This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the brakes, if not completely avoid a collision.
I didn't state a bunch of claims, I linked to a NYT published article. If it turns out that the NYT depicted the incorrect lane, then I expect we'll see a correction. But they published this graphic staked on their reputation for accuracy, not on just "rumors".
Moreover, it does not contradict what the police chief said; here is her initial and only interview:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe...
> Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode.
>
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” said Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., the location for the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”*The police chief also said a number of things that have subsequently been changed. In the Chronicle article, she's reported to have said that the Uber was driving 38 in a 35mph zone. The NYT graphic and other stories from today have said it was a 45mph zone.
That's a failure on every level, from prediction to just sheer radar obstacle detection. You don't hit things right in front of you, mid-class vehicles you can buy today already have sensors to emergency brake when the driver won't but an obstruction is ahead.
That's a pretty clear fail.
I wonder what the Uber's field of view is. At what distance should it have detected stuff about 9 meters off track?
But she did likely walk out from landscaping. So perhaps she initially "looked" like waving branches or whatever. And there must be some mechanism to suppress such false positives, or vehicles would brake when it's windy.
And yet the police were so quick to say that camera footage indicates that Uber was likely not at fault. It was so quick that it makes me inclined to think it's pretty obvious. However, after the SF Chronicle published its exclusive interview with the Tempe's chief of police, the Tempe Police PR person had to issue a statement that, "Tempe Police Department does not determine fault in vehicular collisions."
I'm not one to believe in conspiracies or to automatically suspect shadowy influence, so I want to believe that the the camera footage seems to argue that this was an unavoidable accident. But the evidence released so far argues against that, regardless of whether the victim's crossing was illegal or not. And why are the police making a judgment on this so soon in the first place, especially when the decision will be made by county law officials, and ostensibly after referring to Uber's full suite of sensor data?
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/20/uber-fault-pedestrian-fa...
I'm sure a system that warns more for the sake of cautiousness would be rejected by people.
Frustratingly, so many stories make no mention of the lane. This is the only one I've found so far, and it's from the local news-weekly:
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/federal-agencies-investi...
> The Volvo was in the lane nearest the curb, about 100 yards south of Curry Road, and going about 40 mph at the time of the collision. Initial evidence shows the vehicle didn't brake "significantly" before the impact.
My assumption is that the writer thinks "lane nearest the curb" is unambiguous to the average reader, which would mean the right-most lane. Because...why would average reader (who isn't looking at the accident scene right now) assume that the left-most lane on any road is "nearest the curb"?
However, from Street View, we see that there are curbs on both sides of the street -- i.e. the median itself has a curb: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4368426,-111.9428855,3a,75y,...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if the Uber had changed lanes quickly, to avoid hitting the woman, the backup driver would presumably have mentioned it.
How do I know this graphic isn't entirely speculative?
The distances, as depicted, are a little strange. If Uber AV hit the victim at 40mph, you would expect her body to be seen farther away from where it says "Body seen in this area".
It is incontestable that the Uber hit her on its right-front side. Here's a clear picture recently tweeted by NTSB: https://twitter.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/976215176323194880
1. Another car was in the lane left of the fatal car, blocking its view of the pedestrian. 2. The pedestrian fell back after reaching the curb.
But it looks like both the artificial and the human driver were asleep.
Could this be a demonstration of what people talk about with regards to partial autonomy being a detriment to human attention?
Definitely. By the time the human realises something is wrong and has to take control, it's already too late.
Incidentally, this is also why autopilots in planes have been more successful --- when something goes wrong high up in the sky, there's still relatively much time to assess the situation and react. With cars, even if the car suddenly told the driver to take over, the driver would essentially have to already be fully attentive to the situation in order to make a decision in time. It's the difference between seconds to a minute in a plane vs. fractions of a second in a car.
It has a vague location for where the victim's body ended up, yes, but I don't interpret that graphic as purporting to show the actual location of the vehicle or victim at the time of the trash.
> This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. I think the arrow represents the direction of travel, but I would assume they just placed it near the body, and aren't explicitly trying to suggest which lane the car was in. And the notation "somewhere in this area", in my eyes, confirms this.
