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Velodyne Lidar Inc. baffled by Uber crash
- Piskvorrr 9y agoAaand here comes the CYA storm, with everyone declaring they had absolutely nothing to do with the crash.
- Declanomous 9y agoI mean, it is pretty baffling that people are defending the self-driving car when it has LIDAR.
- mateuszf 9y agoReally? Isn't LIDAR just some input device, whose data is interpreted in software?
- AstralStorm 9y agoA pretty complex device too. I'm not sure about this specific one, but LIDAR tend to operate in a scan fashion with a refresh rate. This means it can get chopped noisy data in a time sense which requires post-processing.
- jessaustin 9y agoCan we agree that robocars shouldn't drive faster than that processing can occur?
- Piskvorrr 9y agoNobody should; this is one of the basic tenets of highway codes everywhere.
- blensor 9y agoThat would not have mattered im this case. The Veldoyne LIDAR they seem to be using (from the photo of one of their Volvos) is the HDL-64E (don't know which revision but the key specs are the same). This sensor can operate between 5 and 15Hz (full rotations per second). So in the slowest setting the car (assuming it was going at 45mph) moves 4 meters within a full rotation and in the fastest setting moves 1.5 meters. That might sound a lot, and in some applications it is a lot, but please keep in mind that after one full rotation the sensor has scanned an area of up to 45000 square meters ( maximum scanning distance is 120 meters). So each rotation gives you a pretty good situational awareness of your surroundings (barring any occlusions that prevent the sensor from seeing certain spots). Unless the person is covered in IR absorbing material (some black materials do a quite good job at that) it should be impossible for a pedestrian to sneak up on the car without it being sweeped multiple times by the laser beams
- wavefunction 9y agoPeople are saying that "you couldn't see the woman" due to the visible light levels in the video Uber/the police have released but technically informed people are saying "the car has more than just visible light sensors" so arguing that the visible light video exonerates Uber is a defense built on shaky ground.
- coldcode 9y agoAlso given other people taking pictures at that location do not support the "it was too dark" video.
- hcknwscommenter 9y agoThis. The video is incredibly misleading. Perhaps criminally so. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
- andreareina 9y agoA lot of the defending the self-driving car came in the form of, "conditions were bad, the car's sensors didn't detect her, even a human probably wouldn't have seen her". i.e., bad input (and not bad processing of said inputs)
- lima 9y agoIt certainly shows why Google/Waymo are so cautious. They could have brought their product to market much sooner. Move fast and break things...?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- shaki-dora 9y agoMove fast and don't brake? Move fast and kill pedestrians?
- colordrops 9y agoTo be fair it probably wasn't caused by a lidar failure.
- lima 9y agoEven if the Lidar did fail, the software would need to handle it gracefully.
- riffic 9y agohttps://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/04/04/associated-press-cautions-journalists-that-crashes-arent-always-accidents/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/04/04/associated-press-caut...
- adamson 9y agoThis seems exceptional for Velodyne to come out with a statement like this directly from a spokesperson. I would expect a supplier to be more restrained before throwing a large (and growing) customer under the bus like this.
- 05 9y agoUber already tried getting their hands on a better LiDAR unit, we all know how it went. If they could switch to a better in-house sensor, they would have done so already, and Velodyne is the best of what’s commercially available now. What are they going to do, switch to an inferior model at a time their software can’t even avoid a collision using state of the art LiDAR?
- Roritharr 9y agoWell the question of "why didn't the lidar see the pedestrian?" was on everyones mind in the industry, so openly going out and declaring: "it surely must have seen it, the lidar's are fine" is an attempt at reassuring everyone who is now questioning if Lidars are not reliable enough. This is not exactly throwing Uber under the Bus as they themselves have an interest in being able to tell that story later on: "Our analysis concluded that our algorithms didn't put enough weight on the data coming from the lidar, which worked as intended and should have been weighted higher in these specific circumstances, we will adjust our efforts accordingly and will Donate $largeSum to CarsAgainstHumanity to bribe everyone into forgetting how bad we fucked up."
- gowld 9y agoWhy is it OK for the LIDAR company to make a blanket statement of innocence without proof, but not OK for Uber to do the same?
- skybrian 9y agoSaying they are "baffled" isn't a blanket statement of innocence. It's saying they don't know what happened. There is a mystery here. The responsible thing to do is wait for the results of the investigation.
