Police chief said Uber victim “came from the shadows” – don’t believe it

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-victim-came-from-the-shadows-dont-believe-it/

by drabiega • 8 years ago

220 204 8 years ago

Everyone who saw the video has said it's the fault of camera for seeming so dark (since even the street lights have almost no effect anywhere), and regardless of that AVs work with lidar and such. Where is the telemetry and analysis? If it didn't see the pedestrian, then why?

vitalysh• 8 years ago

Exactly, especially considering that this is car by Volvo, manufacturer that quite often demoes it's new features in the are of detecting pedestrians or animals on the the road.

dullgiulio• 8 years ago

The self driving technology is totally Uber, Volvo only has a partnership for cars without any self-driving gadgetry.

ebikelaw3• 8 years ago

Volvo's "city safety" features only work below 30 MPH.

mtgx3• 8 years ago

And it begs the question: did Uber alter the video?

Will it alter the telemetry, too?

If the Tempe police doesn't get forensics experts on this, they're doing their job wrong. Uber is already known as a company that tends to hide and destroy this sort of evidence.

dekhn2• 8 years ago

It would be really hard to believe that Uber would do this. There is only downside, the probability of being caught is high (given they have to hand over a ton of data streams to the NTSB).

dktoao• 8 years ago

Why is this being down-voted? This was the first thought I had. Their history as a company does suggest that they would do exactly this and try to get away with it.

lvoudour• 8 years ago

The lidar should have enough time to detect the pedestrian (who is crossing the road at a leisurely pace) and reduce speed, yet the car doesn't seem to slow down at all. The whole "dark road" narrative doesn't hold a candle, something is seriously wrong with the sensors and/or algorithm.

masklinn7• 8 years ago

The lidar should have enough time to detect the pedestrian (who is crossing the road at a leisurely pace)

And had already crossed an entire lane, they were struck on the right-hand lane of a two-lanes street.

KaiserPro3• 8 years ago

I think the chances of that data being released without a court order is fairly low. Ideally both the raw data, plus the product (actions based on the raw input, not the model/program) should be released, so that it can be included in everyone's dataset.

However, being that the sensors used are supposedly secret and innovative, along with the programs/models, I don't see the motivation for any AV company for releasing the data

ptaipale3• 8 years ago

Isn't NTSB usually releasing this kind of material after investigation? I do think it is reasonable that they do not release it before. The idea of NTSB looking at things is to analyse and find what to improve, not really to assign guilt (which appears to be the primary motivation just now).

masklinn7• 8 years ago

Everyone who saw the video has said it's the fault of camera for seeming so dark

Not by a long shot. The /r/video thread has a comment with 20k upvotes purporting to demonstrate that the hit was inevitable "doing some basic math": https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/86756p/police_relea...

The first two responses (sorted by "best") respectively blame the safety driver and provide their own anecdote of hitting something at night, you need response #3 (500 comments below if you don't fold subthreads) to see LIDAR mentioned and #4 and #5 to note that the dashcam footage is not representative of real visibility.

mcguire2• 8 years ago

"When the pedestrians shoes first become visible in the video there is approximately 59' between the car and the pedestrian, in 1 second the car will have already covered 52.5' of that gap leaving 6.5' left to stop the car.

"In order for a human driver, or the driver in this car to have avoided this collision by merely hitting the brakes and traveling in a straight line, "as is the reaction when startled by something on the road" there would have needed to be at least another 127.5' of distance between the car and the pedestrian."

Wow, that comment is...bad.

(As an aside, the stopping distance of a car, including reaction time, traveling at 35MPH is about 100 feet.)

marchenko• 8 years ago

I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but should we expect the Tempe AZ City administration to be a neutral source of information in this case? Might they be biased by their decision to host this experiment in their jurisdiction (in the sense of anticipating criticism)?

kartan• 8 years ago

“Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads. While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses. In 2015, I signed an executive order supporting the testing and operation of self-driving cars in Arizona with an emphasis on innovation, economic growth, and most importantly, public safety. This is about economic development, but it’s also about changing the way we live and work. Arizona is proud to be open for business. California may not want you, but we do.”

https://azgovernor.gov/governor/news/2016/12/governor-ducey-...

Politics can always be an explanation.

Animats• 8 years ago

California's self-driving car rules are essentially what Google asked for. Google/Waymo is fine with that; they have had lots of self driving cars running around Mountain View for years. The main California requirements are that the manufacturer takes total financial responsibility, has to file accident and disconnect reports, and can't use the technology commercially under a test license. Uber violated that last condition in San Francisco, and CA DMV revoked their vehicle licenses.

So Uber moved to Arizona, where they could kill more freely.

mannykannot• 8 years ago

I don't know about that, but I imagine the police chief received a lot of advice, whether solicited or not, from Uber's PR, about how to interpret the video.

mieseratte2• 8 years ago

As an occasional commuter cyclist, I'm well aware of the position cars and drivers hold in our social pecking order. It's a well known "joke" that if you want to get away with murder, you do it with a car.

While we should not absolve Uber, including the driver who was too busy looking at his phone to intervene, I do wonder if a standard driver would have also been deemed not at fault by the police. The answer is likely, "yes".

simion31411• 8 years ago

I do wonder if a standard driver would have also been deemed not at fault by the police. The answer is likely, "yes".

But it seems, we do not for sure, that the sensors completely failed and on top of that the human driver also failed, so the question is :are this tests safe? next time the failure could happen on a crosswalk , IMO the question of who is to blame is not as important then the question if is safe to do this tests on public roads with such poor hardware and software.

masklinn7• 8 years ago

including the driver who was too busy looking at his phone to intervene

I've yet to get any information on one thing though, are safety drivers operating under the assumption that the car works at SAE2 or at SAE3? Because if it's the latter, the driver has no cause to keep looking at their phone. If it's the former, the car should have a deadman's switch to ensure the driver stay alert.

