Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck, Killed Pedestrian Wasn't Set To Stop In An Emergency
An Uber Technologies Inc. car involved in a deadly crash in Arizona wasn’t designed to automatically brake in case of an emergency, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report on the accident.
The self-driving car, which was being tested on a public road with a human operator, struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in March. Uber said Wednesday that it was closing down its self-driving vehicle program in the state, two months after Arizona barred it from road-testing the technology.
NTSB Preliminary Report Released
The NTSB has released a preliminary report on the Uber pedestrian accident in Arizona. This is being reported widely, but it took a little digging to find the actual report, which is linked from the NTSB press release at: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.aspx The PDF report, 3-1/2 pages with several illustrations, can be downloaded directly with https://goo.gl/2C6ZCH
From the second page of the report:
Uber had equipped the test vehicle with a developmental self-driving system. The system consisted of forward- and side-facing cameras, radars, LIDAR, navigation sensors, and a computing and data storage unit integrated into the vehicle. 1 Uber had also equipped the vehicle with an aftermarket camera system that was mounted in the windshield and rear window and that provided additional front and rear videos, along with an inward-facing view of the vehicle operator. In total, 10 camera views were recorded over the course of the entire trip.
The self-driving system relies on an underlying map that establishes speed limits and permissible lanes of travel. The system has two distinct control modes: computer control and manual control. The operator can engage computer control by first enabling, then engaging the system in a sequence similar to activating cruise control. The operator can transition from computer control to manual control by providing input to the steering wheel, brake pedal, accelerator pedal, a disengage button, or a disable button.
The vehicle was factory equipped with several advanced driver assistance functions by Volvo Cars, the original manufacturer. The systems included a collision avoidance function with automatic emergency braking, known as City Safety, as well as functions for detecting driver alertness and road sign information. All these Volvo functions are disabled when the test vehicle is operated in computer control but are operational when the vehicle is operated in manual control.
According to Uber, the developmental self-driving system relies on an attentive operator to intervene if the system fails to perform appropriately during testing. In addition, the operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review.
On the night of the crash, the operator departed Uber's garage with the vehicle at 9:14 p.m. to run an established test route. At the time of the crash, the vehicle was traveling on its second loop of the test route and had been in computer control since 9:39 p.m. (i.e., for the preceding 19 minutes).
According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about 6 seconds before impact, when the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph. 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. At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2). 2 According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday May 26 2018, @12:48AM (24 children)
So what part of this is a self driving car?
Uber thinks its going to continue testing this vehicle in other states,
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/05/uber-wants-to-test-driverless-cars-in-pittsburgh-again-the-mayor-is-pissed/ [arstechnica.com]
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17338010/uber-resume-self-driving-car-test-dara-khosrowshahi [theverge.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:25AM (17 children)
Re: Sue the b*s*a*ds
Actually Uber already settled with the dead woman's family.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/technology/uber-fatal-crash-settlement/index.html [cnn.com]
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17176176/uber-settlement-self-driving-car-crash [theverge.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:33AM (15 children)
Okay, so that covers the civil side of things, but who got arrested for the criminal negligance and manslaughter?
Oh, no one? Everyone gets away with it because they threw money at the poor woman's family? And everyone is okay with this? Where are the pitchforks and torches in California? Why hasn't some do-gooder strung up the CEO Mussolini style? What the fuck is wrong with you assholes? Not YOU, tak, but you, society. You shitbags screech when a clump of cells gets aborted. You screech when someone gets the death penalty, or some drugged up failure shoots a bunch of brats at a school, but when a CORPORATION does it, well, that's "just the price of progress" or what the fuck ever you have to tell yourselves to delude yourselves enough to be able to go to sleep at night thinking you're not just as much a part of the problem for just letting this go.
I need to register a fucking corporation so that I can go around killing people too I guess.
(Score: 2, Troll) by frojack on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:39AM (12 children)
Nice rant, but the accident was in Arizona.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday May 26 2018, @07:27AM
There you go again, spoiling a good rant by introducing facts....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @07:47AM (9 children)
Yes. Yes it was. However, Uber Headquarters is not in Arizona. Uber Headquarters is in San Francisco. If you were to march upon Uber Headquarters in Arizona, I would imagine that you would get a lot of confused looks, and suggestions that you should try San Francisco. I suppose you cannot understand a map, so I'll let you know that San Francisco is a city in California. Maps are tricky for people nowadays somehow, and that's a pretty good thing to know because it's a big city, and shit. Really, trying to protest anything in Arizona relevant to this is as much of a waste of time as Occupy Wall Street was for doing anything actually in New York instead of Fucking Shithole Jersey. The general amount of waste of time there is roughly 100%. So it goes.
But still it is good to know that a corporation can commit manslaughter and the world collectively shrugs. Verily do you ever deserve everything coming to you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @08:08AM (8 children)
Same AC here, still.
