5 ms·

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 spectr

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.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Radar can detect objects in a non-visible spectrum: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/753843823546028040?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/753843823546028040?lang=... > Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust - Elon Musk The major car companies have even developed the technology to also allow LiDAR to see through snow/rain without the previous refraction problems: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navigate-in-rain-or-snow/ https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi... My question is given it could detect the jaywalking object (regardless of visible light) within the very very short timeframe at those speeds, on what looks like a highway, I'm curious if it's rational to expect even the future ideal machines (say 5yrs from now) to have been able to react in that situation. It's not as obvious as people here are pretending it is. Yet even then we now have a previously unknown model to test our machines on to prevent it from happening again. Given a human would 99%+ of the time not have seen this woman in time, then I believe we'll at a very minimum be better off as a society as a result of this... as wrong as that sounds, because it's now a high-priority dataset, not just a sad story in the local news (if even) we'll forget about tomorrow as it would be with a human driver.
    - brokenmachine 9y ago
      > Given a human would 99%+ of the time not have seen this woman in time I'm far from convinced that a human would not have seen this woman in time. See all the comments in this thread about how the dashcam footage is much worse than reality, and even one person who drives that road regularly saying it's not that bad visibility-wise. I think if I had seen that lady slowly walking her bike onto the road in my adjacent lane, I would have slowed down for sure. And from seeing my own nighttime dashcam videos, I think I would have seen her. She's the only object nearby, on a fairly straight road with no adverse weather conditions. I would have seen someone pushing a bike onto the next lane. Maybe I would have hit her still, but I would have slowed down for sure.
    - mjmahone17 9y ago
      So the speed limit on Mill Avenue, where the crash took place is 35 mph. The uber was traveling at 40 mph. The reason Mill’s speed limit is 35 instead of 45 (like most Arizona’s major roads) is because it’s got much heavier pedestrian traffic than typical. If an autonomous vehicle cannot detect pedestrians crossing a slower-than-typical road with enough time to at least not kill them, it shouldn’t be on the road. If that means uber can’t drive autonously at night, too bad for them. To be fair, the law currently is very permissive to drivers, and a human may not have been deemed at fault. Despite going 40 in a 35 zone, when (due to reduced visibility) they actually should have been going 25. You are supposed to go only as fast as you can stop, given current visibility. Regardless of the speed limit.
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  > I watched the video a bunch of times and I don't see how the vehicle could have slowed down within the 700ms max where she would have been visible to a LIDAR, to make much of a difference. There's also a steering wheel. (Why is everybody here missing this?!) I could totally see it having moved out of the way.
  - shawnz 9y ago
    Veering off the road to avoid a collision is not necessarily the safer option.
    - LoSboccacc 9y ago
      well the technology appears to be there, the second one in the sequence is a swerve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xITOqlBCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xITOqlBCM also check out the one at 1:06 - pilot detects slightly before than the autopilot but the dashcam is still pitch black
  - gnode 9y ago
    In order for steering to be a collision avoidance strategy, the system would have to risk the life of the driver. It may be fairly easy to recognise an obstruction on the road, but determining that it's human is much harder. If a plastic bag blowing across the road could kill the driver, or other drivers nearby, that would be a very unpopular solution.
    - slavik81 9y ago
      They hit the person with the right side of their car, so even a small move left could have avoided this accident. Given that it was a divided highway with an empty lane to their left, moving half a lane over would have been a reasonable response. Of course, the Uber vehicle did not take any action at all. It doesn't seem to have ever realized that there was a solid object in front of it. Without that, collision avoidance is impossible.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  40mph is actually right at the inflection point where survivability changes dramatically. At 40mph it's about a 50/50 chance of a car crash with a pedestrian causing a fatality. At 35mph the chances of a fatality go down to 1 in 3, at 30mph it goes down to 1 in 5. At a little under 20mph it's 1 in 10.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Okay, I've heard that 40mph plenty of times here when AI cars come up, so is it possible the car could have slowed down 10mph? I only suggested 10km/hr as an ideal maximum (aka 35mph) given better technology, not as a baseline for today... I've also read that the last speed sign was 45mph before this accident. I used 40mph as it was between the 35mph sign that was coming up before the hit and the 45mph one before it.
