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Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality
- skepticmoron 9y agoAward them a multi trillion dollar contract and replace all cars with their technology within the next year.
- reificator 9y agoLook. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human drivers. But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car also have run into a school shooting unarmed? You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you can say is that you had a similar situation under controlled circumstances and reacted appropriately. This is publicly patting yourself on the back for a competitor killing someone. To say it's in bad taste is an understatement.
- icebraining 9y agoOne fear is that Uber's mistakes will endanger the whole self-driving industry, by making people afraid. I'd say these companies are trying to separate themselves to avoid that.
- reificator 9y agoThat doesn't make it the right time to publicly announce "we wouldn't have killed someone here, look how great we are".
- wjnc 9y agoNear my hometown a Tesla crashed and the crash killed the driver recently. Guess who gave a statement within days blaming the driver for speeding? For a European that was quite the novelty (and probably illegal, although AFAIK deceased lack privacy protection since not a natural person).
- ggg9990 9y agoMusk definitely goes too far with his response to any criticism of Tesla. It makes him sound a little like Trump — “I’m so amazing”
- thrownaway954 9y agoi know it will sound insensitive, but one person dying is not that big of a deal... heck 1000 people dying is only 10% of the amount of people that die each year for drunk driving[1] and you don't see liquor being pulled off the shelves. however i do see how people (including me) are sheep and can be manipulated into believing anything. taxis and trucker unions can use this an opportunity to condemn self driving vehicles. [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving
- wpietri 9y agoThat doesn't just sound insensitive. Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. People do die from drunk driving, and those drivers go to jail because they fucked up in a huge way. That's no reason to give Uber a dead-person mulligan. Indeed, it's a reason that some Uber exec should perhaps be wearing an orange jumpsuit over this. I'm all for self-driving cars, as done right deaths will go down. But that means we shouldn't introduce them until they are well-made enough that deaths actually go down.
- Johnny555 9y agoWatching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds. [1] http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/index.html http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/index.html
- jaclaz 9y ago>It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds. Yes, but it is difficult to state that it would have been "likely" fatal, and even sevral fractures are IMHO a big improvement over death, the whole point is not about the "average" braking time (BTW that same study gives 1.64 seconds average for "steering away" which is probably what most human drivers would have done in a similar situation, instead of braking or instead of only braking), it is the peaks that count. I mean, it is about the (rightful) expectation that an automated system is safer (faster, more reactive) than the best you can find (not the average, the best) "in nature" among a random set of drivers, just like the state codes (correctly) take the worse case in the sample or however incereases the recommendation to three seconds. If you play the game suggested on the same site you gave a link to and deliberately count up to three before clicking, you get: Reaction time: 2916.00ms Reaction speed age: 89 years old Playing fairly, you are likely to get values in the range 300-500 ms. Here is another paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Reaction_Times_and_Driver_Behavior_Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Rea... that puts it back to around 1-1.5 seconds or however maximum at 1.8 seconds in the very worst cases.
- reaperducer 9y agoI imagine we'll see self-driving car horror movies soon. We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.
- reificator 9y agoJust last year that was an arc in Ash vs Evil Dead. Granted it was self-driving thanks to a book inked in blood and bound with human flesh, but that's beside the point...
- ggg9990 9y agoDamn, I’m already imagining them like the climate change movies where a 800-foot tsunami hits Manhattan. 200 million self driving cars have become hostile and are trying to kill the humans. The problem is that they have commandeered a group of friendly-looking Japanese humanoid robots to pump gas for them. One rogue humanoid robot is the one who will save humanity along with help from a 6-year-old girl with pigtails and a stuffed rabbit named Hopsy.
- jsight 9y agoWho leaked our script? Ugh...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rasz 9y agosoon? havent you been watching new Xfiles?
- wjnc 9y agoI agree. But suppose the difference mentioned (1 sec) is true. That's such a large difference that what they call for (formal outside verification) sounds pretty reasonable. This debate will always be hard since it will involve deaths, with AI and video involved.
- reificator 9y agoYou're right. Developing video games has taught me that a second is a long time. But we still don't even know that Uber didn't detect them that early. The CV system or other sensors could have picked out the pedestrian but something else went wrong instead. I tend to think that if Uber did detect the pedestrian, they would have said something by now. But perhaps they prefer the optics of not having seen her to the optics of seeing her but not braking at all. We simply don't know. Imagine that press conference. > Uber: "After examining the black box on the car we have determined that the car detected the pedestrian but failed to brake." > Reporter: "Was this because the pedestrian was a woman?" > Reporter: "Did the car do this to protect the life of the Uber employee inside?" > Reporter: "Was her credit score too low?"
- 2474 9y agoThis reminds me of a survey I had taken. I can't remember the survey publisher but it was related to self-driving vehicles. You were presented two pictures (e.g. a picture of school kids crossing a crosswalk and the other a picture of an adult male and female walking their dog across a crosswalk). Presumably you had to choose; would you swerve to hit the adults and dog or would you stay course and hit the kids. I know there is no moral compass for a computer system to determine what it should do in the scenario but I laughed at the quiz because I couldn't believe this is the kind of data that will feed machine-learning algorithms. It just feels bad.
