5 ms·

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 t

by 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
  It’s that last possibility that’s horrifying above all others. The backlash either way is going to be terrible, but if these cars are just not up to the task at all, and have driven millions of miles on public roads... people will lose their minds. Self-driving tech will be banned for a very long time, public trust will go with it, and I can’t imagine when it would return. This is going to sound bad, but I hope this is just Uber’s usual criminal incompetence and dishonesty, and not a broader problem with the technology. Of the possible outcomes, that would be the least awful. If it’s just Uber moving fast and killing someone, they’re done (no loss there), but the underlying technology has a future in our lifetimes. If not...
  - jamiepenney 9y ago
    Like the AI Winter.
  - jozzas 9y ago
    Waymo actively test edge cases like this both in their test environments in the desert and via simulation, they have teams dedicated to coming up with weird edge situations like this (pushed bicycle) where the system does not respond appropriately so that it can be improved. All of these situations are kept and built up into a suite of regression tests. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...
  - bigiain 9y ago
    "I hope this is just Uber’s usual criminal incompetence and dishonesty" I, for one, certainly won't be betting against you there...
- Rapzid 9y ago
  I get your concern, but I would probably reserve the word inadequate. If this is the only situation you have to worry about a self driving care hitting and killing you in, and it's the only know data point at this time, some may consider that much more than adequate.
  - dragontamer 9y ago
    But this isn't the only self-driving car issue. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-death-self-driving-car-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-aut...
    - jozzas 9y ago
      I really don't bundle Tesla in with Waymo, Lyft, Toyota, Uber that are trying to build ground-up self driving cars. Are Tesla actively testing self-driving cars on public roads yet? Are their included sensors even up to the task? I didn't think they even have LiDAR?
      - gowld 9y ago
        Tesla does automatic lane-change and automatic braking.
      - dragontamer 9y ago
        True, but this seems to be a simple case of reacting to a person who steps in front of the car. Automatic braking technology exists on even cars that aren't considered "self-driving".
  - galdosdi 9y ago
    If this is the only data point then uber self driving cars are about 50 times more dangerous than average human drivers (see numbers quoted repeatedly elsewhere; uber has driven about 2 megamiles; human average is 100 megamiles between fatalities) If that's your idea of adequate, you'd be safer just vowing to get drunk every time you drive from now on, since a modest BAC increases accident rates, but not by a factor of FIFTY!
- flukus 9y ago
  > Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public) I think this is a very good possibility considering that autonomous vehicles is the goal of the company and they're racing to get to that point before they run out of investment money. They have a lot of incentive to take short cuts or outright lie about their progress.
- bigbluedots 9y ago
  If the last possibility is the case, there would likely have been a lot more accidents by now
  - flukus 9y ago
    Unless they human drivers have been a lot more active then we've been led to believe, or perhaps they don't drive as much at night.
- DannyBee 9y ago
  The last video of uber's system view i'm aware of is https://youtu.be/4CK0RhM-fos https://youtu.be/4CK0RhM-fos (2016)
  - vowelless 9y ago
    Looks like a velodyne 64 based laser. It is virtually impossible for those to not be able to see the the bicycle well in advanced. Uber had a serious issue here. Something like: 1. System was off 2. Point clouds were not being registered correctly (at all!) 3. It was actually in manual mode -- safety driver didn't realize or didnt react fast enough. 4. Planning module failed 4. Worst outcome in my opinion: Point cloud registered correctly, obstacle map generated correctly, system was on, planner spit out a path but the path took them through the bicycle.
  - codedokode 9y ago
    The LIDAR data look pretty noisy, especially for distant objects. Could not they filter out the pedestrian thinking it is a bush or something like this?
kaennar 9y ago
Anything that is tracking an object moving on the road should be looking at the velocity of the scanned object as well as keeping track of some sort of difference from normal. I would think the car should know it's on a two lane one way road, realized an object was moving in one lane with some sort of velocity towards the path of the vehicle, and that perhaps something was not normal. From the reports of cars running red lights and then this I would imagine they have an extremely high level of "risk" (what it takes for the car to take actions in order to avoid something/stop) that is acceptable. What would be far worse than a hardware or sensor failure would be to learn that Uber is instead teaching its cabs to fly through the streets with abandon. Instead of having cars that drive like a nice, thoughtful citizen we'll have a bunch of vehicles zooming through the streets like a pissed of cabby in Russia.
mirimir 9y ago
Not "center line", because this is a divided highway. So she had to cross two lanes from the median, in order to step in front of the Uber. "Human-sized object in the roadway" should have been enough to trigger braking, even if the trajectory wasn't clear.

