    Many people don't seem aware that the reduced speeds at curves aren't because your car can't take the curve at that speed (most can) but because you can't tell if there's an obstruction from a sufficient distance.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  Also, it should have been using its brights to increase the visible range, to provide backup for the LIDAR that should've caught this.
- manfredo 9y ago
  This does not seem reasonable. Should it drive at < 35 MPH on highways at night? That's probably even more dangerous.

gok 9y ago

In pitch darkness, IR cameras can only see more than a visual light camera if you somehow had IR headlights that were more powerful than the visual headlights (they probably don't; that would blind other AVs just like high beams blind other drivers). It doesn't grant you the ability to see in the dark with infinite range. Lidar can sense shapes with more range, but at the cost of dramatically worse resolution and latency. It's conceivable the radar/lidar sensor caught the person in the left lane with a bike and decided that was a reasonable place for a person with a bike to be, then lost track of the person while she walked into the right lane (where the visual/IR system could not see her yet). It's also entirely possible there was an egregious bug. This video doesn't really tell us much.

hcknwscommenter 9y ago
Human beings radiate IR do they not? Silly question, of course they do. Perhaps not above an Arizona level of thermal background?
- gok 9y ago
  Thermal imaging and near-infrared imaging are not the same. Waymo/Uber/etc are not using thermography for their autonomous vehicles.
  - Balgair 9y ago
    We see a nIR video of the driver. Those weird eyes everyone seems to have are the tell-tale sign of nIR as it interacts with the retina. So, we know that nIR sensors are being used in the interior, at least. That said, Arizona in the summer is going to play havoc with lIR and thermography in erms of false positives and negatives. The sensor suite probably should be using lIR at night for this reason and the switching it off in the day. But given Uber's history, the lack of lIR reeks of cost-cutting.
- rwbcxrz 9y ago
  I'm not an expert in IR or computer vision by any means, so take this with a grain of salt. Air has such a low thermal mass that it doesn't measurably affect most IR sensors. Hot pavement could be a potential issue, but that shouldn't have a major effect on forward-facing sensors. Besides, it's only March. Even Arizona isn't that hot yet.

skywhopper 9y ago

The video here is misleading. A human driver has a much wider field of view and better low-light vision than this video renders the situation. That's not to say that this would have been prevented by an attentive driver. But it's also clear that the safety driver was not paying attention, so it's even harder to know.

IndrekR 9y ago
Humans have amazing low-light adoption, but not if the human is blinded by/staring at a bright cell phone screen as seen on this video.

sv12l 9y ago

> 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. I'm not sure, pls look that pic https://imgur.com/a/VfBck https://imgur.com/a/VfBck, you can clearly see there exists at least 10-15 meters b/w them right at the time when she pops up. Now I don't know the speed of the car, but I'd wager, a human driver (if s/he was alert) would have attempted a breaking at that moment.

sp332 9y ago
At 38 MPH, the car would cover that distance in 0.7 seconds. That is on the low end of human reaction times for braking, so an average person might not have time.

munk-a 9y ago

It strikes me as extremely disingenuous if this is all Uber gave to the police. They should be making as much raw data as possible available. At the very least it'd let other companies test their AIs against the scenario and see if they would catch sight of and be able to avoid the pedestrian, if not then this is one more data point to train them on so it doesn't happen again.

vlozko 9y ago
The NTSB is also involved and I’m sure they’ll have more than than video to go by.
- munk-a 9y ago
  I hope so, but I'm not certain what sorts of legal precedents could be leveraged here. Uber, for instance, might try and avoid sharing non-visual recording data on the basis that it's proprietary information. IANAL but I'm very curious if companies can be compelled to share proprietary formats and tools for examining those formats or translating them into non-proprietary formats (which... is that even a thing legally speaking?) in a case like this. For instance, if law enforcement had testimony and other warrant allowing things that indicated that a user had stored some vital secret plan in a password field what could the government compel a company to do, assume the disk it relies on is also encrypted for extra fun time 1. Hand over the physical disk 2. Hand over the disk image 3. Hand over the decrypted disk image 4. Hand over the unobfuscated (enc or hashed) string of interest from the decrypted disk image 5. Compel the company to decrypt the string if it was encrypted with a common algorithm (i.e. AES) 6. Compel the company to decrypt the string if it was encrypted in a proprietary manner (i.e. in-house custom encryption) 7. Compel the company to devote resources (how much?) to brute force a one-way common hashed string (i.e. bcrypt) 8. Compel the company to discover a hash salt assuming the company doesn't store it locally but may be able to procure it from the user to do the above. 9. 7 & 8 if the one-way hashing algorithm is proprietary (and weak) and the company raises objections that the process of breaking this string will reveal key components of how the algorithm works (i.e. the hash is just md5(string) XOR "IMMA SECRET_STRING") 10. 7 & 8 if the proprietary algorithm is not weak but the company raises objections over trade secrets for other reasons.

