Re:Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set t...
by bluGill on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:43PM
(#17146409)
Humans cannot react fast enough. There was just 1.3 seconds allowed. Drivers ed teaches 2 second following distance for a reason: it takes you most of that time to realize there is a problem and get your foot on the brake. In the best case a human would just hit the "okay to stop" button as the accident happened.
Of course cars cannot change speed instantly anyway - it is likely that even if the button was hit in time the accident was still unavoidable at 1.3 seconds. The car should have been slowing down hard long before it knew what the danger was. (I haven't read the report - it may or may not have been possible for the computer to avoid the accident)
Re:Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set t...
by smogcutter on Thursday May 24, 2018 @04:09PM
(#17147843)
At 40 mph 1.3 seconds is 76 feet, right around the threshold of stopping distance if the computer slammed on the brakes at that moment. At the very least, it's the difference between an ER visit and a fatality. Far too short a time for a human to react to a warning, though.
Re:Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set t...
by romwell on Thursday May 24, 2018 @09:44PM
(#17150009)
> Far too short a time for a human to react to a warning, though.
Simply swerving left would have avoided the accident. Stopping is not the only thing the human driver could have done!
Re:Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set t...
by smogcutter on Friday May 25, 2018 @02:31PM
(#17156605)
Sure. What I mean is that if they expect to correct this with some kind of "oh shit" alarm for the driver, 1.3 seconds isn't enough time to do anything helpful.
The whole thing is nuts. Imagine a human driver seeing the same thing the computer did, and responding the same way: they'd be in handcuffs.
Re:Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set t...
by davrosthedalek on Thursday May 24, 2018 @03:44PM
(#17147586)
Average reaction time for humans for a visual alarm is 1/4 second. So more than a second left. And that's a second at the current speed. At 60 mph (was that the speed?), that's about 25 meters. With 1 g breaking for 1 s, the car's speed could have been reduced to 27 mph, and the person on the street would have had almost 0.4s more time to jump away, alerted by the sound of the car breaking.
Re:Uber Self-Driving Car That Struck Pedestrian Wasn’t Set t...
by bluGill on Thursday May 24, 2018 @04:25PM
(#17148059)
Reaction time is only part of the picture. First you recognize the issue. Then you have to move your body. In court they generally use 1.5 seconds for all of this. Your best case is .7 seconds, but this situation was clearly not the best case - even if the human had been paying attention it would be much worse.
http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/reactiontime.html has a good discussion (starting with why 1.5 seconds is not the answer)
>The system is not designed to alert the operator.
>The vehicle operator intervened less than a second before impact by engaging the steering wheel.
>She had been monitoring the self-driving system interface
It seems like this was really aggravated by bad UX. Had the system alerted the user and the user had a big red "take whatever emergency action you think is best or stop ASAP if you don't know what to do" button to mash this could would have had a much better chance of being avoided.
Things coming onto the road unexpectedly isn't exactly an edge case when it comes to crash causing situations. I don't see why they wouldn't at least alert the user if the system detects a possible collision with an object coming from the side and the object is classified as one of a certain type (pedestrian, bike other vehicle, etc, no need to alert for things classified as plastic bags).
I don't see why they disabled the Volvo system. If they were setting up mannequins in a parking lot and teaching the AI to slalom around them I can see why that might be useful but I don't see why they would want to override the Volvo system when on the road. At the very least the cases where the systems disagree are useful for analysis.