Regulations are written with blood.
I've recently wondered why there isn't some sort of "test", where they throw various scenarios at the self-driving cars, and see how they react.
Apparently killing bystanders is now okay, if there's a software component to the massacre.
I'd like to see Uber's logs of all the other pedestrian and vehicle near misses where the computer took corrective action.
What testing did Uber do on a closed course with adversarial conditions? Ball rolls into road with a child following, pedestrians walking under a flickering street lamp, people dressed in costumes, a parade, a protest, service workers, a pickup truck with a lost load.
When the driver fails to do a task that the computer seems necessary with a high degree of confidence, both get shutdown for further evaluation.
To my knowledge the fast frame rate (>9 Hz) thermal sensors are still ITAR-restricted, seriously limiting their application in autonomous vehicles among the other things.
This is the salient point that I was looking for.
Interestingly, US and European headlights standards are very, very different and this accident is a clear example. US headlights are intended to "illuminate the roadway", whereas European headlights are intended to "illuminate obstacles on the road and in the margins". That's not just a wording difference, rather the part numbers for US-spec and European-spec headlight assemblies are different.
When you walk outside in the daytime, everything is bathed in a uniform light from the sun, but you have no trouble distinguishing between objects, as they emit and reflect light differently.
Probably not relevant to conditions at 10pm on Monday, when it was between 70F and 57F (the range for 6pm Monday to 12am Tuesday.)
> Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that.
Sure, when it was 92F the pavement would probably be 140+F.
> How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is proably +/- 5 degrees of that?
At night, the pavement would be much cooler than a human; at the high temperature you report, it would probably be much hotter; there's a place in between where the problem you have would be occur, sure, but it's neither at the high nor, more to the point, in the conditions when the accident occurred.
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2) They should be using a dark adapted / night vision camera and probably are, the video feed presented is just that, the best one that "presents".
3) They should be using thermal infrared to spot living things
4) They were severely over driving their headlights if what we are seeing is "reality" as seen by the onboard computer.
I want to know how much access to the hardware Uber had after the accident, including physical and remote. I also want to see the streaming logs and full provenance.