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Uber Pulls Self-Driving Cars After First Fatal Crash of Autonomous Vehicle

posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 19 2018, @10:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the bound-to-happen dept.

vux984 writes:

A self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. It was in autonomous mode at the time of the collision, with a vehicle operator behind the wheel. Uber has suspended testing of its self-driving cars.

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-autonomous-car-fatal-crash/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/self-driving-uber-kills-arizona-171055918.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/19/594950197/uber-suspends-self-driving-tests-after-pedestrian-is-killed-in-arizona
https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-suspends-driverless-car-program-after-pedestrian-is-struck-and-killed-1521480386
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17139518/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash-tempe-arizona
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-test-car-involved-in-accident-resulting-in-pedestrian-death/

I couldn't find any good analysis of the liability situation here.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:45AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:45AM (#655241) Journal

    Might also make pedestrians a bit more careful.

    An autonomous car that isn't in beta (death) testing phase should be far safer than a human driver. LIDAR can be used to see around corners and the computer can react to circumstances in milliseconds rather than hundreds of milliseconds. So I don't see it having an effect on pedestrian behavior. In fact, if pedestrians know that autonomous cars will always halt when a pedestrian gets in the way, they may be motivated to jaywalk more.

    We always knew that people would die from autonomous cars. "Zero fatalities" isn't realistic.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:34AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:34AM (#655255)

    How does lidar see around corners? Bendy light?

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:43AM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:43AM (#655261) Journal

      Stanford Researchers Develop Non-Line-of-Sight LIDAR Imaging Procedure [soylentnews.org]

      NLOS [(Non Line Of Sight)] imaging reconstructs the shape and albedo of hidden objects from multiply scattered light. Despite recent advances, NLOS imaging has remained impractical owing to the prohibitive memory and processing requirements of existing reconstruction algorithms, and the extremely weak signal of multiply scattered light. Here we show that a confocal scanning procedure can address these challenges by facilitating the derivation of the light-cone transform to solve the NLOS reconstruction problem. This method requires much smaller computational and memory resources than previous reconstruction methods do and images hidden objects at unprecedented resolution. Confocal scanning also provides a sizeable increase in signal and range when imaging retroreflective objects.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:57PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:57PM (#655523) Journal

    I don't think that "lidar seeing around corners" is realistic outside of a controlled environment. It's one thing for "over the horizon radar" to work, as the sky is a pretty uniform environment, it's another for lidar to see around corners. Yes, they've done it in a controlled environment, but that's not a typical use case.

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