Further, if they do know which lane it was in, that would be an excellent bit of investigative journalism that no one else has reported, and you'd expect it to be in the story, if not the actual lead. It's not, so...
If people are actually correct about the median thing then I cant imagine how this is not a colossal failure of software. But again it makes way more sense that she walked out from the right side of the road.
Emphasis on ”purports”. The NYT graphic doesn’t indicate the vehicle was in the right lane, nor does it indicate a precise location for Elaine. I don’t think you have bad intentions here, but extrapolating a hypothesis from this graphic seems unfounded.
There isn’t enough information to go on to develop reasonable hypotheses from any angle, unfortunately. The investigation needs to complete and footage needs to be released.
(Pure speculation follows)
I wonder if it possible that the problem is that she was moving too slowly for it, not too quickly?
If for some reason it could not get a good read on the component of her velocity parallel to the lane, it might mistake her for another vehicle moving at similar speed to the Uber, and then see her transverse velocity component as being due to normal drift within the lane. It would read the situation as a normal passing situation, not someone about to enter its lane.
Is it possible the road had other vehicles blocking the view?
> The Uber had a forward-facing video recorder, which showed the woman was walking a bike at about 10 p.m. and moved into traffic from a dark center median. "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” Sylvia Moir, the police chief in Tempe, Arizona, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
I don't remember reading this, where was that reported? (Most of the blurbs I read were pretty scarce on the details...)
“It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”
There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are just as clueless.
Likely, but not necessarily. Depending (hugely!) on what actually happened, it might be that the car should have started slowing down before the woman changed course.
As an extreme example, if you’re driving at 50 mph and come up behind a kid cycling at the side of the road with a foot separation between the extrapolated trajectories of the bike and your car, should it be OK to continue your course at full speed, or should drivers take into account that kids are kids, and may move erratically?
Also (again purely hypothetical), if the car had already had several similar events on that road that resulted in near misses, should it have slowed down before it even entered the street, knowing the road segment to be particularly dangerous?
I think human drivers, even though they are horrible at attending to the road for extended periods, get into accidents relatively rarely because they know when they really need to pay attention.
Finally, I do not rule out that that “driver behind the wheel” reacted slower than would have happened if (s)he was actually driving the car.
Disclaimer: I’m a layman, and haven’t seen the video ⇒ Let’s wait and see what the NTSB will say about this.
As an aside, that statistic is why I never speed in pedestrian zones.
https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
From /r/roadcam yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI
Human driver avoided hitting the pedestrian. There are lots of videos of human drivers successfully not hitting people who "suddenly" pop out "at the last minute". Self-driving cars should be able to match that. If they can't, they don't belong on public roads yet.
It should not have no awareness it's in an impossible situation (because that implies it will have no awareness is similar, possible, situations)
The safety humans here might as well be hood ornaments.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/uber-...
Maybe you can't prevent an accident, but you can at least reduce momentum and demonstrate that your system was working correctly.
In my driving lessons I got told to swerve for humans. Pedestrians and cyclists are the least protected participants in traffic. If you swerve and hit another car, the resulting crash will cause a lot of damage, but injuries to humans will likely be much less severe, if they even happen.
Animals, especially small ones are a different matter. Using the same argument, it is better to risk hitting the animal than risking sverving into other traffic.
Of course, this all presumes you can quickly analyze the situation and conclude that it is safe to swerve (which, in theory, the computer can do far faster than a human can).
Please remove the software mindset when looking into this.
Such as a kid attempting to chase down a ball that is rolling towards the road (object vector path collision), specially with the ball and or kid suddenly hidden from view because of a parked car (real environment vs visual environment). Or a group playing basketball in a driveway. Both where slowing down is always the safer bet.
Someone is dead and there may well be one or more trials as a result. Facts will take a s long as they take to surface.
Another idea would be to just throw them right in front of an autonomous vehicle at full speed. Let's test those brakes!
(sorry, but the original idea is just so ridiculous that I am incapable of responding in a non-sarcastic way to this...)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/25/16362296/g...