- danvoell 9y ago“Certainly, our Lidar is capable of clearly imaging Elaine and her bicycle in this situation. However, our Lidar doesn’t make the decision to put on the brakes or get out of her way.” - Would be very interesting, in the name of transparency, to see the log. Whatever malfunctioned has to be there. Hopefully some sort of mechanism to prevent future crashes arises from this. Instead of just a few lawsuits, payoffs and coverups
- candiodari 9y agoThere are 2 problems with this way of reasoning is what you see in the aviation industry. One, you're comparing this incident with an idealized human. Everybody thinks pilots and drivers are magical beings that don't make mistakes. And then 90 people die because one engine catches fire, pilot turns off the other engine and then banks the aircraft for make a quick emergency landing, obviously the plane loses lift immediately, drilled itself into a bridge, taking a taxi with it into the river below. No survivors, almost a hundred dead [1]. And I get it, the pilot needed to rapidly make a series of decisions under ridiculous levels of stress, that's the real cause. But when things go wrong close to the ground at 150km/h in an object that weighs 50 tons, they go wrong quickly, so you need to respond quickly. Needless to say, nothing prevents reoccurence. Quite simply, a plane will crash if you do this. There's nothing that can technically be done to prevent it. As for cars, over 10.000 people die every year because humans can't be bothered to wait until they sober up to drive [2]. Those are the human pilots that we should measure against. Frankly, I don't understand how humans are allowed to drive cars or fly planes at all. We pass signals in our brain, they can cross from neuron to neuron in about 10ms. That means that in a second, a signal can affect, at most, a ball with radius 2cm in our brain. To spread out over the brain requires 7-8 seconds minimum in theory and in practice minutes is the more common scenario. That means, it's your spinal column that's driving the car/flying the plane and it gets updates "from upstairs" that are 2-5s old by the time they reach the control loops. Our brain is very good at predicting events so it doesn't look like that's the case, but it is. Compare self-driving or other autopilots against realistic humans, who make these sorts of mistakes. An average autopilot needs to do better than a decent human driver. It should not need to outperform a magical how-we-imagine-ourselves perfect human driver. That said, I do agree that we need some basic rules. Tesla's car did NOT stop after crashing into a truck after a lidar mistake (and a serious mistake by the truck driver that it was attempting to compensate for I might add), but not stopping, that's utterly unforgivable. Same here, obviously the car was obviously either driving with the lidar turned off or ignoring it's output. That's like a human driving with their eyes closed. But certification must be functional. It can't be on the quality of individual components. It can't be on code review. It must be functional. We should have test tracks where autopilots get confronted with dozens of situations, preferably combining 5-6 individual problems at the same time. And then it needs to navigate it safely, under constant decision pressure. And then it needs to end with 5 cars being sacrificed to test their reactions when something heavy drops on them, when they drop off a cliff, when they get mechanically blocked, and when catastrophic mechanical failure occurs ... (so they don't put the pedal to the metal causing 10x the damage to others when they do have an accident). But it needs to be a functional, practical test. Not the madness we currently have for aviation. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKNREZ_u8E8&t=31s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKNREZ_u8E8&t=31s [2] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-drv_factsheet.html https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
- oh_sigh 9y agoSomeone in a previous thread mentioned that Uber had disabled LiDAR input because they were testing visual-light-only navigation. Was that just speculation/rumor?
- Qworg 9y agoThat would be so incredibly risky as to be insane, especially with non-technical staff in the monitoring seat. I've not heard anything of it before you brought it up.
- tjoff 9y agoYou don't have to disable it to test that, just run two systems in parallel and detect large deviations. I refuse to believe that they would just disable it on public roads to see if it could manage.
- gmueckl 9y agoI hate to say it, but never underestimated the human potential for stupidity. To make matters worse, this is amplified in organizations. But in this specific case, this is all speculation until the data gets analyzed.
- tetrep 9y ago> Someone in a previous thread mentioned that Uber had disabled LiDAR input because they were testing visual-light-only navigation. That smells like BS. I can't imagine any serious players in the self-driving field that can't replay all their sensor inputs into models offline to see how things behave. If they wanted to test without LiDAR, they would run this simulations without LiDAR input. No reason to disable it when there's actual consequences. That being said, I suppose it's possible that Uber have done what I already said, so much so that they were confident it would work and were willing to deploy it. But it still smells funny to me because I would sincerely hope the LiDAR (and other non-visible light sensor input) would be used as a failsafe. My very limited understanding of autonomous car implementations is that you mix in all your input together to determine your surrounding environment (and all your "what do I do" logic deals with information derived from this input aggregation), so in order to safely test a new model with less input in your car, you'd need at least 2 models (one with all input, one with reduced) running at the same time. It still seems like it'd be viable to me, and something you'd certainly want to do to avoid situations exactly like this. If you've got 2 models running, it seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to have the "all input" model assume control if it's trying to avoid an immediate collision, basically having it perform a similar role to that of a human behind the wheel during "disengagements".