CodeWriter23 9y ago

It's pretty clear to me (from the second half of the video) the driver was looking down at her phone and glancing up at the road periodically. IMO if she had been focusing on the road, she would have at least started braking before hitting the pedestrian. Or perhaps actually stopped before that happened.

nraynaud 9y ago
My more generous interpretation is that they were looking at the computer screen where the car shows its interpretation of the situation, people tend to lift their phone towards their face.
Piskvorrr 9y ago
This is only a fig-leaf of a driver (for catching legal flak by sitting in the front left seat), not actually operating the vehicle at all. This part was inevitable, given the unbounded technooptimism.

danso 9y ago

> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. It's a bit too early to make that conclusion. For all we know, the equipment was malfunctioning. Which I guess technically leads to your point, but we'll have to wait for the investigation to actually know what failed vs. what met expectations (I worry that expectations and tolerances, as set by the car companies, will be revealed to not be as comfortable as we might assume).

donarb 9y ago
It was also a bit too early for the police to release a statement less than 24 hours after the incident saying that it appears that Uber/the car/observer was not at fault.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  Jaywalkers ar at fault in Arizona in the case of an accident so it doesn't seem too early. On the subject: this lady I used to know hit someone who ran out in front of her and started freaking out (thinking they were in some serious trouble) until the police told her "you're fine, they were jaywalking".

aerovistae 9y ago

> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. Because the software is still critically flawed, of course...this only represents a present-day failing, not some sort of permanent obstacle for the future.

solresident 9y ago

The bike --rofl

vadimberman 9y ago

In addition to that, even if we were limited to the "last moment", there was about half a second or a second time to react. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that should be enough for the car to at least try something. Isn't the car supposed to brake to minimise the collision, if the swerving is too dangerous (and it wasn't in this case, as the road wasn't too busy)?

kappi 9y ago

check the below article and embedded video, talks about the Uber ADAS https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/not-too-fast-not-too-furious-self-driving-uber-atg?utm_term=.wmmMKkRWX#.xmkrlNx7Z https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/not-too-fast-not-too-f...

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

The code isn’t perfect obviously. The software is probably programmed to avoid anything in the opposite lane.

Animats 9y ago

How did LIDAR and IR (?) not catch that? That seems like a pretty serious problem. Something is badly wrong there. That should have been detected by LIDAR, radar, and vision. Yes, they need a wide dynamic range camera for night driving, but such things exist.[1][2] They're available as low-end dashcams; it's not expensive military night vision technology. Radar should pick up a bicycle at that range. The old Eaton VORAD from about 2000 couldn't, but there's been progress since then. LIDAR has its limitations; some materials, including the charcoal black fabric used on some desk chairs, are almost nonreflective to LIDAR. But blue jeans, red bike, bare head? Expect solid returns from all of those. The video shows no indication of braking in advance of the collision. That's very bad. There simply is no excuse for this situation not being handled. The NTSB is looking into this, and they should. I hope the NTSB is able to pry detailed technical data out of Uber and explain exactly what happened. In the first Tesla fatal crash, they didn't get deeply into the software and hardware, because it was clear that the system was behaving as designed, unable to detect a solid tractor trailer crossing in front of the Tesla. The result of that investigation was that Tesla had to get serious about detecting driver inattention, like all the other carmakers with lane keeping and autobrake do. This time it's a level 4 vehicle, which is supposed to be able to detect any road hazard. The NTSB has the job of figuring out what went wrong, in detail, the way they do for air crashes. Again, there is no excuse for this. [1] https://youtu.be/gWqzJF9tOhw?t=211 https://youtu.be/gWqzJF9tOhw?t=211 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as12rjzCQnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as12rjzCQnY

jcims 9y ago
I wonder if the driver grabbing the wheel disabled the response from the car.
- grafporno 9y ago
  Fun thought experiment: 1. Release video to police (with obvious shots of driver/passenger/whatever not paying attention to the road) 2. Investigation reveals accident was caused by driver/passenger/whatever reaction 3. ???? 4. Profit (PR win/rescue)
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Scoundreller 9y ago

And this is why I have retroreflective tape on my bike’s forks. It’s legally required while riding at night too.

nodesocket 9y ago

You are the same type of person that would have halted the industrial revolution at the first report of a human casualty or injury in a machine.

dang 9y ago
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN.