Lanes are marked, usually. So why not embed something like an UV/IR-only color pigment in the lanes? Invisible so it doesn't affect human drivers but can easily be picked up by cameras.
SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go through rather than the over they'd be subjected to by a sedan. Motorcycle accident stats bear this out - the overall accident rate has gone down as people have started riding safer, but the fatality rate has gone up as SUVs have taken over market share.
The roads this is a bit more complicated, but basically roads need to either be slow enough to safely share space (25mph or below), separated out so that only cars can use it (freeways), or kill an alarming number of pedestrians and bicyclists. Four lanes and a 35 MPH speed limit with infrequent crossings is pretty much going to have a body count.
I'm not trying to excuse Uber here, just trying to maybe convince urban planners to stop building things that convince people to try to cross four lanes of traffic going 35 MPH.
Then maybe we'll have corporate pressure aligned with social pressure to change the laws and move traffic patterns beyond what random luck has 'evolved' to safe and sensible defaults.
The proliferation of dashcams makes your dream far more likely.
This is because a person's certain of gravity is above where a sedan's front would hit them.
The criterion (really the only criterion) for whether or not automatic vehicles "should be on the road" is whether or not they are safer than the alternative. And that certainly doesn't include "being as good a driver as jdavis703 was in this particular anecdote".
Being engaged in a particular role relative to a situation can (I believe) alter one's capacity to perceive and respond to it.
This isn't to say that for definite the instructor would have had the insight described in the parent post, but it is to say that you can't rule this out just based on the information that as a passenger they didn't have the insight.
My outlook on the transition period is not very optimistic. Humans are good at anticipating crazy behavior. Fatalities increasing (before they eventually decrease) is currently just as likely as the promised miracle in my mind - we don't have enough data to sway my mind either direction just yet.
I agree there's still a lot of work to be done, but my point is that the problem is the driving system itself, and a lot of people dies because of it. AI can't directly change that, but if it can still do better than humans (in a few years), then it's worth it.
I mean, most parents will—at some point—trust their teenage children to pick up their younger siblings. And teenagers are decidedly below-average drivers.
On average...
Unless they're picking up their kids from lake wobegong elementary or something...
But it's made harder if you're speeding.
The nearest sign on the road it was on, for the direction it was traveling according to most reports, that it would have passed says that the speed limit is 45 mph [1]. That image is from July 2017.
For the other direction it is 35 mph [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4350531,-111.941492,3a,75y,3...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4371031,-111.9433154,3a,75y,...
(disclaimer: I don't want to be defending Uber, I just don't see the need for the red herring)
Unlike earlier articles, this seems to imply that the SDV was not speeding.
If they are mostly unenforced, how does the system work? Does everyone implicitly add 20% to the posted limit, or do they just go whatever speed feels right to them given the road and the conditions?
(In my part of Australia, speeding is fairly common, but not speed limits are not a joke. You can expect most people to stick within ~5km/h of the limit, and if you choose not to then there's a real chance you'll get done by a hidden camera. The idea of everyone ignoring the limits sounds terrible: of course they are a bit arbitrary, but that's unavoidable for any unambiguous law, and the alternatives of arbitrary enforcement or no enforcement seem much worse.)
ooo, there's video of the turkey wheelchair broom chase: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2017/mar/16/goo...
That's not entirely true. A Tesla, for instance, won't stop if it detects a stationary object on the highway, assuming it's a false positives of the algorithm.
I want safe self-driving cars, when they are safe. But Uber's clearly-established cavalier attitude toward human beings apparently can't be trusted with self-driving cars. I'm disappointed that politicians thought they could.
> “It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”
We can accept that by the time the Uber AV "saw" the victim, it was too late to brake. But that doesn't mean we can't ask questions about what the AI actually saw and classified. And even if it was a "sudden" event for humans, was it "sudden" relative to computer reaction time? How fast did the victim move into the road that the Uber AV couldn't even brake?
This led to one more question. Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black box like that of aeroplane?
All of the logs are encrypted (with different keys), and only when an issue occurs, the company who owns the data gives the key for that particular car at that particular hour for decryption. Basically a data-escrow.