by neom 9y ago

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
It’s that last possibility that’s horrifying above all others. The backlash either way is going to be terrible, but if these cars are just not up to the task at all, and have driven millions of miles on public roads... people will lose their minds. Self-driving tech will be banned for a very long time, public trust will go with it, and I can’t imagine when it would return. This is going to sound bad, but I hope this is just Uber’s usual criminal incompetence and dishonesty, and not a broader problem with the technology. Of the possible outcomes, that would be the least awful. If it’s just Uber moving fast and killing someone, they’re done (no loss there), but the underlying technology has a future in our lifetimes. If not...
- jamiepenney 9y ago
  Like the AI Winter.
- jozzas 9y ago
  Waymo actively test edge cases like this both in their test environments in the desert and via simulation, they have teams dedicated to coming up with weird edge situations like this (pushed bicycle) where the system does not respond appropriately so that it can be improved. All of these situations are kept and built up into a suite of regression tests. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...
- bigiain 9y ago
  "I hope this is just Uber’s usual criminal incompetence and dishonesty" I, for one, certainly won't be betting against you there...
Rapzid 9y ago
I get your concern, but I would probably reserve the word inadequate. If this is the only situation you have to worry about a self driving care hitting and killing you in, and it's the only know data point at this time, some may consider that much more than adequate.
- dragontamer 9y ago
  But this isn't the only self-driving car issue. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-autopilot-death-self-driving-car-elon-musk https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/tesla-aut...
  - jozzas 9y ago
    I really don't bundle Tesla in with Waymo, Lyft, Toyota, Uber that are trying to build ground-up self driving cars. Are Tesla actively testing self-driving cars on public roads yet? Are their included sensors even up to the task? I didn't think they even have LiDAR?
    - gowld 9y ago
      Tesla does automatic lane-change and automatic braking.
    - dragontamer 9y ago
      True, but this seems to be a simple case of reacting to a person who steps in front of the car. Automatic braking technology exists on even cars that aren't considered "self-driving".
- galdosdi 9y ago
  If this is the only data point then uber self driving cars are about 50 times more dangerous than average human drivers (see numbers quoted repeatedly elsewhere; uber has driven about 2 megamiles; human average is 100 megamiles between fatalities) If that's your idea of adequate, you'd be safer just vowing to get drunk every time you drive from now on, since a modest BAC increases accident rates, but not by a factor of FIFTY!
flukus 9y ago
> Either Uber's gear is _way_ less sophisticated (to the point of being too dangerous to use in public) I think this is a very good possibility considering that autonomous vehicles is the goal of the company and they're racing to get to that point before they run out of investment money. They have a lot of incentive to take short cuts or outright lie about their progress.
bigbluedots 9y ago
If the last possibility is the case, there would likely have been a lot more accidents by now
- flukus 9y ago
  Unless they human drivers have been a lot more active then we've been led to believe, or perhaps they don't drive as much at night.
DannyBee 9y ago
The last video of uber's system view i'm aware of is https://youtu.be/4CK0RhM-fos https://youtu.be/4CK0RhM-fos (2016)
- vowelless 9y ago
  Looks like a velodyne 64 based laser. It is virtually impossible for those to not be able to see the the bicycle well in advanced. Uber had a serious issue here. Something like: 1. System was off 2. Point clouds were not being registered correctly (at all!) 3. It was actually in manual mode -- safety driver didn't realize or didnt react fast enough. 4. Planning module failed 4. Worst outcome in my opinion: Point cloud registered correctly, obstacle map generated correctly, system was on, planner spit out a path but the path took them through the bicycle.
- codedokode 9y ago
  The LIDAR data look pretty noisy, especially for distant objects. Could not they filter out the pedestrian thinking it is a bush or something like this?

kaennar 9y ago

Anything that is tracking an object moving on the road should be looking at the velocity of the scanned object as well as keeping track of some sort of difference from normal. I would think the car should know it's on a two lane one way road, realized an object was moving in one lane with some sort of velocity towards the path of the vehicle, and that perhaps something was not normal. From the reports of cars running red lights and then this I would imagine they have an extremely high level of "risk" (what it takes for the car to take actions in order to avoid something/stop) that is acceptable. What would be far worse than a hardware or sensor failure would be to learn that Uber is instead teaching its cabs to fly through the streets with abandon. Instead of having cars that drive like a nice, thoughtful citizen we'll have a bunch of vehicles zooming through the streets like a pissed of cabby in Russia.

mirimir 9y ago

Not "center line", because this is a divided highway. So she had to cross two lanes from the median, in order to step in front of the Uber. "Human-sized object in the roadway" should have been enough to trigger braking, even if the trajectory wasn't clear.