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drawkbox 9y ago

Arizona and Tempe especially have lots of darker roads. The LIDAR/computer vision tuning at night doesn't seem right. Maybe it was adjusting for the changing street light brightness but yes this is one situation and the vehicle had just come from the Mill bridge that has festive lights that are strung along the bridge [1]. This is a situation though where the LIDAR should have clearly been better than it was. Maybe it was in a strange state after having seen all the lights and then complete darkness, looks like they were headed north on Mill Ave over the bridge [2] just past the 202 where it is indeed very dark at night and probably the spot right here [3] which matches up with the building in the background, the other way is South and is busy/urban by ASU. They had just crossed a lit up bridge, then dark underpass, then into this area [3]. The area that it happened in [3] does have bike lanes, sidewalks and a crossing sidewalk close by [4] but is by a turn out so not a legal crossing however there are lots of trails through there. This video is worse than expected by far and may be forever harmful to the Uber brand in terms of software. In AZ I usually see the self-driving cars out in the day, maybe there is lots of night tuning/work to do yet. [1] https://i.imgur.com/kwxjW36.jpg https://i.imgur.com/kwxjW36.jpg [2] https://goo.gl/maps/ey1RA47tKBJ2 https://goo.gl/maps/ey1RA47tKBJ2 [3] https://goo.gl/maps/gpugzAZKxcS2 https://goo.gl/maps/gpugzAZKxcS2 [4] https://goo.gl/maps/Ni18GfjMP962 https://goo.gl/maps/Ni18GfjMP962

cozzyd 9y ago
What the heck are those trails doing in the median if it's not a legal crosswalk?
- baking 9y ago
  I've been staring at those myself for a couple of hours. My best guess is the crosswalk was moved, but the paths were left. There's a lake nearby and tons of parking under the overpasses, with trails and picnic areas. Also, the woman was right under a working street lamp. And as was stated in an earlier article the car continued on at 38 mph after the accident. The bike ended up 50 yards down the street. EDIT: "That spot is east of the second, western-side Mill Avenue bridge that is restricted to southbound traffic, and east of the Marquee Theatre and a parking lot for the Tempe Town Lake. It can be a popular area for pedestrians, especially concertgoers, joggers, and lake visitors. Mid-street crossing is common there, and a walkway in the median between the two one-way roads across the two bridges probably encourages the practice." "Pedestrians can cross a street without using a crosswalk in many instances without risking a jaywalking ticket, but Arizona law requires pedestrians not using a crosswalk to yield to traffic in the road." http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/cops-uber-self-driving-car-didnt-brake-much-in-arizona-pedestrian-death-10247629 http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/cops-uber-self-driving-c...

scythe 9y ago

It seems like this perspective may come from the idea that processing camera input is a formality. But the best estimates of the practical computing power of the brain are based on its visual processing capacity, because we know that's a hard problem. CAPTCHAs all depend on humans' ability to process images semantically faster than a computer (spambot). While it probably isn't unsolvable, I don't think it's surprising that this is consistently a challenge.

tbabb 9y ago

IIRC IR is ITAR controlled and not available above abysmal resolution. I am curious if this limitation applies to self-driving cars, too. If so, then it's really time to do what was done for GPS and declassify it for use by the general public. It's a public safety/public good issue.

