I think a major effort in self driving is solving the Goldilocks issue of reacting properly to impending accidents, but also not apply uncomfortable breaking if it’s not needed.
Seems like it was too insensitive at that distance.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
Shouldn't the brake application be not boolean but 0-100% strength based on confidence levels?
This is also an issue with current production automatic braking system. One that was largely solved with on track testing, and on road testing logging false triggers with a driver driving. There's no need to risk lives unless you're just cutting corners to avoid the cost of a test track.
They should have had it set to spike the breaks once collision was imminent though, that's (maybe) the biggest programming omission here.
I'm not sure that'd be a huge issue. The vectors have to be intersecting first of all, which most vectors emanating from sidewalks wouldn't be, and then a little hysteresis would smooth out most of the rest.
What's actually needed here is some notion of whether the pedestrian is paying attention and will correctly stop and not intersect the path of the car. Humans are constantly making that assessment based on sometimes very subtle cues (is the person looking at/talking on a phone, or are they paying attention, for example).
These autonomous systems are evaluating surrounding vectors every few milliseconds. A timescale of 3 seconds simply isn't important, as they would instantly detect you slowing down and conclude that you wouldn't intersect with their vector.
> But why didn't it brake from t minus 6 to t minus 1.3? Looks like it detected that the car's and object's paths were converging, so why didn't it brake during that interval?
Safe driving often does require slowing down in the face of insufficient information. If a human driver sees an inattentive pedestrian about to intersect traffic, they will slow down. “Drive until collision is unavoidable” is a failing strategy.
And anyway, jerky driving is a symptom of late braking, not early braking.
I see it as more than just jerkyness, I see a massive safety issue in traffic. If your autonomous car is slamming on the brakes spontaneously there's a lot more opportunities for other drivers to plow into you from behind.
No it's not, the issue was jerky driving.
> “Drive until collision is unavoidable” is a failing strategy.
No kidding.
That being said, I'm happy to find my assumptions about stopping time are incorrect and a car traveling at 25mph can stop in less than a second. So on busy NYC streets this wouldn't be an issue. Even at 50mph it appears that stopping time is sub 3s, so the vehicle could probably have avoided this collision if it were running a more intelligent program.
Right, collision is basic physics accounting for the stopping time and distance of pedestrians and cars. So the question is whether pedestrians on sidewalks really have so many collision vectors with traffic such that autonomous vehicles would be jerky all of the time as the initial poster suggested.
I claim reasonable defaults that would far outperform humans on average wouldn't have that property. Autonomous vehicles should be programmed to follow the rules of the road with reasonable provisions to avoid collisions when possible.
That's vanilla testing edge-case stuff, really, and it's known that uber are unter when it comes to this, but the removal of all the useful safety layers after that (braking, alert, second human, hardware system) is reckless and stupid.
"It might move out of my way" is no reason to get so close at such a high speed that you can't avoid it when it doesn't!
Self driving cars can emulate humans, but that won't bring them to human level performance without the ability to model other actors. If they try to mathematically rule out the possibility of accidents without such models, they won't be able to go anywhere.
Also, my two year old will sometimes walk towards the curb, but she is very good with streets, so I am not worried. She always stops and waits to hold someone's hand before crossing. This behavior freaks some drivers out, causing them to slow or come to a complete stop, which is the nicest outcome because then I can take her hand and cross the street. When I am walking by myself drivers rarely yield even as I am stepping into the street, even at marked crossings.
I guess my point is if my two year old exhibits the behavior you ascribe to a hypothetical non-child pedestrian then how can you be sure your hypothetical pedestrian won't just "keep walking"? What if they are blind, or drunk, or reckless? Perhaps you have been lucky before and never struck a pedestrian but I strongly urge you to assess your behavior. Stop for pedestrians, it's the nice thing to do and it's probably the law where you live.
When I am driving I often see people standing at the curb just staring at their smartphone. Usually these people are wasting time because they don't expect traffic to stop. When I stop for them they are usually pleased, they cross the road and get on with their life. Sometimes these people are just waiting for an Uber or something, when I stop for them they get confused and look at me funny. I don't mind, I just smile at them and resume driving. I am in a car, so I can accelerate and travel very quickly with almost no effort. It is no trouble for me to spend a few seconds stopping for a false positive.
The speed limit is a reference to the maximum allowable speed of the roadway, not the minimum, only, or even recommended speed.
I didn't always drive like this, but I was in an accident that was my fault that totally upended my life, so I made an effort to change my ways. You can do it too, before you get in an accident that sets your life back, or irreparably shatters it...
I recommend taking an advanced drivers education course if you seriously decide you want to improve your driving. A lot of this stuff is covered.
Nobody's suggesting that anyone should slam the brakes every time a moving object intersects your vector of motion.
No, you did that:
> I often have pedestrians walk towards the street and I assume they will stop so I don't slow down unless they are children or similar. Almost every day I could hit pedestrians if they kept walking.
With respect, I don't know what you meant to say but that sounds like a description of a bad (or at least inconsiderate) driver to me.
In any case, when I think about how I would design a self driving car, an "auto-auto", the first principle I came up with was that it should never travel so fast that it couldn't safely slow down or break to avoid a possible collision. This is the bedrock, foundational principal.
> 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
Little different, huh? If you see something that looks like it might be in your way, and you aren't sure what it is, you just keep going?
And if I see a pedestrian in the middle of the road at a random spot, especially at night, I'm slowing down since I don't know WTF they're thinking. Or if I'm in a neighborhood with regular street crossings carved out of the sidewalk and someone's coming up to one of those - I don't know how well they're paying attention to their surroundings.
I think it comes down to the fact that the classification algorithms are not ready for primetime.
As far as trains go, they do slow down when passing trough a track adjacent to a platform. There are some non-platform adjacent tracks the train companies use to avoid slowing down, however they will slow down or even stop if something is going on.
Similarly, high speed rail doesn't have level crossings due to safety considerations. Overall trains are very safe and they are _designed_ for safety. It is highly irresponsible and immoral to just wing it with people's life/safety.
100% agree.
> As far as trains go, they do slow down when passing trough a track adjacent to a platform. There are some non-platform adjacent tracks the train companies use to avoid slowing down, however they will slow down or even stop if something is going on.
The equivalency isn't 'trains slow down through stations' (That would be cars having lower speedlimit in pedestrian areas - they do and the ubers honor) , it would be 'train spikes breaks if someone takes a step toward the edge' (Which they don't, even though it would potentially save lives).
There's always a tradeoff between usability and absolute safety. I'm not saying the uber did nothing wrong, at a minimum it should have spiked it's breaks. The 'perfect world' solution would be the uber knowing mass and momentum of approaching objects, and whether they could stop in time. But honestly, here would that have helped? We'll never get rid of people walking in front of moving cars, just have to be find the happy balance (which we clearly haven't)
A train's deceleration under maximum braking is far, far lower than a car. [1] suggests 1.2m/s² (paragraph 8).
[2] says the deceleration of a low-speed train crashing into the buffers at the end of the line in a station should not be more than 2.45m/s² (paragraph 35). That caused "minor injuries" to some passengers.
Trains do slow down earlier if the platform they are approaching is very crowded, but there's not really anything else they can do.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/547c906640f0b...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/547c906640f0b...
With cars, there is an expectation that you have to share the road with other vehicles, objects, obstacles, pedestrians, etc.
No. That's my point. Take less drastic measures earlier, and only escalate when you have to. That's how I drive, and a self-driving car can do the same.