An other thing that is not clear is whether they were looking at their phone or at instrumentation (e.g. telemetry or the like).

avs7335• 8 years ago

While we should not absolve Uber, including the driver who was too busy looking at his phone to intervene, I do wonder if a standard driver would have also been deemed not at fault by the police. The answer is likely, "yes".

Add in the characterization of the victim that has been going on. If the car had hit an ASU student it would have been assumed they were drunk/on the phone. If it had been a Mormon missionary (not uncommon in AZ) there would be a lot more focus on the car/driver. Instead, they hit a homeless/low value person. The discourse reflects that.

usrusr• 8 years ago

Certainly not. As long as the cars still require someone to sit behind the wheel for taking the fall when something bad happens, putting your citizens up for inverse target practice creates a handsome number of VC funded low qualification jobs: all you need is a drivers license and, apparently, something to read against the boredom.

andygates2• 8 years ago

We should not expect an early statement to be authoritative.

bhouston• 8 years ago

The videos that show everything super bright look like they have their high beams on, whereas the Uber video looks like the standard headline mode. Although I can not be completely sure. If that is the case it is apples-to-oranges.

ptaipale3• 8 years ago

Impact of light sensitivity of camera, and light resolution, is probably more relevant here than even low/high beams. The car must be able to drive with low beams as well, but it's really relevant for human observers, not what the car actually sees.

KaiserPro3• 8 years ago

Which might form an excuse if it was a human driver. However the human wasn't looking at the road. (I can't blame them, its pretty difficult to concentrate when you are not _actually_ driving) So headlights or not, it's irrelevant.

However the article goes on to explain that dip'd beam headlights don't dramatically increase your vision.

However you are correct its apples to oranges. The Dashcam sensor is had not adjusted correctly to the light conditions, or it isn't sensitive enough. However thats not entirely relevant, as the dashcam doesn't (or at least I hope it doesn't) form part of the sensor array.

perfmode• 8 years ago

Where was the LIDAR?

Steltek3• 8 years ago

For reference, I found this video over on reddit (from /u/ghdana) of the area. It looks _very_ different with even a cell phone camera.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

Edit: I guess this video is also referenced in the article, after Brian's.

mieseratte2• 8 years ago

That's a pretty stark difference from the Uber video. There's no reason this incident should have happened.

Steltek3• 8 years ago

Sadly Inevitable Meta: Howdy folks, look, I appreciate the upvotes on a comment I made quickly (because I've been following this topic with some interest) but it's not nearly as content rich as some of the other top level comments around here.

That said, I appreciate a site like Arstechnica doing a great job of dissecting just how badly Uber's tech failed here, legal responsibility or not.

ebikelaw3• 8 years ago

I think the best explanation for the very poor quality of the video released by the police is that it's a video of a video, as if they recorded a video of the original video being played back on an LCD display.

zython• 8 years ago

To be fair, cell phone cameras as I recall have a tendency to push the ISO up, so it potentially could look different IRL (I'm purposefully being vague).

Ideally /u/ghdana would have posted the camera settings which filmed this, so you could get a better understanding of the situation.

Not that I'm defending UBER on this, as others have said LIDAR and IR in addition to the cameras should have picked the woman up.

ksk3• 8 years ago

To be fair, cell phone cameras as I recall have a tendency to push the ISO up, so it potentially could look different IRL (I'm purposefully being vague).

That is true, but raising the ISO for proper (well 18% grey anyway.) exposure is something pretty much every retail camera made in the past decade does. I doubt UBER is using some experimental esoteric camera here.

gamblor9562• 8 years ago

The Uber victim did come from the shadows. Arizona gets dark at night, especially during a new moon. The question isn't why the optical cameras didn't see her, it's why did the LIDAR failed to detect her?

clint• 8 years ago

read the article before posting

gamblor9562• 8 years ago

I did, including the comments to the article where they clarify that the follow up videos were taken with high-beams on, i.e., in dissimilar circumstances. And the picture in the comments showing the location of the crash, where there were no streetlights in the immediate vicinity, and a large bush shielding the median, from which the victim is alleged to have come from.

I think there are serious questions about why the Uber car didn't detect the victim, given all the sensors it was supposed to be using, but "came from the shadows" is an accurate description based on the Google Street View and overhead views of the crash site.

It helps to read the entire article before commenting.

gargravarr• 8 years ago

The first thing I noticed in watching the video is that the Uber car's lights seem to be ridiculously focused on a very small patch in front. The dark spot the cyclist appears in remains so until little more than a second before she is tragically hit.

The question is indeed why the electronics failed to detect her, but there's something really wrong with car lights like that.

lb1lf• 8 years ago

AZ gets dark at night. The workaround is for cars to have headlights.

Not knowing the law as it applies for (semi-)autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, I am very curious how this one turns out.

Based on my experience driving at night (In Norway, where it also gets pretty dark), even in rural areas with no street lights, you tend to discover pedestrians -even the ones not wearing safety reflectors- significantly more than a second and a half before you cross paths with them.

So - while the vehicle is driving autonomously, there's still a driver (or whatever we should call it, seeing as they do not drive as such) behind the wheel.

If the driver had paid attention to the road, rather than her cell phone, this accident likely wouldn't have happened.

So - who is to blame, legally speaking? The 'driver' for not paying attention? The coder implementing the control algorithms? The HW engineering team deciding which sensors to use? Someone else?