    - InclinedPlane 9y ago
      Braking time is about 4 seconds from 40 mph (average braking acceleration is a bit under half a gee for ordinary cars), which means every second of braking is a roughly 10 mph reduction in speed.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gowld 9y ago
    Per your own data, 30mph is the "inflection point". 30mph to 40mph cuts survivability by 40%.
- adamweld 9y ago
  I think your response time calculations are wildly wrong. The LIDAR sensor[1] being used here can pick up targets up to 120m away. I'm not sure about the RADAR or vision systems also in place, but even LIDAR alone should have been able to easily pick out the pedestrian with plenty of time to come to a full stop. This is clearly poorly designed autonomous driving software, not a sensory deficiency.
  - dmix 9y ago
    I watched it again and you might be right, there was likely time for something to happen, given the available reaction speed going 40mph on a highway. I'm curious what that something translates to and what affect it could have had on this situation (ie, swerving, slowing by x mph, etc).
    - patrickyeon 9y ago
      Because you didn't do the math yourself, 40 miles per hour is just shy of 18 meters per second. So 120 meters is almost 6.7 seconds at that constant speed (more if you're slowing down). Start of video to collision is less than 5 seconds.
      - dmix 9y ago
        That should give quite a bit of time to slow down then or at least move slightly out of the way, even given the person may not have been detected exactly within the 5s+ of the video + factoring in computation speed + mechanical response times. Although again this is speculation as I'm not intimately familiar with how the objection detection works and what a bike w/ plastic bags may have looked liked crossing the road, plus what available options were at that speed and given the environment. Thanks.
    - SolarNet 9y ago
      The braking distance at 80 mph for a modern car is 320 feet (just under 100m) the car should have been able to come to a complete stop if the software had been using the LIDAR correctly.
    - 9y ago
- lutorm 9y ago
  Usually it is the law that you are only allowed to drive as fast as the conditions allow (e.g. CA's "Basic Speed Law".) That includes being able to see obstacles in your path early enough to be able to do something about them. If you can't see far enough to be able to avoid something in the road, you're simply going too fast. That should apply to machines, but it already applies to humans.
  - dmix 9y ago
    What are you saying exactly, that a human driver would be at fault here given the video evidence? I believe it's entirely possible for a robot to solve this problem with proper Radar and maybe LiDAR going forward. But I would be extremely skeptical about anyone claiming a human would have been at fault...
    - lutorm 9y ago
      If the statement is that "a human would not have been able to stop in time either", then yes, by the letter of the law, a human would have been at fault. If you can't see where you're going, you need to slow down. Does that seem so unreasonable?
      - gowld 9y ago
        You're simply wrong. Drivers aren't required to drive slow enough to avoid every possible illegal or unexpected natural obstruction. http://www.zacharlawblog.com/2015/11/whos-at-fault-in-an-accident-involving-a-jay-walker-.html http://www.zacharlawblog.com/2015/11/whos-at-fault-in-an-acc... > So, should an accident occur between a jaywalker and a car---if shown that the driver could have/should have seen the person and could have/should have been able to avoid, then without question the driver can be held responsible. https://www.nicoletlaw.com/blog/2015/07/what-happens-if-a-jaywalker-is-hit-by-a-car.shtml https://www.nicoletlaw.com/blog/2015/07/what-happens-if-a-ja... > To a large degree, it comes down to the driver's ability to avoid the accident. If a jaywalker steps right out into the car's path and is instantly hit, the driver will usually not be held responsible. It will be determined that the pedestrian caused the accident. > However, if the jaywalker strolls into the street a few hundred yards ahead of the car and the driver does not slow down or swerve, the driver could be held responsible. Even though jaywalking is illegal, drivers are expected to take reasonable action to avoid crashes when they can, even if they feel they have the right of way. > Negligence also comes into play if the driver should have seen the pedestrian but did not. For instance, a driver who is texting and driving may look away from the road and not see someone step into the street, hitting them with the car. The driver could argue that the road was clear and that the person shouldn't have been there. While that may be true, he or she could still face charges.

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.