Tossrock 9y ago
You can get 320x240 60hz for $2000 as a consumer[1]. On the one hand I wonder what kind of resolution the military grade version is, but I also wonder if the bandwidth/dollar is actually better. I imagine Raytheon basically just makes up a number when they're setting the price of a helicopter gun cam. [1]: eg https://www.amazon.com/FLIR-Systems-III-320-Thermal-Detector/dp/B01BE2JZ9O/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1521704146&sr=8-18&keywords=flir https://www.amazon.com/FLIR-Systems-III-320-Thermal-Detector...
owenversteeg 9y ago
No. ITAR controlled, in the context of IR imaging, means that you can't export any thermal imaging systems above 9fps. You can use whatever you want inside the US, and 60fps systems are available for consumers today.

osrec 9y ago

The lady can be seen fairly clearly (even in this poor quality video) at 0.03 and impact occurs at 0.04. That's 1s, which means a distance of approx 17m. If the guy was watching (sort of the point of him being there really) he could have slowed the car significantly and probably even stopped it. These are test vehicles being treated like prod vehicles. They should probably not be on streets with pedestrians quite so soon.

mdorazio 9y ago
You're massively underestimating human response time to visual cues and also the distance needed to stop a vehicle traveling at 35-40mph. It takes a full quarter of a second to respond to a visual stimulus on average, and more than that to also move your foot and depress a brake pedal. By that time the car was less than 50 feet from the pedestrian. At 40mph braking distance is about 80 feet in good conditions. There is absolutely no way a human driver could have avoided this accident assuming the same visual distance and dynamic range as the camera. Best case, the car may have slowed down a bit before impact.
- osrec 9y ago
  Or swerved perhaps? I think the Uber employee developed a false sense of security with respect to the car's capabilities.
- Steeeve 9y ago
  Human would have had significantly longer than this video. It's not that dark there at night. (Not as dark as the camera would lead you to believe). Swerving distance to avoid death is well within possibility. Aside from that, the possibility of death was further exacerbated by the vehicle not reacting to impact.
- nraynaud 9y ago
  You absolutely don’t need to brake in this situation, there are 5 lanes, you release the gas to give the pedestrian more time to finish crossing and if it’s a bit short you go to the next lane over, aiming behind the pedestrian. That’s what everybody was doing in France, now that I am in Arizona the drivers are just murderous towards pedestrians, they don’t release the gas or move to aim behind them, like it’s perfectly ok to kill someone. (Don’t get me started on right on red and exiting from a drive in, I think I will get killed on a sidewalk here)

donpdonp 9y ago

I agree thats a textbook case for the non-visual-specrum sensors. Its possible that lidar DID catch it, but the avoidance logic decided to continue forward. For example if it decided a collision was immpossible to avoid, swerving might make things worse. Also its possible the logic thought the timing was such that the bike would pass after the car crossed where the bike was going, so slowing down would actually cause a collision.

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hartator 9y ago

It’s what high beams are for. It would have been easy to avoid.

ptaipale 9y ago
How is it in America? Over here (North Europe), one may not use high beams when there is street lighting (even though in this case the lighting seemed not very good).

senectus1 9y ago

totally agree. I've seen crash detection catch an impending crash two cars ahead of the car in front of the car watching. If that crash detection can detect shit going on two cars ahead why couldn't LIDAR see that? having said that. wth was she doing?

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IncRnd 9y ago

> 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. Actually a human driver would be expected to have less visual trouble in this case. People's eyes are far more adaptable to low light conditions than a camera's video. If you've ever tried to take a picture on a visible night using your phone, you've seen this effect. > 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 the same time, a human can't. a computer can see in the dark, a human can't). Except that the computer did not do that in this case. This car also uses LIDAR and should have noticed the pedestrian long before the accident occurred. > Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. Either the sensor equipment or the software was defective, otherwise the pedestrian would have been detected.

DisruptiveDave 9y ago

Serious question: What is the argument for the need for autonomous driving? I haven't really pushed this question so figured I'd start here.

whiw 9y ago

Speculating: IR interference might have jammed this vehicle's LIDAR for an instant as it sampled the vicinity of the hazard. Any power in the passband of the detector might have been sufficient to saturate it and make it less sensitive to the returning LIDAR signal. This could come from another LIDAR unit in the vicinity. Other possible jammers might include IR laser pointers, TV remotes, or IR camera illuminators.

codedokode 9y ago

The car also had headlights on and I think they should give enough light to see the pedestrian in 20-30 meters ahead even without street lights.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> How did LIDAR and IR not catch that? The LIDAR can catch anything it wants. If the car's AI doesn't know how to deal with it, it won't.

martin_bech 9y ago

Im conviced 99-100% that the Automatic Emergency Brakeing (AEB) on my Tesla would have braked for that. The promise of these systems, as you also point out, is that they can see things, humans cant. The "real" cameras on this car (not this dashcam footage), and the LIDAR, should be fine with it beeing near pitch black.

