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Although it seems from the dashcam footage that the scene is dark and the bike/pedestrian comes out of nowhere, humans are able to handle extreme low-light situ

Although it seems from the dashcam footage that the scene is dark and the bike/pedestrian comes out of nowhere, humans are able to handle extreme low-light situations and I don't doubt that this pedestrian would have been visible to an attentive driver. If autonomous cars cannot handle low-light conditions given the current state of hardware, either from visible, ir, or lidar, then they need to run in the daytime only.

pdonis 9y ago
> humans are able to handle extreme low-light situations But this wasn't an extreme low light situation. It was a situation with street lights alternating with extreme low light regions. Under those conditions the human eye will not be dark adapted and your low light vision won't be very good.
- eanzenberg 9y ago
  Ive driven at night and the video is not representative of what I see. With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road. If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously.
  - pdonis 9y ago
    > With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road. I agree that is the optimum, but I don't think all roads are optimal in this respect. > If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously. From what I can see in the video, this is what a reasonably cautious human driver would have been doing on the street shown, since it does not appear to have sufficient light to avoid blind spots. It does not appear that the Uber car had its high beams on. But, as has been noted in other comments in this thread, the car had other means besides visible light (LIDAR and IR) for seeing the pedestrian, so it should have been able to do better than a human driver at avoiding the collision.
    - eanzenberg 9y ago
      I would love to see what the lidar/ir system was seeing. I'm not sure that will be released if it's obvious uber fucked up.
      - linkregister 9y ago
        I doubt that NTSB would fail to ensure that footage got released.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

pdonis 9y ago

> humans are able to handle extreme low-light situations But this wasn't an extreme low light situation. It was a situation with street lights alternating with extreme low light regions. Under those conditions the human eye will not be dark adapted and your low light vision won't be very good.

eanzenberg 9y ago
Ive driven at night and the video is not representative of what I see. With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road. If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > With your car's headlights and the road lights, there are no blind spots on the road. I agree that is the optimum, but I don't think all roads are optimal in this respect. > If there is not enough street illumination and my headlights cannot reach far enough ahead I turn the high beams on and travel cautiously. From what I can see in the video, this is what a reasonably cautious human driver would have been doing on the street shown, since it does not appear to have sufficient light to avoid blind spots. It does not appear that the Uber car had its high beams on. But, as has been noted in other comments in this thread, the car had other means besides visible light (LIDAR and IR) for seeing the pedestrian, so it should have been able to do better than a human driver at avoiding the collision.
  - eanzenberg 9y ago
    I would love to see what the lidar/ir system was seeing. I'm not sure that will be released if it's obvious uber fucked up.
    - linkregister 9y ago
      I doubt that NTSB would fail to ensure that footage got released.
- deleted 9y ago
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