- dmix 9y ago
  Radar can detect objects in a non-visible spectrum: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/753843823546028040?lang=en https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/753843823546028040?lang=... > Good thing about radar is that, unlike lidar (which is visible wavelength), it can see through rain, snow, fog and dust - Elon Musk The major car companies have even developed the technology to also allow LiDAR to see through snow/rain without the previous refraction problems: https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navigate-in-rain-or-snow/ https://qz.com/637509/driverless-cars-have-a-new-way-to-navi... My question is given it could detect the jaywalking object (regardless of visible light) within the very very short timeframe at those speeds, on what looks like a highway, I'm curious if it's rational to expect even the future ideal machines (say 5yrs from now) to have been able to react in that situation. It's not as obvious as people here are pretending it is. Yet even then we now have a previously unknown model to test our machines on to prevent it from happening again. Given a human would 99%+ of the time not have seen this woman in time, then I believe we'll at a very minimum be better off as a society as a result of this... as wrong as that sounds, because it's now a high-priority dataset, not just a sad story in the local news (if even) we'll forget about tomorrow as it would be with a human driver.
  - brokenmachine 9y ago
    > Given a human would 99%+ of the time not have seen this woman in time I'm far from convinced that a human would not have seen this woman in time. See all the comments in this thread about how the dashcam footage is much worse than reality, and even one person who drives that road regularly saying it's not that bad visibility-wise. I think if I had seen that lady slowly walking her bike onto the road in my adjacent lane, I would have slowed down for sure. And from seeing my own nighttime dashcam videos, I think I would have seen her. She's the only object nearby, on a fairly straight road with no adverse weather conditions. I would have seen someone pushing a bike onto the next lane. Maybe I would have hit her still, but I would have slowed down for sure.
  - mjmahone17 9y ago
    So the speed limit on Mill Avenue, where the crash took place is 35 mph. The uber was traveling at 40 mph. The reason Mill’s speed limit is 35 instead of 45 (like most Arizona’s major roads) is because it’s got much heavier pedestrian traffic than typical. If an autonomous vehicle cannot detect pedestrians crossing a slower-than-typical road with enough time to at least not kill them, it shouldn’t be on the road. If that means uber can’t drive autonously at night, too bad for them. To be fair, the law currently is very permissive to drivers, and a human may not have been deemed at fault. Despite going 40 in a 35 zone, when (due to reduced visibility) they actually should have been going 25. You are supposed to go only as fast as you can stop, given current visibility. Regardless of the speed limit.
mehrdadn 9y ago
> I watched the video a bunch of times and I don't see how the vehicle could have slowed down within the 700ms max where she would have been visible to a LIDAR, to make much of a difference. There's also a steering wheel. (Why is everybody here missing this?!) I could totally see it having moved out of the way.
- shawnz 9y ago
  Veering off the road to avoid a collision is not necessarily the safer option.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    well the technology appears to be there, the second one in the sequence is a swerve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xITOqlBCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--xITOqlBCM also check out the one at 1:06 - pilot detects slightly before than the autopilot but the dashcam is still pitch black
- gnode 9y ago
  In order for steering to be a collision avoidance strategy, the system would have to risk the life of the driver. It may be fairly easy to recognise an obstruction on the road, but determining that it's human is much harder. If a plastic bag blowing across the road could kill the driver, or other drivers nearby, that would be a very unpopular solution.
  - slavik81 9y ago
    They hit the person with the right side of their car, so even a small move left could have avoided this accident. Given that it was a divided highway with an empty lane to their left, moving half a lane over would have been a reasonable response. Of course, the Uber vehicle did not take any action at all. It doesn't seem to have ever realized that there was a solid object in front of it. Without that, collision avoidance is impossible.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
40mph is actually right at the inflection point where survivability changes dramatically. At 40mph it's about a 50/50 chance of a car crash with a pedestrian causing a fatality. At 35mph the chances of a fatality go down to 1 in 3, at 30mph it goes down to 1 in 5. At a little under 20mph it's 1 in 10.