I just wanted really fucking drive it home just how much I shouldn't have to painstaking explain this fucking shit to you. Don't be that fucking stupid. I know you can do better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @05:25PM
And yet, here we are.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:11PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 27 2018, @02:19AM (3 children)
Correction: self-driving car technology has the potential to save a lot of lives. Uber's technology will end up killing a lot of people if they continue to test and possibly deploy it if they aren't faced with legal action or experience a miracle, possibly by stealing more engineers and technology from its competitors. Even prior to this incident, it was common for Uber's self-driving cars to ignore red lights, and it apparently ignores foreign objects and pedestrians too.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @03:55AM (2 children)
Didn't say Uber's success was a certainty. Destroying Uber's attempts on rather frivolous grounds means we'll probably see the same go for the others.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday May 28 2018, @10:08PM (1 child)
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:35AM
Where's the proof? You just have one preventable death and an immature technology and testing process which can readily be improved to prevent said preventable deaths in the future.
And? You've merely shown here that Uber has room for improvement, not that they can't improve.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 27 2018, @03:13AM (1 child)
I'm not opposed to self-driving cars or a reduction in automobile deaths. I am opposed to any people existing free from consequences.
Also, I've got plenty more shit to lose. Stay tuned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @03:52AM
Like consequences for jaywalking across highways at night? And it looks to me like you're quite opposed to those things else you'd be advocating penalties more in line with the actual misdeed.
The emotional people always do.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @08:14AM
Fuck yourself, kay? Here we are existing in a world where people lose their collective fucking brains because shitbags elected a shitbag to office who said icky things about women and minorities. They visit violence upon their neighbors and anyone else nearby, and that's supposed to be okay, but then someone gets a little upset because a corporation is literally killing people without significant consequence, and suddenly the observer is the asshole?
No, sir, that is not how things work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:49PM (1 child)
I've been following wswswswsws' coverage of the Grenfell fire story. Give Thursday's article [wsws.org] a read-through.
It's another example of how corporations can commit murder and get away with it. Maybe Uber here was vehicular manslaughter. Grenfell seems more like premeditated murder. How many people will go to jail? Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Is it any wonder that people think it's cool to just shoot up schools and shit? Our culture devalues human life, and it couldn't be more clear at this point that transnational corporations or maybe just corporations in general are above the law.
Oh, but, of course you can't just incorporate yourself and then go on a murder spree! You're not a ruling elite. Only the ruling elites are allowed to do that. Also, another prerequisite seems to be profit somehow. Here the profit motive for your murder spree: you're collecting raw material to sell some wonderful sausage [scaryforkids.com] at a handsome profit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @04:05AM
The corporation in question was the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @03:05AM
From the CNN/Money link:
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:33AM (3 children)
To put it more simply, entities such as Uber can rent racetracks or other proving grounds to test their self-driving cars. There are plenty of stunt-drivers who work for Car and Driver or Consumer Reports who would love to handle that racetrack alongside them and see how they handle "lane-changing" at high speeds. Antilock brakes are a thing nowadays. Unless, like I stated, self-driving cars are a Jew/CIA plot to kill.
Analysis: faggot Silicon Valley (and even San Diego, Qualcomm has some things in the works, also LIDAR-based) programmers think they know how to drive, even though they never drive to work*, at least not aggressively. They drive wimpy cars with automatic transmissions, if at all. They drive Prius cars and others like them.
Recommendation: relocate your "self-driving car" divisions to the South and Midwest and hire a heapin' healpin' of the engineers who live out there, who understand the importance of driving. Otherwise, have them run the Fontana racetrack and then put them in L.A.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday May 26 2018, @04:32AM
Ahhh.... the magic of "hold harmless" clauses.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @08:20AM (1 child)
Sir, I do not want that shit in the midwest. I understand that the people out here are of little value. Believe me, I would sacrifice any number of them were I to have my way. That alone would reduce the number of five car pileups the moment a single raindrop falls from the sky from roughly seven a day in the shithole city I reside within to what I can only assume would be two or three.
However, people are panicky stupid animals enough here such that they do not need automated one ton motorized paperweights barrelling down the road at them for them to purposefully and deliberately ruin the lives of people on the road around them. My recommendation would be to wish that shit upon Utah, because at least then you are visiting wrath upon the religious, which is to say: people who actually deserve it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 27 2018, @04:08AM
Give them a week and they'll be acclimated to the strange new thing. Works for elk too.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Saturday May 26 2018, @02:20AM
It's worse. It wasn't fit for purpose. Every person driving has to be able to emergency stop, swerve if possible (to avoid directly hitting a human being), and keep enough distance to stop. At the very least, every moment braking is taking away speed that might otherwise kill. It would take some pretty impressive AI to evaluate all of it in microseconds and make a decision like a human being can. You don't get to just not address emergency braking, especially because it's a behavior you're not very successful about dealing with in simulations. Which is what it sounds like, "Emergency braking is too hard".
As if, that skill was optional to begin with. It's like deciding to do live tests with an airplane who's designers put it in no landing gear, because it was fucking with their weight limits.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Informative) by inertnet on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:39AM
It's a self driving car alright, but it's not a self braking car.