This way we know the logs are not being tampered with, and we keep the data hidden from the third party.
Of course, maybe thats what you're arguing for. But either way, I think it's a bad idea.
I believe most modern cars already have this.
>> Uber Victim Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Car
First line of the first paragraph in the article (my underlining):
>> Police say a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman on Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly
And the title on this thread:
>> Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber
Both titles are very misleading. The Bloomberg title because it doesn't clarify it's repeating a police statement, the HN title because it makes it look like the relevant video is in the article, or at least that someone from Bloomberg has seen it, neither of which is the case.
Given that this was published a day after the SF Chronicle piece, I think there's a good chance the article has deeper sourcing or corroboration, and that the headline is deliberate.
I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become Uber drivers. That is, these types of crimes are relevant to working as an Uber driver—more than things like tax fraud or failure to pay child support.
In a civilized society people should be able to get jobs when they get out of prison. It's called "time served" for a reason. Everything other is just paving the path to recidivism - when people can't make a living because no one will hire ex-cons, they don't have any other way of literally staying alive than living as hobos or breaking the law.
The attitude in your comment is imho perfectly representing why the US has such problems with career criminals.
The only class of people where even after time served there should be safeguards are when there's a psychological reason that actually makes people dangerous, like pedophilia.
Apparently Lyft shares the attitude you describe, but Uber does not.
https://www.thezebra.com/insurance-news/5215/criminal-backgr...
Note that I was merely showing surprise that this was allowed, not passing judgment. I had heard of cases (see above link) where people were denied because of prior misdemeanor convictions, which is why I was surprised.
Colorado fined them $8.9M last year for violating background check laws.
https://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/20/uber-colorado-fine/
"The PUC said the drivers should have been disqualified. They had issues ranging from felony convictions to driving under the influence and reckless driving. In some cases, drivers were working with revoked, suspended or canceled licenses, the state said. A similar investigation of smaller competitor Lyft found no violations."
>The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa County Superior Court records.
He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind of relevance would have this?
Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was not under the effect of alcohol or drugs.
Having committed armed robbery has seemingly no connection (I mean it isn't like he was condemned for having killed someone while driving a car or something like that), and even if that was the case some State must have issued (or renewed) his driving license, meaning that he was legally authorized to drive the car.
I know, and understand how this (right or wrong as it might be[1]) could be of use for the police or for the judiciary system, what I am highlighting is just how gratuitious it is on a piece of news.
[1] this is a (lesser known) writing by G.K Chesterton: "The perpetuation of punishment" (page 504 of "On Lying in Bed and Other Essays") circa 1907 https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504
It's another question whether it's fair to assume that. I don't think it is, though personally I think it's reasonable to take the information into account as long as you restrain yourself from jumping to any conclusions.
Sure, the whole point being that it is meaningless and IMHO disturbing to imply that.
Not that I am familiar with bank robbers, and of course have no idea on the specific crime for which the driver was earlier condemned, but I believe that bank robbers need to be actually rather punctual, have planning capabilities and usually be exceptionally good drivers, at least this is what Hollywood usually shows us.
>I don't think it is, though personally I think it's reasonable to take the information into account as long as you restrain yourself from jumping to any conclusions.
I wonder how you take that into account without making any conclusion or however influence your opinion, this kind of info is IMHO either relevant or not (gratuitious).
It is a car accident, where the automatic means failed and the driver supposed to take commands in case of failure of the automated system didn't or couldn't, the criminal past of the guy has no relevance, it is more likely that the whole thing happened too fast, or that he was distracted, and unless and until it is established that the accident was caused voluntarily or by "voluntary inaction".
What if the driver was differently "marked" by society?
Like - say - known to belong to the Communist Party or to the Neo Nazi's?
Or if he was mentioned as being (choose one) gay, transgender, black, latino, illegally immigrated?
What kind of added info is that in the context of a car accident?
Ridiculous and this company after all it's done is still around and now it's killing people!
road usage is shared among cars, motorcycles and scooters, trucks, pedestrians, bicycles, mobility scooters, and other things.
