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1) I'd hope and assume that an autonomous vehicle would have better sensors than a single mounted video camera. It does have other sensors that it uses, right
by nkurz 9y ago
1) I'd hope and assume that an autonomous vehicle would have better sensors than a single mounted video camera. It does have other sensors that it uses, right? Were they all operational? What do they show? Combined, do they have dynamic response comparable to the human eye?
2) The road seems really dark. Are the headlights intentionally dimmed here? At night, on a empty road with no opposing traffic, shouldn't the headlights normally be on bright, rather than dimmed? Does the autonomous vehicle control this switch or the human driver?
3) I feel like a human driver would have been likely to swerve left to avoid the human. They may still have hit the rear of the bicycle, but no one would have died. Does the car even attempt to prioritize collisions with inanimate objects over living ones? Does it at least attempt to slow down if a collision seems inevitable?
4) If you cannot stop in time to avoid an obstacle on the road after it is illuminated by your headlights, it would seem clear that you are travelling "too fast for conditions". Either you need brighter lights, or a you need to slow down. Is this in dispute?
- ghaff 9y agoNo headlights should not normally be on bright within city limits. Brights are something you tend to use on dark country roads.
- ubernostrum 9y agoI'm a broken record here, but: Seriously. Go spend some time in /r/roadcam on reddit to get yourself accustomed to what a typical dashboard camera video looks like. People here are drawing all sorts of conclusions based on seeing an unfamiliar type of video, and that's a really bad thing. The two biggest things to get used to are: 1. Dashcams do a terrible job in dark or low-light scenes. The car's headlights, and the streetlights, were almost certainly functioning just fine; the scene only looks as dark as it does because that's the best the camera can do. A dashcam video of a dark/low-light incident will always look significantly darker than how a human would perceive it when actually present. 2. Dashcams often have a wider field of view than their human operators. Which means you often see obstacles in the video before they'd be in the field of view of a human driver (this causes no end of "well I saw that coming way before the driver did!" snark in /r/roadcam discussions). And in theory this vehicle has infrared on board, and a LIDAR system scanning the road ahead for trouble. Any such system should have had zero difficulty detecting the pedestrian in time to stop or avoid. The fact that it didn't is a very bad sign for Uber's implementation.
- stefan_ 9y agoHere is what even a GoPro can do at night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HamWCVrFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0HamWCVrFI
- user5994461 9y agoNot a fair comparison. The gopro is static in a well lighted corner. It's ideal conditions. The same camera in movement facing moving lights might never be able to adjust its sensitivity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stevenwoo 9y agoThanks for the clarifications - dashcams sound exactly like the first few generations of GoPro cameras (haven't tried any of the last few so can't generalize) - almost useless in low light conditions, great in sunlight or in front of a high powered light source.