boznz 9y ago
I can almost guarantee every variation on the above accident is being tested now by waymo, tesla et-al..

amarant 9y ago

lidar would've, but Uber had to trash all lidar sensors since they were stolen from waymo! or so it would seem... ;)

manmal 9y ago

Regarding how the LIDAR did not catch that, there are 4 possibilities I can think of: 1. A software bug failed to recognize the obstacles, or misclassified them, or it fell below some probability threshold. 2. LIDAR didn’t work at the time, and the car did not shutdown. 3. The victim‘s clothing absorbs the LIDAR‘s wavelength pretty much completely, such that it appeared as a „black hole“ and was ignored by the algorithm since this occurs commonly. Unlikely though since the bike itself would surely have registered? 4. It’s hard to see on the video, but is the car going up a slope? In that case, if the LIDAR didn‘t look up far enough, it could have failed to see the victim for optical reasons.

stormthebeach 9y ago
4) That portion in particular is a slight down slope
Piskvorrr 9y ago
For years, I've been told by AV technooptimists that these are all "never happens" scenarios. I have a feeling we have a Therac-class failure here.
CabSauce 9y ago
Another option (related to your #1) could be disagreement between the visual field cameras and the LIDAR. Which could result in a lower confidence of an object being a pedestrian.

jonathanstrange 9y ago

The human driver appears to be reading. I know that's a pretty hefty accusation, but I can't shake off the impression.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Yet this crash proves that all the equipment in the world didn't catch a very obvious obstruction. A human is not an "obstruction", dammit. I mean, literally- it's not like hitting a wall. The driver's life will never be in danger and the care may not even be significantly damaged. There's a very special reason why we want self-driving cars to avoid humans, that has nothing to do with the reason we want to avoid obstacles. And because this special reason is very, very special indeed, we need much better guarantees that self-driving vehicle AI is extremely good at avoiding collisions with humans, than we do for anything else.

coding123 9y ago

I'd like to see an Uber SDV drive on Waymo's test tracks (where they have the employees pop all the shit at it). And just see what it does. I'm guessing it will be ridiculous and nightmarish.

vicpara 9y ago

The lady was walking the bike at the edge of a light cone. The inner cam was actually filming in IR. Uber cars have IR cameras, LIDAR and an also multiple radar sensors. My guess is that the algorithms have never met a person crossing the street with a bicycle during night time so they just ignored it or considered it to be a glitch. You can have to approaches regarding labeling driving situations. Either you label with positive tags the situations where the car needs to react. Or you label with positive tags the normal situations when the car does nothing. Depending on the two approaches you can have a car that kills pedestrians that appear in weird circumstances. I also bet a pedestrian that ducks in the middle of a lane would 100% be killed by a car. Or two people having sex while standing in the middle of a lane. The other situation you have cars avoiding invisible obstacles that may appear due to some aberrations from sensors (which are far from perfect).

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Which is exactly the reason this is nowhere near production: "kinda works, sort of, in trivial cases" is not quite the SDV promise I keep hearing: "my car will also go reasonably straight when I let go of the wheel on a wide, straight stretch of the road, and won't even run over anyone if there is nobody on the road. Therefore, autonomous driving!"

samdoidge 9y ago

The pedestrian is a lot more obvious to the eye than I suspected, and it's actually quite shocking. They are correct to stop all road tests until they have investigated why they are missing this.

naskwo 9y ago

Mercedes has used thermal imaging commercially for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d03SuJ0TVcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d03SuJ0TVcY I would be very surprised if there is no thermal imaging in autonomous vehicles.

sly010 9y ago

I don't work on self driving cars or even vision, but I have heard when you are on a highway you start with filtering out small stationary reflections, since they are almost certainly not cars. (Which is maybe why the tesla didn't see the big red firetruck - it was not visible). It's not a big leap to imagine that Uber's LIDAR ignored the bike because it was not recognized as a person, was moving perpendicularly at a low speed, so got pre-filtered as a puddle. We can only guess and Uber will report whatever they want.

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yayr 9y ago

There is already some analysis of the footage, that claims the police video is manipulated, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBy4_3azBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBy4_3azBg also there are videos showing the real conditions with simple smartphone cams, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 Imo this is a clear attempt to shift public opinion. Also for everybody it should be clear, that a car should only drive as fast to be able to break once something comes into sight. For the whole industry it is very unfortunate, that some just don't understand the responsibility that comes with new technology and it's limitations.