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I 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 detectin

I 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?

mturmon 9y ago
From a recent publication in an IEEE conference related to intelligent vehicles: "Radar is robust against bad weather, rain and fog; it can measure speed and distance of an object, but it does not provide enough data points to detect obstacle boundaries, and experimental results show that radar is not reliable to detect small obstacles like pedestrians." This would be because the wavelength of lidar is in the micron range while that of vehicle-detection radar is in the mm-cm range. You won't be able to reliably get radar reflections off of mm/cm-scale objects or object elements, or accurately (<1cm) localize object boundaries. Good navigation would require tighter localization. Radars are really good, though, for detection of objects, including identifying moving objects, close up -- canonical examples being walls and other vehicles. Radar sensors are rather cheap (having been in mass production for a long time) so it's common to have one on every bumper or corner.
- Qworg 9y ago
  To be pithy - humans are big absorptive sacks of water, radar sees us poorly.
- blensor 9y ago
  If it were "only" a human then the radar would have a hard time seeing the person. But the bicycle is a substantial chunk of metal which should give much stronger echo. And a 10 kg. metal object placed in the path of an autonomous car should cause all kinds of emergency measures to engage. Many high end cards have auto braking systems based on radar (and additional sensors). Mercedes even has a similar scenario on their product page [1] Volvo does so too, as far as I could find. So not only did they not detect the obstacle with two different sensor technologies they may have deactivated the already existing safety features in that car as well. [1] https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/on-the-radar-screen-recognising-risks-automatically/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/on...
TillE 9y ago
> an emergency break I think half the people commenting on this incident have misspelled "brake". It's odd, because that's not something I've observed as a common error before.
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
  Happens in every single thread involving cars and braking. Every one!
- blensor 9y ago
  thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it, and have absolutely no idea how I made the mistake in the first place.

mturmon 9y ago

From a recent publication in an IEEE conference related to intelligent vehicles: "Radar is robust against bad weather, rain and fog; it can measure speed and distance of an object, but it does not provide enough data points to detect obstacle boundaries, and experimental results show that radar is not reliable to detect small obstacles like pedestrians." This would be because the wavelength of lidar is in the micron range while that of vehicle-detection radar is in the mm-cm range. You won't be able to reliably get radar reflections off of mm/cm-scale objects or object elements, or accurately (<1cm) localize object boundaries. Good navigation would require tighter localization. Radars are really good, though, for detection of objects, including identifying moving objects, close up -- canonical examples being walls and other vehicles. Radar sensors are rather cheap (having been in mass production for a long time) so it's common to have one on every bumper or corner.

Qworg 9y ago
To be pithy - humans are big absorptive sacks of water, radar sees us poorly.
blensor 9y ago
If it were "only" a human then the radar would have a hard time seeing the person. But the bicycle is a substantial chunk of metal which should give much stronger echo. And a 10 kg. metal object placed in the path of an autonomous car should cause all kinds of emergency measures to engage. Many high end cards have auto braking systems based on radar (and additional sensors). Mercedes even has a similar scenario on their product page [1] Volvo does so too, as far as I could find. So not only did they not detect the obstacle with two different sensor technologies they may have deactivated the already existing safety features in that car as well. [1] https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/on-the-radar-screen-recognising-risks-automatically/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/on...

TillE 9y ago

> an emergency break I think half the people commenting on this incident have misspelled "brake". It's odd, because that's not something I've observed as a common error before.

HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
Happens in every single thread involving cars and braking. Every one!
blensor 9y ago
thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it, and have absolutely no idea how I made the mistake in the first place.