This will be a lot simpler when vehicles are 'properly' autonomous - but right now, it seems AVs simply give the 'driver' all sorts of incentive for not paying attention, while still not absolving them of responsibility. That's the worst of both worlds.

typeformer4• 8 years ago

Uber is a corporation, so it as a legal entity is liable, any kind of individual liability is possible to be litigated but very difficult to win. One problem is that corporate charters once granted are never revoked so corporations just keep doing terrible things and diffusing the costs of their actions onto society with minuscule repercussions. You can bet if I was looking down at my phone and not at the road and then hit a woman in the dark (all captured on camera) I would be going to jail... But, Uber has done some really despicable things (stealing the medical records of a rape victim to use for intimidation), and now they've likely killed someone and no one will ever see cell time.

Xorlev• 8 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

I think there is a question of why didn't the optical cameras detect her. It doesn't seem poorly lit.

dognotdog• 8 years ago

Notwithstanding the fact that a typical visible light imager in a driver assistance system alternates exposure times between frames, especially at night: one over-exposed image to discern dark texture, and one under-exposed image to find the color of point light sources, such as traffic or brake lights.

The released video looks like the latter, though it could also just be standalone dashcam footage. It is also pretty mangled by compression, especially the dark parts are just completely blocky, so it is probably not a good indicator of what the vehicle saw.

OTOH, bikes can be notoriously hard on image recognition, for example it is not unheard of that reflective rims are interpreted as continuation of a curb or lane marking. LIDAR and RADAR should see them, though, and they probably did, so it is indeed unclear where it all went wrong.

jacksmith21006• 8 years ago

Would love to see how Google would handle this situation. Have to believe their algorithm would be smarter and handle.

Remember Google had to deal with bike corner cases a couple of years ago.

"A Cyclist's Track Stand Befuddled One of Google's Self-Driving Cars"

https://gizmodo.com/a-cyclists-track-stand-totally-befuddled...

antonkm• 8 years ago

I think a big problem with this whole debacle is that we're discussing cameras and lighting, before discussing the actual matter: a person died and someone is responsible.

It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

The discussion about footage removes focus from the actual issue which should be a legal issue, not a technical debugging session.

Edit: Sorry, am not native English speaker. What I meant when I wrote accountable was that I would have to own up to what happened. Not that I would get a sentence if it was an accident.

phil21• 8 years ago

It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

As long as you weren't drinking or otherwise found to be obviously negligent this is typically not the case.

The interesting part of this to me is that the police are treating this as if it were a human driver and holding the car to that level of responsibility. A human driver would not be charged with anything for a typical accident like this one (hitting a pedestrian in low light conditions outside of a crosswalk on a high speed road).

The court case will happen since this is so high profile, but if an average Joe driving the exact same route home from work had hit her, it likely would not even go that far.

frgtpsswrdlame• 8 years ago

A human driver would not be charged with anything for a typical accident like this one (hitting a pedestrian in low light conditions outside of a crosswalk on a high speed road).

It wasn't low light conditions and it isn't a high speed road. It most definitely could be pushed to court in the case of a human driver.

jonathanyc4• 8 years ago

People are also saying it might be OK if a human wouldn’t have been able to do better. Setting aside whether a human could have done better by at least braking, is “as good as the average human” really a good or reasonable standard?

I thought the whole point was that the average human sucked at driving. If a human driver had LIDAR they would not have crashed into this woman; more precisely, a human driver with LIDAR would have had to have been criminally negligent to have crashed into and then killed this woman.

boardwaalk• 8 years ago

Sure it is, for the moment. We can't require a high bar from the get go. To use an analogy, where would we be if we required the reliability of modern airplane from the advent of the Wright Flyer?

bluGill2• 8 years ago

This is just one case, we need to know the relative incidence rate before we can state anything. Even if we could somehow prove that a human driver wouldn't have hit the women that still doesn't mean that self driving cars are not massively better than humans: if self driving cars prevented hundreds of deaths they would still be better even though they miss this one situation.

Of course in the end self driving cars need to fix the bug that caused this to happen.

rileymat2• 8 years ago

If you were sober, how accountable do you think you will be held in this exact same scenario?

moccachino• 8 years ago

A computer can have access to sensory information beyond anything that a human can have. A computer can process that information hundreds or thousands of times faster than a human can. Therefore the computer should be held to a much higher standard than a human driver in a scenario like this.

DangerousPie• 8 years ago

It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

I don't know where you live, but in most legal systems I am aware of there are definitely situations where you wouldn't be responsible. If you were not impaired, driving legally and someone suddenly walks in front of your car, why would you be accountable for that?

stefan_• 8 years ago

Someone didn't "suddenly walk in front of the car". The time they stepped into the road, you were still half a mile away.

Time to learn some new favourite german words. The first would be Sichtfahrgebot; you may only drive as fast as you can see. If your stopping distance exceeds your vision, you are driving too fast for conditions. This is doubly obvious with autonomous vehicles.

The other is Betriebsgefahr. It was your decision to drive a multi-ton vehicle with enough power for the electricity needs of a city block. She was walking, you were driving - you introduced the vast vast majority of the risk and it was your choice that is responsible for the lethal injuries. For this mere fact, you bear a significant percentage of the fault, always.

yardie• 8 years ago

In a lot of no-fault states you may not be criminally liable for a car accident but in a civil suit you won't get off scot-free. In every case of car vs human that I have come across the driver pays something, usually medical bills. Reason being a driver is required to have insurance while a pedestrian does not. And as far as I know, auto insurance companies are more willing to pay a settlement.

Do remember that on a civil suit culpability is a sliding scale. It's not guilt or not but what percentage of this accident is attributable to you. A driver looking at their phone, with an enhanced sensor safety system (lidar, sonar, nightvision) will get far more blame than a typical driver.