- whoisjuan 9y agoOf course the Lidar wasn't at fault. That's like blaming your laptop for the bugs of your own shitty code.
- rconti 9y agoWell, it COULD be at fault, if the sampling rate was too low to see a human walking across the road, or if it couldn't see the materials of the bike or human, etc etc. But we all know none of these things are true.
- nomel 9y agoNo, that still wouldn’t be the Lidars fault. That would be a fault in safely setting the specification for the Lidar sample rate, and not catching the design flaw in testing.
- cmpolis 9y agoHardware is not faultless. The analogy doesn't stand up - there's a non-trivial chance that a memory module or your hard drive in your laptop will fail over the lifetime of the device. Furthermore, a LIDAR unit is complex and has firmware and lower-level software embedded that may be at fault.
- kuber_harbinger 9y agoYes, I've even seen this first hand where it was, in fact, the laptop as the issue source. Not that I'm taking Uber's side at all, just saying it is a possibility and we should wait for official evidence of the fault before jumping to conclusions.
- tzs 9y agoIf the software is well written, any of those types of failures should raise an alarm to alert the safety driver to take over, and then shut down the self-driving system.
- chrismcb 9y agoIt isn't anything like blaming your laptop. Lidar is a crucial sensor that allows the car to "see." If the lidar couldn't "see" the person, it doesn't matter how good your software is.
- saurabp 9y agoSo if the LIDAR did not fail, it was probably the neural network that takes in LIDAR data and makes the decision to brake. Would love to see NTSB releasing the data for us to analyze.
- jefft255 9y agoJust to be clear, neural networks typically aren't used to work with lidar in self driving cars. NN for point clouds are still at the research stage.
- stevew20 9y agoI was really hoping I wouldn't need to be the first person to point this out! Thanks Jeff
- abakker 9y agoMy understanding is that you don’t do analysis or training inside the control loop at all. Basically, build a model and then it becomes a go/no-go check when you really want to use it.
- adrianmonk 9y agoDoes this mean this is just a research project that Uber doesn't actually use in their cars yet? From https://eng.uber.com/sbnet/ https://eng.uber.com/sbnet/ "By applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and other deep learning techniques, researchers at Uber ATG Toronto are committed to developing technologies that power safer and more reliable transportation solutions." "CNNs are widely used for analyzing visual imagery and data from LiDAR sensors. In autonomous driving, CNNs allow self-driving vehicles to see other cars and pedestrians"
- jefft255 9y agoThere are many projects using deep learning with lidar. Google PointNet, PointNet++, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXHX9kFGXfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXHX9kFGXfg . These are all much newer than 2D CNNs and I don't know if it works well enough to actually be used in SDCs. Also, using CNNs on point clouds comes with all sorts of problems.
- rtfs 9y agothis is quiet interesting. two days ago the main stream media here in germany said that the accident would have happened anyways, regardless of the self-driving technology built into the vehicle. Looking at the video, the quality of the current self-driving technology is really questionable, especially if i recall also the other non-fatal road traffic offences publicized so far.
- cjbprime 9y agoThat claim by the media sounds obviously untrue. And alongside being untrue, it ignores the differing severity of collisions. Even if the car had to use its normal video camera instead of Lidar for some reason, the second or two of applying the brakes that would provide can easily -- and will likely -- turn a fatal collision into a non-fatal collision.
- 908087 9y agoVelodyne clearly have no clue what they're talking about. They should consult with the "futurologists" on reddit who only needed 5 seconds and a video to conclude that "it was too dark out".
- peterwwillis 9y agoI haven't been following this closely, but how was the car able to go over the speed limit? If a speed governor was turned off, or was able to be overriden, isn't it possible that multiple systems in the car were turned off, such as systems that regulate gas and brake?
- teraflop 9y agoFrom what I remember reading, the car was going 40mph in a 45mph zone. EDIT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-driving-uber-pedestrian-killed.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-drivi...