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoGetting data on an ethical dilemma. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
- CupOfJava 9y agoWhy is it a 'similar situation'? They fed the same footage that the Uber system had access to.
- reificator 9y agoIn the lab, yes. Presumably in real time. Presumably without configuring things differently than normal, except that they used a pre-recorded feed. Presumably without multiple attempts. Presumably without...
- InTheArena 9y agoMobile-eye has a history of throwing partners and competitors under the bus (see Tesla). It's not just about bad events, it's part of their corporate DNA.
- zer00eyz 9y agoExcept their technology was ON the car that was involved... they are part of the story - Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.
- pdpi 9y agoThe whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you, but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.
- nmeofthestate 9y agoThey certainly averted disaster, didn't they.
- knuththetruth 9y agoAll kinds of technology that’s less half-baked than Uber’s self-driving cars has redundant, decoupled safety systems. Might be better for Uber’s data collection to turn this off, but you really can’t argue it was safer. I don’t think we should be killing people because that works better for their business needs.
- c22 9y agoMobileye isn't a "self-driving" system, it's a collision prevention/mitigation system, like airbags or ABS. Leaving it on while a human controls the car hasn't been seen as a disaster.
- bladers 9y agofirst of all Mobileye does have a self driving system (their EyeQ4 chips is for Level 3-4 self driving). However Amon was referring to their EyeQ3 chip from 2014 which is installed in 24 million cars and have billions of miles
- dogma1138 9y agoTesla’s autopilot runs on MobilEye only AP 2 runs on NVIDIA.
- zelon88 9y agoIt also seems to me that this experienced company is trying to setup road blocks to stifle competition and using this fatality as cannon fodder to support his arguments. How about we let whoever wants to research autonomous vehicles have at it, and we just throw the "Supervising driver" who failed in jail like he should be? I mean the guy had one fucking job: hit the brake pedal if you're going to crash into something. He failed. The car is an experiment. The driver is the only safety mechanism in that car that matters, and as usual with humans it screwed up.
- Johnny555 9y agoMissing from the article is the nature of the link to Mobileeye -- the Volvo cars Uber is using come with collision avoidance built-in, Uber disabled it. The Volvo collision avoidance uses technology from Aptiv, which in turn uses technology from MobilEye. So this isn't just a random company saying "we could do better", this is the company with equipment already on the car (though disconnected) defending their reputation.
- jsight 9y agoI believe that Mobileye has said the opposite in cases where their current technology would not have been able to respond as well. And their technology was on the vehicle being involved in the crash, but not being used. In the past, Mobileye has made it a point to be very specific about what their technology is and is not currently capable of. I don't see a problem with that.
- adamnemecek 9y agoAll these people and companies trying to profit from this accident is really poor taste.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThis is not profiting, this is self preservation.
- admax88q 9y agoIf the purpose of a company is profit, is there really a distinction?
- toomuchtodo 9y agoDefinitely. One PR approach would be to capitalize off of this tragedy for sales. That doesn’t appear to be the approach they’re taking though (“Please don’t regulate us into oblivion” or “Self driving can be done safely, don’t judge the industry by the failures of one participant”).
- dbsvsv 9y agoThis reminds me, does anybody know what's up with Geohotz's comma.ai?
- rrdharan 9y agoThe project was canceled and geohotz posted the code on GitHub: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2016/10/28/commaai_car_kit_cancelled/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2016/10/28/commaai_car_kit... https://github.com/commaai https://github.com/commaai
- bsaul 9y agoi get the feeling of some people here calling for bad taste, but mobileye ceo has been a long time proponent of playing it safe, underpromise, warning against the theoretical limits of modern technics, and has claimed for a very long time that fully autonomous driving wasn't doable in a near future ( proof of that in the numerous videos you can find on youtube). i guess it's only fair for him to speak up one more time now that his fears has materialized.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gvb 9y agoSpeaking up is understandable: Mobileye supplies its technology to Aptiv who supplies the system to Volvo for the XC90. The reports are that their system was disabled by Uber at the time of the accident. It is understandable that Mobileye does not want to share the blame in this case. Ref: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa... “We don’t want people to be confused or think it was a failure of the technology that we supply for Volvo, because that’s not the case,” Zach Peterson, a spokesman for Aptiv Plc, said by phone. The Volvo XC90’s standard advanced driver-assistance system “has nothing to do” with the Uber test vehicle’s autonomous driving system, he said. [...] Intel Corp.’s Mobileye, which makes chips and sensors used in collision-avoidance systems and is a supplier to Aptiv.
- gok 9y agoWe really won’t know what happened until the NTSB report comes out, but I’m not convinced this was an object detection failure. It seems really possible to me that the sensors detected the bike-walking person as a bicyclist, and a bicyclist in a different lane is not a reason to slam on the brakes. They might have just forgotten to add a rule that a bicyclist in a parallel lane is a reason to brake if it’s perpendicular to you.
