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So even after the buggy software correctly identified the bicycle in time to stop, it still made no attempt to do so. The driver ultimately had to take over and stop the car. Somebody please tell me again that self-driving cars are better than humans. I need a good laugh.
Quote:
NTSB: Uber’s sensors worked; its software utterly failed in fatal crash
The National Transportation Safety Board has released its preliminary report on the fatal March crash of an Uber self-driving car in Tempe, Arizona. It paints a damning picture of Uber's self-driving technology.
The report confirms that the sensors on the vehicle worked as expected, spotting pedestrian Elaine Herzberg about six seconds prior to impact, which should have given it enough time to stop given the car's 43mph speed.
The problem was that Uber's software became confused, according to the NTSB. "As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path," the report says.
The vehicle was a modified Volvo XC90 SUV. That vehicle comes with emergency braking capabilities, but Uber automatically disabled these capabilities while its software was active.
The vehicle operator—who had been looking down in the seconds before the crash—finally took action less than a second before the fatal crash. She grabbed the steering wheel shortly before the car struck Herzberg, then slammed on the brakes a fraction of a second after the impact. The vehicle was traveling at 39mph at the time of the crash.
Dashcam footage of the driver looking down at her lap has prompted a lot of speculation that she was looking at a smartphone. But the driver told the NTSB that she was actually looking down at a touchscreen that was used to monitor the self-driving car software.
As I pointed out way earlier this was virtually certain to be the case. The target was what one would call a "gimme". No way it could be missed. So the problem was the Uber screwed up the software response.
There will undoubtedly be other casualties in this development process...though this one should not have happened. I would think a huge damage award against Uber. Maybe even actions to shut them down or police them so they do not make another such error. Clearly incompetence.
There will undoubtedly be other casualties in this development process...
We need self driving vehicles as much as we need those little spritzers/wiper blades to clean our headlights.
The big benefit, we are being told, is that they will eliminate human error (except for the programmer, as we see here).
There are approximately 3x 10^8 vehicles in the US and about 3 x 10^4 traffic deaths each yr-- a ratio of 1 in 10,000. There's been at least 3 deaths due to driverless cars this year. Are there 30,000 self driving cars in use?
We need self driving vehicles as much as we need those little spritzers/wiper blades to clean our headlights.
The big benefit, we are being told, is that they will eliminate human error (except for the programmer, as we see here).
There are approximately 3x 10^8 vehicles in the US and about 3 x 10^4 traffic deaths each yr-- a ratio of 1 in 10,000. There's been at least 3 deaths due to driverless cars this year. Are there 30,000 self driving cars in use?
Nope. Only one autonomous vehicle death. Tesla is a fancy driver's assist but is no way an autonomous system and does not claim to be.
And the one death should not have happened. Outrageous break down in the development process.
More will die as the development continues but they should be few in number and hopefully will help swiftly develop the system to the point where accidents and deaths become well below human driver levels.
I would note that on the general subject of accidents it is already clear that the human drivers are the cause of virtually all the accidents in which the google vehicles have been involved.
There will undoubtedly be other casualties in this development process...though this one should not have happened. I would think a huge damage award against Uber. Maybe even actions to shut them down or police them so they do not make another such error. Clearly incompetence.
Thankfully they shut down Uber's Arizona program entirely. I say that because their facility in Tempe was very close to my office, and I'd encounter those cars nearly every day. I have nothing against AVs in general, but I don't believe Uber to be a responsible company.
There are approximately 3x 10^8 vehicles in the US and about 3 x 10^4 traffic deaths each yr-- a ratio of 1 in 10,000. There's been at least 3 deaths due to driverless cars this year. Are there 30,000 self driving cars in use?
There were approximately 40,000 deaths in the US in 2017 from the cars with safe human drivers:
Nope. Only one autonomous vehicle death. Tesla is a fancy driver's assist but is no way an autonomous system and does not claim to be.
And the one death should not have happened. Outrageous break down in the development process.
More will die as the development continues but they should be few in number and hopefully will help swiftly develop the system to the point where accidents and deaths become well below human driver levels.
I would note that on the general subject of accidents it is already clear that the human drivers are the cause of virtually all the accidents in which the google vehicles have been involved.
Honest question- would you be OK with yourself or one of your loved ones being killed if you knew it would help swiftly develop the system?
I see many comments in this vein and I think to myself it is one thing to talk abstractly about this topic and very different to talk about how we would actually be affected if something happened to us or our loved ones.
Honest question- would you be OK with yourself or one of your loved ones being killed if you knew it would help swiftly develop the system?
I see many comments in this vein and I think to myself it is one thing to talk abstractly about this topic and very different to talk about how we would actually be affected if something happened to us or our loved ones.
I would of course be devastated. And it would be far worse if it was a stupid error. That is the same reaction I would have to them dying in any traffic accident. And again it would be worse ifthe accident had a stupid cause like DUI.
I led the development of office equipment for multiple decades. We took great pains to minimize the risk of killing a customer but it still could have happened. It did not though we took out a floor in a major office building and caused a few other significant fires. Any one of these could have killed someone. So any new development has some risks and automobiles are worse because of the physics involved.
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