Whoever thought that was a good idea should indeed be sued.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Saturday May 26 2018, @12:49AM
The damned thing was high on weed. Nasty stuff, that weed. Get a car high on weed and the damn thing is so laid back that they hit the pedestrian then go: "whoah, dude, what was that puff of red stuff."
Seriously though, this technology is not ready for prime time, IMO. Promising, yes. Close, yes. But not when it kills people that don't choose to be a part of it. Now, if they wanted it to be a COP car, well that's a different story! :) (yes, it's a joke. One of my best friends is a cop.)
(Score: 3, Funny) by MostCynical on Saturday May 26 2018, @12:52AM (3 children)
Uber has judged you, pedestrian, and you are not worthy.
let this be a lesson to you- stay out of the way.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Saturday May 26 2018, @03:45AM (2 children)
Funny yes, but also quite true: they DID make a conscious decision to disable the system do it wouldn't make false, annoying braking.
So instead of pushing the safety in the system to 11, they jacked it down to, say, 2 and ,"we'll deal with the consequences later".
Someone dies, we pressure the family with "she was crossing the road illegally, here's a fuck load of money, now go away" and the family went "O'tay!"
Should be forced to turn it back up to 11.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @09:50AM (1 child)
> they DID make a conscious decision to disable the system ...
Not "they". Someone (or someones) had to make that decision. What kind of software professional would continue to work for a company where that decision was possible? I'd like to think that I would have quit long before (but of course hindsight is 20-20).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:20AM
The software people most likely did it with the understanding that the vehicle would have a full time driver watching the road while a tech monitored the system. If that understanding had been correct, there might not have been an accident, as the driver could have avoided the collision had she not been distracted. Combining the driving and monitoring jobs is the core problem, and that falls entirely on management.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:26AM (2 children)
So it has already learned to drive like a human, that other piece of new a bit further down the page, and is taking lessons -- dead men tell no tales, better to run the fucker over and get away as fast as you can! Yiha!
OK sure I get it, we have all run code that we where a bit to lazy to do in our heads just to see exactly what it did and what it spat out and then tweak it by running and adjusting a few more times. But people don't get run over and die due to that. It seems like some fairly horribly programming mistakes if you don't think it's a great idea to BREAK after you hit something large. Perhaps it's Machine Learning AI and it just have not gotten to that part yet, or it just didn't see the point of it and skipped that step since it was statistically so unlikely it had hit a human and that the human was dead.
So which lucky state has the weakest laws for lawsuits? Which is the lucky state that is going to become the new home to the UBER-murdermobile?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)
Maybe some of the more responsible players will buy Uber's technology, to bury it. Otherwise, all the self driving car companies are going to be painted black with the same bad brush. I don't think Google/Waymo would have to stretch very far to buy the whole division and have it all scrapped (or keep the Volvos & expensive sensors for their own R&D).
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday May 26 2018, @02:51AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:29AM (6 children)
This level of incompetence should be illegal! why not alert the fucking driver at very least!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @01:40AM
Did you read the full preliminary report by NTSB? It's even worse than the excerpt, although written in very bland, non-committal language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @03:29AM (2 children)
The thing would probably beep every few seconds. Can't distract the "driver" from working the data logger.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @03:52AM (1 child)
Or, they could, you know, have more than one person in the car. One person monitoring the actual driving and somebody else managing the logging and other things. If you've seen the video from inside the car, you'll see that the driver was spending as much time looking at the read outs as looking for objects in the road.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Saturday May 26 2018, @08:06AM
Two people, earning $x per hour, means far smaller bonus for the manager than just one.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday May 27 2018, @02:23AM (1 child)
It did.
"At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2) [...] The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action."
What's that, you say? A human cannot react and brake within 1.3 seconds? It's a surprise to everyone, especially Uber.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 27 2018, @02:41AM
You missed the bit where the self-driving system does not give the safety driver any indication that it might be a good time to put on the brakes. This is because it "cries wolf" so often that the human would ignore it anyway. The 1.3 seconds before impact was pulled out of log files.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:24AM (1 child)
Particularly damning is the part where they disabled the Volvo's factory emergency braking system which could have saved this life.
It was on public roads. Much like engineers that design bridges, we must hold the engineers of this "self driving" vehicle system accountable. I know, I know. It would be theoretically more effective to hold the management of the company accountable. we all know that is actually impossible.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 26 2018, @11:34AM
And...Volvo let them defeat the self-braking system. They are partners -- see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volvo-suv-self-driving-future-business-ride-hailing-lyft-waymo [theguardian.com]
While I do not know details, safety systems like self-braking are normally pretty hard to defeat[1]--my guess is that Volvo told them how to turn it off, or possibly gave Uber a special version of the firmware that included that capability.
[1] One exception is traction control (prevents wheelspin), which usually has a button. This is because there are times on snow or ice where spinning the wheels a bit is the only way to move the vehicle.