- peterwwillis 9y agoOh, thanks for that correction, I thought I read it had been going 51 in a 45. edit: Errr..... http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/20/news/companies/self-driving-uber-death/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/20/news/companies/self-driving-... "the car was going approximately 40 mph in a 35 mph zone, according to Tempe Police Detective Lily Duran." So... was it 40 in a 45, or 40 in a 35? It would seem this is critical information.
- ScottBurson 9y agoI think I saw a comment here on HN from a Tempe resident that said that it's 45 in the direction the Uber car was going, but 35 the other way, hence the confusion.
- peterwwillis 9y agoThat.... doesn't really make any sense. I've never seen a road where opposite lanes of travel had different speed limits. edit Now it makes sense. I went through Google Street View. Northbound on Mill Ave, from before Curry Road to afterward, is 45mph. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4350531,-111.941492,3a,75y,329.59h,74.82t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sx-K4_17J8MVthFRapvIa2A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4350531,-111.941492,3a,75y,3... Southbound on Mill Ave, and on Center Parkway, there are no southbound speed limit signs posted. But after the Curry Road intersection, there is a 35mph sign. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4371031,-111.9433154,3a,75y,161.59h,87.49t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1saLG4gLz0cEv1phvTRFcIHA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4371031,-111.9433154,3a,75y,... I thought the Uber was north of Curry Road going south, but after comparing the video to the map, it looks like the Uber was south, heading north to the intersection. The road opens up and there are two metal signs. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4362927,-111.9424451,3a,75y,331.55h,87.77t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4fS1O8O3KI3F7Tw5Mip-ww!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4362927,-111.9424451,3a,75y,... So, yes, the speed limit on the road in the direction the Uber was traveling on the stretch of road it was traveling was indeed 45mph. Also, very sadly, at the point of impact, there was actually a sign that said "Do not cross; Use Crosswalk ->". https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4365489,-111.942659,3a,22.9y,250.83h,84.61t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sE4V6_Cyyoq-K3JKD56PPyA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4365489,-111.942659,3a,22.9y... Although not facing the direction the bicyclist was crossing from. I'm willing to bet an accident had happened here before.
- notananthem 9y agoCan I ask a dumb non-engineer question? Backup cameras in areas with basically any road debris/weather get covered with dirt. I'm in the Seattle area now, and I often lick my thumb and wipe off the camera, because its a vision system I rely on so I don't kill people. Could lidar/cameras/etc on the vehicle be obscured by road debris or worse, things being bumped/moved, smudged, or even foul play?
- nikanj 9y agoI think any dirt on a sensor would register as additional objects in the scenery, not missing objects. Humans are great at autocorrecting, but from a straight-up sensor data point of view, no light on these pixels=something is between sensor and light source.
- lisper 9y agoYes, that's possible. But in such a situation the data from the LIDAR looks very different than it does under normal conditions. You can easily tell when a backup camera is covered with dirt by looking at the image. Uber's self-driving software should have been able to detect a LIDAR failure in much the same way.
- hnaccy 9y agoYou would have Lidar wipers[1] and the software should hopefully be able to detect obscured or failing sensor and alert driver or stop. [1] https://i.imgur.com/2QTHjij.gifv https://i.imgur.com/2QTHjij.gifv
- skybrian 9y ago
- haZard_OS 9y agoFrom my perspective, the first question should be, "Given the same circumstances, would a human driver have performed better?". After viewing the video of the incident, I strongly believe that human driver would NOT have done better. Therefore, I believe that any attempt to blame or spread mistrust in these technologies because of this incident is (at best) misguided and (at worst) alarmist.
- iancarroll 9y agoRegardless of whether or not a human driver could have done it, the vehicle had a pretty critical sensor onboard that should have been able to see the pedestrian. It’s important to figure out how this collision managed to happen.
- hcknwscommenter 9y agoYou are being manipulated. Your strong belief is based on a hugely misleading video. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
- InclinedPlane 9y agoNighttime dashcam videos typically do a very poor job of representing what a scene looks like to the human eyes. Here is a phone camera video of the same stretch of road as the accident took place on, at night: https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26 https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=26 From this you can see how good the visibility is. We know that the visibility on this stretch of road was pretty good for nighttime driving. We know that the pedestrian that got hit had crossed an entire (empty) lane of traffic before entering the Uber vehicle's lane. I would say that any competent driver who was paying attention and who was driving a car with working headlights (or perhaps even without) would have spotted the pedestrian well in advance and been able to avoid the collision fairly easily. The fact that the Uber vehicle did not do so despite having an abundance of opportunity and despite having not only visible light data but also lidar and radar is almost certainly a massive failure on its part. Almost certainly this is due to a failure to integrate sensor data properly or to fail to categorize a pedestrian correctly. I have no faith that the local PD will do a good job here, but I do have faith that the NTSB will be exquisitely thorough, and I would bet hard-earned dollars that they are going to tear Uber's self-driving technology up one side and down the other.