I expect the civil case to be settled quickly and quietly. T

MaupitiBlue2• 8 years ago

If there had been no interior video, and a regular car, the driver wouldn't be charged with anything. The prosecutor would keep the investigation open for a few months to make the woman's family happy, and then decline to file charges.

With the interior video, and the guy looking at his phone, it gets a little trickier. I think most prosecutors would let the guy twist in the wind for a few more months and then let him plead to a misdemeanor. A lot depends on the victim's family.

The problem is that the case is political and prosecutors tend to behave badly when media and publicity is involved. Hopefully the Tempe prosecutor isn't a camera hound.

neals• 8 years ago

This problem is too complex to call for a single 'actual' issue. There's many issues to be solved and talked about. Technical, legal, emotional and psychological. I don't think there's need to call for one to be more 'important' than any other.

mtgx3• 8 years ago

One of my very first comments about self-driving cars on HN was about who's going to be liable in case of a deadly accident, and that we need to establish that very early, ideally before self-driving cars are even allowed on the road.

So far, the police seems to think "no one". I have a big problem with that. Someone should be liable for it, otherwise there will be no accountability when building self-driving systems. Even if we say "the insurance company is liable", that would still be some progress, because then we'd at least know the insurance companies would put much pressure on the self-driving car makers to prove that their systems are safe.

But I'd say it's the car maker that needs to be the most culpable party, because at the end of the day, if there are say broken brakes in a new car, which causes deaths, you don't blame the brake pad maker. You blame the car maker. They are the ones who should make sure everything works and is perfectly safe before selling the product to consumers or putting it on the road.

MaupitiBlue2• 8 years ago

if there are say broken brakes in a new car, which causes deaths, you don't blame the brake pad maker.

Yes you do. You blame both. Both have an independent duty to not sell defective products. MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916).

andygates2• 8 years ago

Certainly Waymo have said Waymo will be responsible for theirs.

slap_shot• 8 years ago

I don't think this is accurate. I'm not a lawyer or even very knowledgeable about law, but I would be very surprised if the driver is at fault here. This is anecdotal, but I know someone who was in an eerily similar accident (as the driver) and unfortunately killed a person who walked in front of his car. While tragic, he did nothing wrong and there were no legal repercussions.

I live in NYC, where jaywalking is a way of life, and I've adopted two policies over the last few years:

1. Never jaywalk. Just don't do it. Find the appropriate and safe crosswalk, and wait. 2. Never assume it is safe to cross a street, even when you have the right of way. People laugh at me when I look both ways when we have the right of way, but logic is simple: just because I have the right of way does not mean the drivers coming from either side are aware of that or are paying attention.

fucking_tragedy• 8 years ago

I've just approached navigating streets as a pedestrian/cyclist as if I were invisible, because I might as well be to any driver that hits me with their vehicle.

endangered• 8 years ago

Yes, but there is video proof that the human in control of the car was on her phone.

dreta2• 8 years ago

The discussion on lights and cameras in this case is a part of determining who is responsible for the accident.

anotheryou• 8 years ago

Maybe the took the mid-range from a HDR* video and published it? This way they technically did not add contrast, but just conveniently dropped all the info in the shadows to "make it accessible"

* not tone-mapped, I mean what HDR truly stands for

pwthornton4• 8 years ago

If Uber's self-driving cars are no better than the visual acuity of humans, they shouldn't be on the road. There is no point to this at all if we can't make robots better than humans.

Self-driving cars should be able to use sensors that pick up stuff better than human eyes.

I can't believe that radar and LIDAR were completely unable to see this woman until the visual cameras picked her up. This seems like either a serious flaw with the sensors or with software. The driver, despite looking down at a phone, still seemed to react faster than the computer!

I'm not that comfortable with Uber doing self-driving cars. I don't really consider them a true tech company. They are not built on world-class engineering and design. They are largely a company built by getting around legal regulations and getting rid of staff workers. They've done incredible legal work with regulatory environments.

A company like Google, I think they have the talent and the culture to build something really good here. A company like GM would understand the stakes at hand here and would be cautious. Uber just doesn't seem to have the talent, mission or ethics to be in the self-driving car business. It's no surprise they are the first company to kill a pedestrian.

underyx4• 8 years ago

There is no point to this at all if we can't make robots better than humans.

How about saving human time that would otherwise be spent on driving?

djKianoosh• 8 years ago

as long as you're ok with the tradeoff; convenience at the expense of safety

pwthornton4• 8 years ago

This is more an argument for better land-use policy (allowing more density), more public transportation (proven technology) and more remote work. All of these much better solve giving humans more time than self-driving cars.

Self-driving cars don't promise to save time. It's still driving. Their promise -- their only real promise -- is to save lives. And I think saving tens of thousands of American lives every year is a worthwhile goal. Worldwide, more than 1 million people die in car crashes every year. Humans have proven that they can't drive cars well, but we have put up with it because it is convenient.

I know some people will say that they could work on their way to work, but I can't do work in a car. Staring at a laptop in a car gives me motion sickness, along with a lot of other people. And, of course, this would only apply to people who do computer work in the first place.

As someone who has been in serious car crashes and lost friends to them, I for one am all for self-driving cars. It's going to be a revolution, but we shouldn't be testing them on public roads if they are this bad.

babygoat• 8 years ago

Would that console you if you were run over by a self-driving car?

untog• 8 years ago

By that logic we should remove all speed limits on roads. Does that seem like a good idea?

rglullis• 8 years ago

The rider inside the Uber car didn't die...

simion31411• 8 years ago

How about saving human time that would otherwise be spent on driving?

