3 ms·

We 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 t

by gok 9y ago

We 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 ago
Any 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 ago
  Obviously 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 ago
    The 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 ago
You don't slow down and proceed with caution when overtaking a bicyclist in an adjacent lane?
- gok 9y ago
  When they have a whole lane? No. As a cyclist I rarely even see drivers slow down when they’re going 55 and I’m just on the shoulder.

by gok 9y ago

CydeWeys 9y ago

Any 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 ago
Obviously 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 ago
  The 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 ago

You don't slow down and proceed with caution when overtaking a bicyclist in an adjacent lane?

gok 9y ago
When they have a whole lane? No. As a cyclist I rarely even see drivers slow down when they’re going 55 and I’m just on the shoulder.