It wasn't that the sensors were confused or something - the AI had no idea how to cope with pedestrians in the road for whatever reason, so threw them in the "Other" category.
At least 98% of objects are categorised, the rest don't matter. /s
At least 98% of objects are categorised, the rest don't matter. /s
Because that kind of safety-conscious culture needs to be deliberately enforced, from the top all the way down, by a system that takes a long view.
If we're making an analogy to the defense industry, then building self-driving cars as a tech startup is closer to the Anarchist's Cookbook than Northrop Grumman.
The justification made for disabling the emergency braking - that it would interfere with data gathering - might appear reasonable at first sight, but it does not stand up to scrutiny, for if the emergency braking is triggered, the driving system has already made a mistake, and you already have the data on that malfunction.
They had hired a driver to sit behind the wheel to monitor the road and the car for exactly this reason.
The driver they hired decided to watch a movie on their phone instead of paying attention to the road.
If Volvo's system is that dangerous, then it should not be on the road at all - but there is no evidence that it is, you are just making a speculative argument.
> They had hired a driver to sit behind the wheel to monitor the road and the car for exactly this reason.
That is no reason to disable a safety feature that would add safety in depth.
> The driver they hired decided to watch a movie on their phone instead of paying attention to the road.
That was a major error - a crime, in fact - but, unfortunately, also an entirely predictable scenario that cannot be dismissed on the grounds that dealing with it would make testing more difficult or expensive. So now we have three errors.
The built-in emergency braking system from Volvo does this [0] but Uber deliberately disabled it (presumably because it conflicted with their self-driving rig).
[0] https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
If you hit the accelerator harder when the Volvo brakes you override it. It should be fairly easy to integrate as a backup.
However I guess that the Volvo system might not be far looking enough for those speeds?
Instead, as the report says:
> The vehicle was factory-equipped by Volvo with several advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), including forward collision warning (FCW) system and automatic emergency braking (AEB) system. However, Volvo collision avoidance ADAS were not active at the time of the crash; the interaction of the Volvo ADAS and ATG ADS is further explored in section 1.9.
It was apparently disabled by Uber because it was difficult to run the Volvo systems alongside their own, which strikes me as highly irresponsible. Autonomous driving software relies on multiple redundancy, and AEB is the last-resort system for when everything else, from automatic maneuvers to alerting the driver, has already failed.
The deadly assumption here is "doesn't clearly match a category" => "safe to ignore"