- dmix 9y ago
  Okay, I've heard that 40mph plenty of times here when AI cars come up, so is it possible the car could have slowed down 10mph? I only suggested 10km/hr as an ideal maximum (aka 35mph) given better technology, not as a baseline for today... I've also read that the last speed sign was 45mph before this accident. I used 40mph as it was between the 35mph sign that was coming up before the hit and the 45mph one before it.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Braking time is about 4 seconds from 40 mph (average braking acceleration is a bit under half a gee for ordinary cars), which means every second of braking is a roughly 10 mph reduction in speed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gowld 9y ago
  Per your own data, 30mph is the "inflection point". 30mph to 40mph cuts survivability by 40%.
adamweld 9y ago
I think your response time calculations are wildly wrong. The LIDAR sensor[1] being used here can pick up targets up to 120m away. I'm not sure about the RADAR or vision systems also in place, but even LIDAR alone should have been able to easily pick out the pedestrian with plenty of time to come to a full stop. This is clearly poorly designed autonomous driving software, not a sensory deficiency.
- dmix 9y ago
  I watched it again and you might be right, there was likely time for something to happen, given the available reaction speed going 40mph on a highway. I'm curious what that something translates to and what affect it could have had on this situation (ie, swerving, slowing by x mph, etc).
  - patrickyeon 9y ago
    Because you didn't do the math yourself, 40 miles per hour is just shy of 18 meters per second. So 120 meters is almost 6.7 seconds at that constant speed (more if you're slowing down). Start of video to collision is less than 5 seconds.
    - dmix 9y ago
      That should give quite a bit of time to slow down then or at least move slightly out of the way, even given the person may not have been detected exactly within the 5s+ of the video + factoring in computation speed + mechanical response times. Although again this is speculation as I'm not intimately familiar with how the objection detection works and what a bike w/ plastic bags may have looked liked crossing the road, plus what available options were at that speed and given the environment. Thanks.
  - SolarNet 9y ago
    The braking distance at 80 mph for a modern car is 320 feet (just under 100m) the car should have been able to come to a complete stop if the software had been using the LIDAR correctly.
  - 9y ago
lutorm 9y ago
Usually it is the law that you are only allowed to drive as fast as the conditions allow (e.g. CA's "Basic Speed Law".) That includes being able to see obstacles in your path early enough to be able to do something about them. If you can't see far enough to be able to avoid something in the road, you're simply going too fast. That should apply to machines, but it already applies to humans.
- dmix 9y ago
  What are you saying exactly, that a human driver would be at fault here given the video evidence? I believe it's entirely possible for a robot to solve this problem with proper Radar and maybe LiDAR going forward. But I would be extremely skeptical about anyone claiming a human would have been at fault...
  - lutorm 9y ago
    If the statement is that "a human would not have been able to stop in time either", then yes, by the letter of the law, a human would have been at fault. If you can't see where you're going, you need to slow down. Does that seem so unreasonable?
    - gowld 9y ago
      You're simply wrong. Drivers aren't required to drive slow enough to avoid every possible illegal or unexpected natural obstruction. http://www.zacharlawblog.com/2015/11/whos-at-fault-in-an-accident-involving-a-jay-walker-.html http://www.zacharlawblog.com/2015/11/whos-at-fault-in-an-acc... > So, should an accident occur between a jaywalker and a car---if shown that the driver could have/should have seen the person and could have/should have been able to avoid, then without question the driver can be held responsible. https://www.nicoletlaw.com/blog/2015/07/what-happens-if-a-jaywalker-is-hit-by-a-car.shtml https://www.nicoletlaw.com/blog/2015/07/what-happens-if-a-ja... > To a large degree, it comes down to the driver's ability to avoid the accident. If a jaywalker steps right out into the car's path and is instantly hit, the driver will usually not be held responsible. It will be determined that the pedestrian caused the accident. > However, if the jaywalker strolls into the street a few hundred yards ahead of the car and the driver does not slow down or swerve, the driver could be held responsible. Even though jaywalking is illegal, drivers are expected to take reasonable action to avoid crashes when they can, even if they feel they have the right of way. > Negligence also comes into play if the driver should have seen the pedestrian but did not. For instance, a driver who is texting and driving may look away from the road and not see someone step into the street, hitting them with the car. The driver could argue that the road was clear and that the person shouldn't have been there. While that may be true, he or she could still face charges.