- aecs99 9y agoI lean towards what Velodyne is saying in this situation. I have been working with LiDAR systems for over 4 years of which the last 1.5 years have been towards building autonomous driving vehicles. When I saw the videos, I was truly baffled by how a LiDAR can miss that. I worked with different types of LiDARs (from different manufacturers) and there is a very high chance that the LiDAR point cloud contains all the information corresponding to the person and the bicycle to make a decision. What we need to keep in mind is that sensing an object is different from deciding whether or not to take an action (e.g., hitting brakes, raising alarms, swerving, etc.). Most LiDAR/RADAR/Camera manufacturers only provide input data. It's like saying "hey, I see this". It's up to the perception software to decide whether or not to make a decision. In most cars, relatively simpler decisions are made by the car's perception software (e.g., adaptive cruise control, lane change warning, automatic braking, etc.). Self-driving companies override such systems, and rewire the car such that it is their perception software that makes the decision. So the onus is completely on the self-driving company's software. In this case, it is the perception software developed by Uber to be critiqued - not Velodyne, not Volvo, not the camera manufacturer. It looks like the engineers at Velodyne feel confident that they should (and would have) sensed the person, and hence their statement. I wouldn't doubt them much as they have been in the LiDAR game since DARPA days when self driving was considered experimental. From a different angle, Velodyne may not have much to loose by throwing Uber under the bus - especially when compared to how much their reputation is at stake. This is because Velodyne has several big customers (e.g., Waymo, and almost every other self-driving, mapping company that is serious about getting big). NTSB should and will get access to the point clouds. Uber has a choice of releasing the point clouds to the public - but I highly doubt they will.
- blensor 9y agoI don't understand why everyone is focusing so heavily on LIDAR being at fault or not at fault. The car does have a RADAR as well, which would not help detecting the pedestrian but most certainly the bike she was moving along. I don't know the field of view of the radar but that should have caused an emergency brake as well, shouldn't it?
- 9y ago
- FabHK 9y agoAfter the Tesla fatal accident, there was some discussion about the difficulty of stationary obstacles. Apparently, there are so many false positives, that they're quite readily discarded (otherwise the car would stop all the time). See discussion here, "Why Tesla's autopilot can't see a stopped firetruck": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16239010 As the victim was traveling perpendicular to the movement of the vehicle, I wonder whether that had anything to do with it. If so, quite a severe limitation.
- candiodari 9y agoIf you look at how lidar's work this does indeed make no sense. Lidars will see vertical poles that stick up high, like pedestrians. That's exactly what they're good at. For a lidar with even bad resolution to have missed this pedestrian ... it's technically not impossible, but it'd be one-in-a-trillion streak of extremely bad luck. It seems much, much more likely that the car was somehow ignoring the output of the lidar. Lidar's see everything in a specific plane that's originated at their sensor. This situation is exactly what lidars are made for ... Remember the Tesla accident ? A lidar was scanning planes in front of the Tesla and there was a large truck in front of it. A truck hangs low at the front and at the back, and the tesla autopilot saw both of them. Presumably because it was using lidar it decided that the front of the truck was a car, and that the rear of the truck was a car, and then when the truck changed direction it compensated by doing a high speed maneuver directing the car beteen the front and the read wheels of the truck. Needless to say, results were less than optimal (and then came the unforgivable: after the crash the autopilot was still in control, but it did NOT stop until it was mechanically blocked from going on). That's the sort of mistake you'd expect a lidar to make : it misses objects that are very close to the ground, or "far" off the ground. It sees things starting at 50cm high until 1m30 or so (also depends on the distance to the sensor. The closer the sensor, the narrower the range), no more. That's the weakness of lidars. That unfortunately means what they do miss is ... well, let's put it this way : you can't mount it low in the car, because at that height it'll think large pebbles are telephone poles (plus mud will splatter up and block the sensor). So you don't do that. You can also mount it high but that means those detection planes don't get very close to the ground. And that means, what it'll miss is anything that's close to the ground. Dogs. Children. Parking poles. Stairs (or any kind of abyss). That's where you'd expect mistakes. An adult crossing the street ... there's no way.