There may be solutions for your wasted time driving that not costs more human lives, like public transport. An AI is will never have the intuition of a human brain, so you can try compensating with better sensors and faster reaction time, but if you have worse sensors and reaction time then a human then you do not have a self driving car yet, such toy projects were made by students years ago.

underyx4• 8 years ago

Wow, what the hell happened here? Parent suggested that the only benefit of self-driving cars would be if it prevented accidents. This is just wrong, and I don't think you all are helping the discussion by denying this and downvoting me for pointing out that other benefits exist too, even if self-driving cars will be just as unreliable as human drivers.

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

We can already do that. It's called public transport. The idea of self-driving cars is they can go places public transport doesn't go but the incident happened on a major highway. When I sit on a train I can work without even thinking about where I'm going. It really doesn't look like we're anywhere near that.

jonathanyc4• 8 years ago

I don’t think Google is a good example of a company that would understand the dangers involved, given how flippantly they’ve responded to government action in the past. GM I would trust more solely because at least the engineering of cars goes through strict and government-mandated testing.

wpasc2• 8 years ago

GM ignition switch scandal is far more egregious than anything Google has done IMO.

pwthornton4• 8 years ago

Maybe Apple, Carnegie Mellon, etc.

What I do know is that Uber, a company with virtually no scruples, is very far down the list of company's that I would trust to develop their own self-driving technology. It makes total sense for them to use self-driving cars to replace human drivers, but I'd feel a lot better about this if they leased it from another company.

wpasc2• 8 years ago

I agree with much of what you said, but GM understands the stakes? Are you forgetting the GM ignition switch controversy?

I recall one of my favorite scenes from Fight Club wherein Norton talks about the cost of lawsuit*the likelihood of crash vs the cost of a recall.

I'm all about Tech companies getting into self-driving cars, less excited about car companies with shoddy track records on safety and no history of disruption. There's a reason Cruise Automation (the self driving start up that GM bought) insisted on remaining separate from GM and not being absorbed into GM's culture.

edit: spelling

Maybestring• 8 years ago

cost of lawsuit*the likelihood of crash vs the cost of a recall.

To anyone interested in this issue, I recommend the following paper.

https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/212_Corporate-Risk-...

Also, this story about the engineer who investigated the infamous Pinto 'fire after rear end collision' issue, and the decision not to recall. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/the-engineers-...

gambiting3• 8 years ago

>I can't believe that radar and LIDAR were completely unable to see this woman until the visual cameras picked her up.

The worst part is, that the car didn't react at all - if it started breaking when the cameras saw her, it would still be better than what happened. But there was no reaction. Nothing from LIDAR, nothing from Radar, nothing from visual recognition - which to me, suggests only one thing: she was picked up by all three sensors, and then Uber's algorithm decided she wasn't an actual obstacle and could be safely ignored. Like a leaflet in the wind, or an immobile traffic sign next to the road. That's far worse than a straight up hardware malfunction.

pwthornton4• 8 years ago

That seems like a correct read of this. They didn't react at all. If the data shows that all three systems picked her up just fine and no reaction was made, that's really damning about the quality of the software that Uber has.

typeformer4• 8 years ago

UBER is a terrible company period.

TheCondor• 8 years ago

Laser is the sauce, wasn’t it?

Tesla is showing a video, clearly speed up, on their site and it looks like autopilot slowed down as they drove by a pedestrians on the side of the road. Around 1:30 https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware... it looks like it is very cautious at stops and when there are things roadside, almost too cautious

I tend to agree with you, I’ll even give their culture a tiny bit of slack if they are simply a ride share/taxi company (very tiny, you shouldn’t abuse or harass people ever) and I think it would make a ton of sense for them to partner with self-driving partners but it seems flawed that they made it into an existential issue that they do their own. It’s ironic, ride share has provided a very reasonable option to driving after a bar visit, with measurable results in some places, safety is something they could sell on.

jonbarker• 8 years ago

I think once they get to 'as good as people' we should let them on the road, because they are 'as good as people' but never get tired, angry, and/or drunk :)

simion31411• 8 years ago

I agree, I don't know how we could objectively measure this but I do not see anyone trying to measure this, just selling hopes that soon the AI will be better then humans.

TrickyRick3• 8 years ago

This is exactly what I was thinking as well, even if it's only as good as a human, humans comes with a whole host of other problems which impair our driving abilities.

itp• 8 years ago

A problem I foresee is that even if we could determine them to be as good as a human, they will still be different from a human. People will live that would otherwise have died; people will die that would otherwise have lived. Members of the second set will tend to get far more emotionally involved.

As good as humans implies that over one million people would be killed by robots every year. Some of the families, loved ones and attorneys of these people would be able to make very convincing cases that they would not have died if a human were driving. This is a hard problem to overcome.

S_A_P• 8 years ago

So my initial read on this whole thing was a bit more sinister. What if uber altered the video to playback as darker in an effort to help their cause?

throw7• 8 years ago

I was thinking more they intentionally installed cheap dashcams so that they can release poor quality videos that would favor their narrative of events and get ahead of the story/blame.

dwild• 8 years ago

If Uber's self-driving cars are no better than the visual acuity of humans, they shouldn't be on the road.

This is part of a test... how can you determine that these cars are better than humans if you can't try them? Put more regulation on the tests, sure, but don't stop them all, otherwise, we wouldn't be able to do any of it. Considering that woman didn't have all her focus on the road, already we see that they didn't put the right person there.

YeGoblynQueenne• 8 years ago

> I can't believe that radar and LIDAR were completely unable to see this woman until the visual cameras picked her up.

Well, the LIDAR doesn't control the car. It's just a sensor. The car is controlled by an AI system that takes information from the sensors and makes decisions based on that information (and according to its training).

