Presumably because it spent a large portion of the time in what we would describe in a human being as a state of mild confusion it didn't slow down or react in such instances and it struck the person it had recognized from a substantial distance going 40mph and killed them. Same as this car would have killed its driver.
Regulators shouldn't allow a car on the public roads that might cross the center line and murder a family who didn't get a say in the other drivers choice of vehicle even if said car on average kills fewer people because if we demand better we'll get it. There is too much money to be made for the avenue to be ignored. It seems to me that superior instrumentation could tell the difference between a plastic bag in the wind. It should be required until they can prove they can do it like a human being on vision alone.
That is only based on butchered up statistics. You would get very good statistics with a goddamn robot vacuum on a motorway, because it is a relatively uneventful driving environment. Guess where people will take over the wheel? In dangerous situations, basically self-filtering any negatives from the statistics. Very convenient.
The goal should be as few casualties as possible NOT better than the incompetent idiots who currently drive cars.
Maybe not )slam_ but if I am not confident what's the thing on the road ahead of me, I slow down. At night, when oncoming traffic can blind me, I slow down to give the driver (me) time to react. Otherwise if hitting obstacles is acceptable anyone can create a self driving vehicle.
Or worse, be the one responsible for killing or maiming others.
The alternative is to require the car to be able to see everything all the time and treat gaps in its view as "might be something there", but doing that in the dark is really only possible with LIDAR at the moment.
Not all humans manage to do that, and they're liable if they crash into some other car. Loose their insurance and cannot drive anymore if they do it too often.
Which seems a good enough reason that we need to add regulation that these vehicles must have multiple redundant sensors that can operate at any permutation of sunlight/night/rain/snow/fog.
Radar can also see at night, but has poor resolution. Sonar is good at looking through fog but may be unreliable at highway speeds. Lidar really seems like the only viable option here. Maybe even lidar + radar.
I think it's interesting that Elon Musk always says we don't need lidar because it's a visual world. Lidar is a visual sensor. Just an active one.
We manage to get away with 2 2D sensors, that can actively move around and we have freaking 3 billions of neurons with extensive knowledge of the physical world. We are not giving back only a 3D approximation due to the angle difference between our eyes - we also semantically analyze it, knowing what a car, a tree, the sky, etc are, with their usual dimensions in directions where we don’t even see it.
There's a reason you have radar even on AV's with LiDAR; the plastic bag doesn't absorb much energy
I'm not sure how else this would work. Do you mean the system may see that there's an obstacle, but doesn't know what it is, so it ignores it?
If that's the case, then fixing it is nearly an impossibility. Certainly you wouldn't want to slam the brakes for a plastic bag floating in the wind, but if every obstacle is treated the same, that's what you'll end up doing. But if you try to build a system that can make a decision on every kind of obstacle, it's an extremely exhaustive list.