The driving of an autonomous vehicle is an emergent event of large numbers of complicated and in some cases opaque subsystems. Changing the interactions of these subsystems in a narrow way to preclude this particular kind of event is not necessarily something they'll be able to figure out a way to do without causing more problems.
Which is how it similar to airplane crashes, as it's a heavily automated and centralized system (ie, humans are far less a factor in the event than cars, which can't be optimized nearly as easily).
While cars have had improvements in safety via vehicle design, and popular culture, road signs, traffic laws, etc can influence human behaviour to drive differently, I don't think there has ever been a better time to reduce these events if not everytime, then at least far less often than the current standard.
Which is what is so often missing in these conversations: a rational baseline and a clear reliable process that we will now be in a better position going forward for this not to happen again (assuming the right processes are in place, which they may very well not be in this case).
I am curious as to why the driver didn't react. I wonder if the system keeps track of the driver as well as I would imagine it has to be mind numbing to sit behind a wheel for hours on end and not do anything... So in this situation, how attentive and alert was really the driver who is supposed to be the fail safe mechanism.
That being said, I'm totally open to this being the fault of either Uber or the woman, but there are too many questions in my head that suggest it was the fault of the woman.
Are we saying that at this point we're going to let the initial police statement win because they are "experts" at driving. Are they also expects at the software in SDVs? I think at this point we shouldn't assume either story - but at the same time we can't let either Uber, the police, governments cover this story up for the sake of money and politics.
I think there are some pretty massive implications that should come from this - even if a human driver may have very well killed this person too (which I don't personally believe) don't we need to take a minute and ask a few questions about why the vehicle reportedly didn't even slow down after the hit? Why the dent is on the RIGHT hand side of the car (.2 seconds seems false)? Would a human that was driving slowed a lot earlier - was the pedestrian/biker expecting the car to slow because she clearly had a hand signal up - seeing a fake driver in the car?
There are too many questions and I hope that this specific story is treated with the utmost careful consideration. I for one can't seem to let it go in my head.
Someone died and it very well could have been because of our collective ego that we can accomplish this (SDVs) at this point in our history. We'll never hear from this woman again.
Investigations take time. Just like with airplane crashes, it's probably best to ignore everything about this incident until we see the results of the investigation.
It seems to me that this is exposing a few gaps in how we think about driverless cars currently:
- A framework for how cars should be making "moral" decisions (the trolley problem [0])
- A defined process for post car crash investigations - akin to the process in air crashes
[0] https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-phi...
Doesn't this happen every time a Tesla is involved, too? I think this might be so high-profile because it's the first automated vehicle incident (that I'm aware of) that involves a pedestrian.
I know that one of the Tesla incidents resulted in the driver's death, but that was clearly user error. IIRC Tesla was very quick to release the data on the incident as well, so it was pretty clear versus this situation, which is mostly people guessing.
And similarly are self driving cars listening? Will they detect emergency vehicles by the sirens, or even listen to other cars honking at them?
Sensor data is different. If Uber wants to help the story that self-driving cars are safer, then they should release sensor data to help substantiate any claims they may make in the future about what the car did and did not do.
The kinetic energy mismatch is the real problem, and at the very least, these companies should be testing at only 20-25mph, with _much_ lighter vehicles.
We'll have to wait for the NTSB to check in, but I'd be surprised if Uber isn't shut down(at least in Tempe) for a good long while.
1. She was walking from left to right.
2. The dent was on the right side of the car
She probably knew she was going to be hit if she sped up like that, AND... it was probably more than .2 seconds of total visibility to the SDV.
flagged.
I'd be interested in any studies about this: how much more often do pedestrian-at-fault collisions occur in silent electric mode?
In the short term it sounds like poor Vasquez is boned as the driver considering the media is profiling his previous conviction. There's no profiling a "driverless car" though, how inherently risky it can be.
I'm all for the future and driverless cars I've just always thought this was an idiotic idea that will turn people into Idiocracy characters.
This woman was killed by a very expensive robotic car with a human being that could have prevented it, but wasn't permitted to, because the future of driverless cars is being tested.
What's next their going to kill a bunch of kids trying to help their blind friend out of the street? I mean the headlines this company writes!
https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-pe...