So the Lidar might very well have "seen" the woman, but if the car's AI didn't recognise her as a human in the middle of the road, or didn't know that it had to stop before hitting her, then the car wouldn't stop.

dekhn2• 8 years ago

I'm gonna wait for the NTSB report because they are not armchair journalists citing misunderstood optics laws.

daveguy4• 8 years ago

I'm sure the Uber footage is either extremely low dynamic range (and not similar to human vision) or was modified to make it look darker.

However, the driving footage is from after release of the story. The moon on the 21st had illumination of ~17%. The night of the accident was the day after the new moon with an illumination of 1%. Someone needs to film the same section sometime between April 15 - April 17 to get a more accurate estimate of the light on that night. I expect video will still show much lighter conditions than that shown on the suspiciously dark video, but without the same moon lighting conditions we are comparing apples and oranges.

(accident) http://www.moongiant.com/phase/3/18/2018

(filmed) http://www.moongiant.com/phase/3/21/2018

EDIT: masklinn pointed out the accident occured before the stoplight in the much more lighted area, not later area where the news crew was filming and was commented on in the second video. It was near the stoplight with the parking deck in the background rather than only the long spaced overhead lights. Incredibly misleading video from the dashcam. Maybe good to know for defense of the true conditions, but it probably won't make that much difference. look at the slideshow

gambiting3• 8 years ago

I'm almost certain that the footage was modified to ride the public opinion of "it's too dark to see her, so it was her fault!" even though the car should be able to operate in complete darkness thanks to LIDAR and radar sensors. Uber never plays by the rules, I wouldn't expect them to suddenly be super honest about this.

jjoonathan• 8 years ago

Modified? We would never! No, we simply, uh, compressed it. So that more people could view it without bringing down the server. Standard practice.

"So what does the uncompressed footage look like?"

Intern lost it.

Someone1234• 8 years ago

I'd be surprised if it was actually modified seems too big of a liability.

If it was, someone should be going to jail as a result, since that's the footage they seemingly handed over to the police as evidence in the investigation.

sschueller3• 8 years ago

There are some odd artifacts in the video[1]. Like that the brightness is very low and there is black blob over part of her which then disappears.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBy4_3azBg

jmull• 8 years ago

There are extensive street lights along that stretch of road. The moon isn't going to be a big factor.

Ajedi32• 8 years ago

I'm pretty sure the multiple streetlights present on that section of the street are the main thing illuminating the road; the phase of moon is an insignificant factor.

masklinn7• 8 years ago

However, the driving footage is from after release of the story. The moon on the 21st had illumination of ~17%. The night of the accident was the day after the new moon with an illumination of 1%.

Most of the illumination from the driving footage clearly comes from the street lights, not from the moon. In the Uber dashcam footage, the street lights barely illuminate their own foot, some seem to not even reach the ground. The phase of the moon is essentially a non-factor.

Not to mention LIDAR is not affected by external light source. So the phase of the moon is doubly irrelevant.

daveguy4• 8 years ago

Most, but not all of the illumination. Especially between street lights. That first video is from a section of the road where the accident did not happen. You have to go past the stop light where the first video ends to get to the section where the accident happened (second video).

I understand LIDAR should have handled it, and visible spectrum may not be much different with and without moon lighting. But I would like to see a similar conditions comparison to see exactly how bad the video is compared to actual lighting conditions.

One video pointed out a black splotch over the pedestrian. If you pause and the video you can easily see it. A very unusual artifact to say the least.

EDIT: see masklinn reply -- the accident occured before the stoplight in the much more lighted area, not later area where the news crew was filming and was commented on in the second video. It was near the stoplight with the parking deck in the background rather than only the long spaced overhead lights. Incredibly misleading video from the dashcam. Maybe good to know for defense of the true conditions, but it probably won't make that much difference. look at the slideshow

the_watcher• 8 years ago

LIDAR is about the self-driving technology. The illumination of the road is about the operator being able to react quickly. Agreed about the impact of the moon relative to streetlights, but OP does have a good point simply in regards to proactively addressing any pushback.

ebikelaw3• 8 years ago

Just to quantify this side of the argument, street lighting is by design 50-1000x brighter than the moon, depending on the kind of street. For example the intersection of two major roads with pedestrians present is supposed to be lighted to about 30 lux, and a full moon is .1 lux.

Steltek3• 8 years ago

Moon or not, the Uber video shows the headlights projecting less than half the distance they're rated at. They're functioning so badly, in fact, that it wouldn't be safe to drive with them, human or bot.

sschueller3• 8 years ago

Interesting, I wonder if they where on, maybe those are just the daytime running lights.

drzaiusapelord• 8 years ago

Not to mention, the big selling point with AVs is that they use LIDAR which is superior to human vision. So where's the LIDAR data? Why didn't the car see this person using its non visual sensors.

I think its a given that visual only data is pretty lousy for AV purposes. You have too many issues with it.

taneq• 8 years ago

While I completely agree with your assessment, I feel compelled to point out that LIDAR is an active sensing method and so ambient illuminance actually makes things harder for the sensors.

I really wanna make excuses for the Uber vehicle here because self driving vehicles will be awesome, but in this particular case it just failed. :(

typeformer4• 8 years ago

Yeah and killed an innocent person!

Humdeee• 8 years ago

I'm surprised to hear a top police authority say this. I come from a family of police and it's always said that when telling your side of the story in a traffic incident, saying something along the lines of:

"But Officer, they came out of nowhere!"

never really holds up too well for you. It's the same as saying "I flat out didn't see them, so not my fault." It's quite the opposite in fact... and any cool-headed person will pick that up. I'm sure the investigation is well underway in any event.

avs7335• 8 years ago

Arizona officials carrying water for corporations is not a new thing by any rate.