- CydeWeys 9y agoAny sane self-driving system needs to be a lot smarter than this. It needs to do motion tracking and estimation of future position. Otherwise it's going to run into lots of cyclists and pedestrians, and continue to fail for objects it can't identify (imagine a cyclist carrying something big and bulky). The software needs to be smart enough to not hit anything, and in order to do so it needs to extrapolate future positions of objects based on their current velocity.
- gok 9y agoObviously it needs to be smarter. As for motion tracking, it might have gotten confused as the victim stopped moving. But I’m just not sure that the issue was the sensors or object detection.
- CydeWeys 9y agoThe victim stopped moving ... right in the path of the car, which never braked. It needs to be a lot smarter if it doesn't even understand that it should break when there's a large unidentified object, the size of a person plus something else, right in the lane it's traveling in. We won't know yet exactly what happened, though hopefully the NTSB is getting full access to all sensor data from the car. It could be a huge combination failure of multiple different things. It sounds like it's nowhere safe enough to be driving autonomously on public roads though.
- reaperducer 9y agoYou don't slow down and proceed with caution when overtaking a bicyclist in an adjacent lane?
- techtofixpeople 9y agoGood for these people. Uber has lidar+radar that should have seen this and did not make an effort to publicly respond to the police video that was released. Everyone who works on these problems knows camera exposure is very tricky... And in this case deceptive.
- avip 9y agoWith all respect to Sha'ashua, this is empty PR. mobileye is a decision support system for human drivers, they can't make any claim regarding this accident.
- aclimatt 9y agoWas Mobileye actually part of the implementation of Uber's self-driving technology and was somehow disabled or not used properly? Or is this just a piece of not-so-submarine PR? If the latter, I don't understand the point of this article.
- Mononokay 9y agoUber disabled Mobileye's detection system in the car, from what I can understand.
- linsomniac 9y agoOk, Mobileye would have seen the pedestrian 1 second before impact. That's not important though... The important thing is would it have saved her life? Would it have taken action and if so when and how? It's not clear that Uber's platform didn't see the pedestrian. In fact, I find it unlikely that it didn't see her, between radar and the bike, lidar, and optical (and sonar). I think the situation here is that there were many failures and decisions that led to this death. Some of it is Uber being too cowboy, but there are a lot of other factors too.
- ars 9y ago> The important thing is would it have saved her life? It probably would have. Slamming on the brake for 1 second would have reduced the car's speed enough to change things from fatal to seriously injured. According to: http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/Physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Kinematics/BrakingDistData.html http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/Physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Kin... In one second you can shed 20 miles/hour of speed. That would take the car from 38mph to 18mph. (Those numbers are overly precise, but gives you an idea of the reduction that can be accomplished.)
- linsomniac 9y agoThe car could have also swerved and missed her entirely. IF it decided to take action. That is the point I'm trying to make. Saying your product would have seen the pedestrian is very different from saying it would have seen her and known to immediately take action and the action it would have taken would have changed the outcome.
- russdill 9y agoNot only that, she was crossing from left to right and was hit by the edge of the right side of the car. She could have been missed entirely.
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoAt 45mph the car is traveling at 66 feet per second, so 1 second before impact means it was spotted at approx. distance of 66 feet. The volvo XC90 breaking distance at 62mph is 112 feet. Dividing by the square of the speeds gives us a 45mph stopping distance ~62 feet. So not only would it have saved her life, it could possibly have prevented the car even touching her. (The XC90 has excellent breaking, btw, better than a range rover sport or an audi Q9).
- linsomniac 9y agoI'm struggling with the question: Who's fault is this? The pedestrian for walking across the street, wearing dark colors, being oblivious to traffic? The human in the drivers seat for not paying attention? Uber kind of gets the laundry list: For reducing the number of "safety drivers" from 2 to 1, for not using eye tracking to ensure the safety driver was paying attention, for faulty software or hardware that didn't detect the pedestrian, or for software that after getting the sensor input made a decision to not adjust speed or change lanes, for having some of the worst "intervention" numbers in the industry yet plowing ahead with removing a safety driver from the car... Who gets the blame? I'm mostly a "get rid of idiotic safety tags and let natural selection sort it out" sort of person, but on the other hand I feel that piloting a multi-ton killing machine needs to be treated as a huge responsibility.
- 2474 9y agoI wondered the same thing on the following thread, posted about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477295 I believe some manufacturers will take entire responsibility while in some cases it's the person that "starts" the self-driving vehicle. Legislation seems to be on a state-by-state basis at the moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability
- omgPhysics 9y agoGood for these people. If Uber really had lidar+radar [1] and disabled Volvo safety features [2] (such as radar) there is no excuse for this. Uber should have clarified the video released may not be representative of the information they have. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/heres-how-ubers-self-driving-cars-are-supposed-to-detect-pedestrians/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/heres-how-ubers-self-drivi... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...
- pramodzion 9y agoUsing Tensorflow : https://twitter.com/pramodxyle/status/978498938243227648?s=21 https://twitter.com/pramodxyle/status/978498938243227648?s=2...