2aa07e2• 8 years ago

The car driver was half the time not looking at the road! Who the hell drives like that.

Jaywalking or not, the victim was clearly a pedestrian (not riding her bike), the insurance of Uber (Uber itself?) should compensate the victim's relatives. If it doesn't I expect a huge backslash.

hmate9• 8 years ago

He wasn’t driving.

pwaivers• 8 years ago

They should release the LIDAR sensor data, so we can learn what the car "saw". This dashcash is basically irrelevant compared to the sensors on the car.

ironjunkie• 8 years ago

I don't want to sound like a crazy person here, but could it be that the video released was edited to look super dark? The difference between the Uber video and the amateur cellphone videos is striking!

Could it be that the police//Uber employees//municipality have a political goal to make this look like it was unavoidable? It looks so to me.

thrillgore• 8 years ago

Is Uber paying off the police chief to blame the victim?

I'm with the majority here -- the LIDAR should have picked the pedestrian up and decelerated. Uber's self-driving tech is less safe than a human driver, and should be shelved.

logotype• 8 years ago

Why do we only have the dashcam videos? I want to see the LIDAR data. Also, Uber definitively has ways to render all the sensor data into a video which shows the objects which was detected (or lack of detection).

rplnt• 8 years ago

There needs to be a process in place for autonomous cars accidents. Required telemetry and data provided to independent organization (financed by manufacturers). If it deems the car (hardware or software) was at fault, whole fleet needs to be immediately disabled until the issue is resolved.

Dead pedestrian here and there won't hurt the companies financially. There's not much reason for them to push for perfect products. They can just shoot for 99% and account for the rest in damages. Disabling their service will hurt them.

This needs to be treated like planes, trains, or medical devices are. Not like consumer device.

jaragones• 8 years ago

I wonder why they don't want to show its LIDAR "video", I thought that all autonomous vehicle are using it. I agree that a cause of the accident can be that LIDAR had failed but I wonder why in this kind of technologies they don't have redundancies system. :/

justspamjustin• 8 years ago

When I learned to drive, I was taught to slow down when you see that you’re coming up on lower visibility areas of the road. This could be a turn in the road, a part of the road that reduces slope or a darker part of the road. I still do practice this safe precaution. And while the technology is in its infancy, drivers in an autonomous car should be just as attentive as a driver in any other car.

typeformer4• 8 years ago

I think it was extremely irresponsible of the officers on the scene to imply that there was "nothing that could be done" or a lack of fault before a real investigation had even started!

boyaka• 8 years ago

Most of the illumination when I drive comes from my headlights. All of it that I need, no matter how dark or "shadowy" it is (give me a break).

lafar65027• 8 years ago

We’ll miss the good old times where road accidents were a matter settled between two humans on equal rights, no a individual vs multi-billion corps and their army of lawyers

JoeAltmaier2• 8 years ago

Well, my insurance company is one of those corporations. So we have that.

lafar65027• 8 years ago

Yep, they re gonna fight to death in return for your 100$ fee

xapata4• 8 years ago

When was that? Right now if you are part of an accident, you only have rights via your insurance company and their lawyers. I suppose there's small claims court or hiring your own lawyer, but that ain't the same.

lafar65027• 8 years ago

Where I live the insurance company does not act until the case is clear and it’s known who is guilty and of what. Sometimes it’s just police documentation, sometimes an investigation and court case. But insurance company does not represent you in the court so what exactly are you talking about?

JustSomeNobody• 8 years ago

https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

Speed also affects your safety even when you are driving at the speed limit but too fast for road conditions, such as during bad weather, when a road is under repair, or in an area at night that isn’t well lit.

This vehicle was speeding. Uber is at fault. How is this disputable?

Edit: One More link.

https://www.123driving.com/dmv/drivers-handbook-speed-limits

You will need to drive with extra care at night. You cannot see as far ahead or to the side, and glare from oncoming cars can reduce your vision even more. Follow these guidelines for driving at night:

    Use your headlights (low beam or high beam) between the hours of sunset and sunrise.
    Low beam headlamps are only effective for speeds up to 20-25 MPH. You must use special care when driving faster than these speeds, since you are unable to detect pedestrians, bicyclists and others.
    High beam headlights can reveal objects up to a distance of at least 450 feet and are most effective for speeds faster than 25 MPH.
    Don't use high-beam headlights within 500 feet of oncoming vehicles.
    If you are behind other vehicles, use low beams when you are within 300 feet of the vehicle ahead.
    When leaving a brightly lit place, drive slowly until your eyes adjust to the darkness.
    If a vehicle comes toward you with high beams, flash your lights to high beam and back to low beam once.
    Don't look directly at oncoming headlights. Instead, watch the right edge of your lane. Look quickly to be sure of the other vehicle's position every few seconds.
    Drive as far to the right as you can if a vehicle with one light comes toward you.

mping• 8 years ago

What seems horrible from a SW engineering point of view is that they probably didn't QA this scenario. I mean, it's not a corner case, it's basically the scenario where someone appears in front of the car "all of the sudden".

I just hope engineers working on software that can cause serious injury or kill someone do the appropriate diligences to ensure this doesn't happen again.

bitL2• 8 years ago

It's pretty common to ramp up contrast in cam used for self-driving inputs for basic computer vision to make lane markers pop up. So such a camera won't have much chance of detecting a person casually crossing road without any concerns for traffic. The crash points more to failure in sensor fusion; LiDAR should have detected it, but clustering algorithm might have either removed it, or she appeared in too few scanning frames to be reliably detected as an object, due to heat map thresholding to avoid false positives.

ksk3• 8 years ago

But why would they alter the recorded bits? An imaging sensor streams the RAW data (w/o tone curve). Wouldn't they prefer just storing the RAW bits (which probably have a higher dynamic range anyway) and then apply various transforms - contrast, edge-detect, etc.

bitL2• 8 years ago

I guess it's speed concerns? Maybe they have a custom ASIC they use to pipe and adjust images from the camera, achieving optimal contrast? Using CPU for that is very very slow and self-driving car companies try to push latency down as much as possible, so it might be a limitation of specialized hardware.

sschueller3• 8 years ago

Maybe there should be some limits to when these vehicles may travel until they have proven they can deal with more difficult situations.

Driving at night or in a snow storm is a very difference environment than on a nice day.

avs7335• 8 years ago

There is another aspect of this as well that is important to consider.

I will 100% bet that the police had to interact with/rely on Uber to provide them with the video and data. With Uber's history, and the importance of this to the company, can we trust they didn't manipulate the video (i.e., make it darker)?. In the end, as much distaste as I have for Uber, this isn't even about them...its about process and chain of evidence.

In a non-autonomous accident if there was a fight between two opposing drivers, the vehicle manufacturer is a neutral party and it seems reasonable to rely on them to extract and hand over data. If, however, the fight was between the driver and the manufacturer (e.g., the driver asserted a failure of the vehicle) there is no way that the manufacturer would be allowed to extract the vehicles' data logger. It would be done by an independent third party.

As these accidents happen (and no matter your perspective on this one/cars/autonomous vs. human drivers/etc. - they will happen) there needs to be methodology for extracting data and assessing it from the vehicles that does not rely on the manufacturer or any other conflict of interest party.

Further, this hole debacle shows how important it is that experts be involved in these decisions, discussions. The police chief has no knowledge or experience with the technical details of autonomous vehicles. His statements have, from the beginning, been irresponsible and inappropriately deferential to Uber at the expense of a citizen of his town.

The rush for LIDAR/Radar technology makes clear just how much of autonomous tech relies on the nonvisual range. However, the chief obviously...based on his statements...is judging performance entirely on the visual range. He is not an expert. As an ex-Tempe resident, I doubt Tempe has independent autonomous vehicle experts. I would almost guarantee they are relying on the companies being truthful and open with them.

That is bad.

cesarb2• 8 years ago

I will 100% bet that the police had to interact with/rely on Uber to provide them with the video and data.

For the video released so far, not necessarily. It seems to be from an off-the-shelf dashcam, which the police most probably not only know how to download, but also has already done so several times in other accidents. For the rest of the data (and the video from the self-driving cameras, if it's stored instead of just used in the control loop and then discarded), I agree with you that the police (and the NTSB) will probably need the help of the Uber engineers.

sylvinus• 8 years ago

I understand people are focusing on the video because that's all we have at the moment, but it entirely misses the point: this is primarily a LIDAR failure. This should have been prevented even with the cameras off.

devy• 8 years ago

The takeaways from this tragic accident for me are:

1. We need to have better suited (much better low light performance) frontal cameras equipped for self-driving cars and dashcams. Be it a dual sensor/lens setup or whatnot, if Apple can make it for iPhone X for $35 [1], the technology is available now and shippable now. Compare to the cost of tens of thousands of the price of a car and hundreds/thousands for the price of packages/options manufacturers to add on to a new car, that's virtually nothing.

2. We need better more sophisticated headlamps and new laws to better suited for today's technology advancements[2] - something like a 3rd mode of wide beam on top of hi/low bean modes. From ubiquitous adaptive headlights to matrix laser beams, these improvement can increase driver visibility and perhaps save lives in situations like this.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-x-teardown-parts-cost-...

[2] https://blog.dupontregistry.com/mercedes-benz/why-are-adapti...

scrumper• 8 years ago

The concept of a safety driver in SDC testing needs refining.

The guy here was clearly distracted. He only looks up at the road a fraction of a second before the crash.

My bet is that he'll be prosecuted as if he were a distracted driver: he's responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle (otherwise, why's he there in the first place?). He'll go to prison, probably, and rules will change very quickly as a result.

Driving a car is an active process, it's fatiguing but not inherently boring (excepting really long, straight, empty roads through unchanging scenery). Sitting in a SDC while it drives itself however is boring: there's a well-researched and well-understood attention deficit problem which nobody seems to be discussing here.

It's the same thing that makes TSA security screening such a tough thing to get right, or sentry duty: you can't expect humans to sit for hours passively monitoring for unpredictable and rare events that they then have to react decisively to. Brains don't work like that. These safety drivers need short shifts with frequent breaks, they need a partner, and they need an active background task that keeps their eyes up and forward and their brain engaged (giving a commentary, for example).

dreta2• 8 years ago

If the car is at fault here, then Uber should bare the full consequences.

At the same time though, the person with the bike had no reflective markings, wasn’t blind or anything, and was crossing the road without any respect for the incoming traffic at an unmarked spot. They didn’t even flinch when the car was about to hit them. The guy in the car looked away for like 5 seconds. He clearly wasn’t absent-minded. If the visibility wasn’t that bad, any suspicious activity on the left would have grabbed his attention.

cesarb2• 8 years ago

Is it possible that the released video was so dark because the dashcam was behind a tinted windshield? The other dashcam videos from the same place might be from cars with non-tinted windshields. Of course, any video cameras used as self-driving sensors would be outside the windshield, so their view would be clearer.

TearsInTheRain• 8 years ago

A lot of people are focusing on why the car didn't stop or even slow, but what about the human driver? I feel like this practice of having a human driver behind the wheel doesn't work as well as we might think it does. It is likely giving people and legislators a false sense of security if they think a human has the ability to intervene properly to stop an accident

Police chief said Uber victim “came from the shadows” – don’t believe it

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