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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

1) It does NOT show what the LIDAR sees.

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.

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(4) is the key point here, if that's the only meaningful telemetry, they're going way too fast. If you can't see then you can't stop. This is still a computer failure.

There is no way, full stop, that Arizona regulators allowed a driverless car with only a single dashcam quality level camera as telemetry to drive around. Either Uber broke the law and let a car on the road that doesn't have working LIDAR and IR and possibly RADAR or the software just doesn't work.

To wit it was not "driverless" as there was a supposed "safety driver" behind the wheel.

What controls does Uber have that the "safety driver" is doing their job? When the computer gets confused or its computed probability drops below a threshold, when and how does it alert the driver. How many of these self driving testbeds have a person in the seat just for CYA and not actual safety ?

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.

Would be cool if the driver had to placebo-drive and the car used that input to assess discrepancies and validate confidence.

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.

I don't think that would work. Driving is not a fully conscious, deliberate see-analyze-act loop. A lot of your control movements are subconscious, and you expect instant, correct feedback from the vehicle. To see what I mean - if you've ever played a racing game, try opening a racing replay/Let's play video on YouTube, pretend for a while that you're in control (use your WASD keys), and see how your brain complains about your inputs having no impact on reality.

From the video it appears that the safety driver was checking her phone at the time of the incident.

Arizona is picked as a testbed for self driving cars precisely because regulations are so lax.

Regulations are written with blood.

Unsurprisingly, not the blood of the regulators.

What kind of regulations does Arizona have?

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.

These would have been the 1st battery tests by the car company, surely? Child chasing ball is obviously important scenario. Lidar/sw didnt recognize human/bike combo? But blob was moving & system failed to see or avoid moving blob.That makes me think there should also be a pretrip system check like airlines.

Yeah, well, whatever. "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs," to quote another comment from this discussion. /s

Apparently killing bystanders is now okay, if there's a software component to the massacre.

> 3) They should be using thermal infrared to spot living things

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.

US manufacturers are allowed to sell 30Hz+ products domestically. Not sure what EU (FR/DE) and Israeli manufacturers can sell.

> They were severely over driving their headlights if what we are seeing is "reality" as seen by the onboard computer.

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.

replying to the comment above. It is not a terribly lit road. You are being fooled by the terrible dynamic range of the camera.

Hopefully the NTSB has direct access to all the other telemetry and will release it as well. It would be greatly beneficial to the public if we could see the LIDAR and thermal logs as well.

It's Arizona. I just checked. The high today was 92F. Pavement would almost certainly be warmer than that. How's a thermal camera supposed to detect 98F on a background that is proably +/- 5 degrees of that?

That's the temperature at the peak of day, right? The temperature in the middle of the night, when the crash occurred, should be closer to the low.

Even lows are still in the upper 70s, and again, asphalt will absorb heat during the day and then release it at night. 10pm isn't exactly "middle of the night", either, it's only 3 hours after sunset.

Thermal cameras care about more than just the absolute temperature of an object. The emissive and reflective properties of the material (in infrared) also matter significantly. A human being would almost certainly be visible in a thermal imaging view of that scene.

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.

> The high today was 92F.

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.

So, if the asphalt is 140F when it's 92F, what's it when it's 65? About 100?

See comment above. We routinely walk around (and avoid objects) even though the entire field is uniformly bathed in the light of a single light source.

The reason why it's so hot is because of radiated heat from the sun. It'd be much closer to air temp at 10 pm, well after sunset.

Unless you're going downhill, FLIR (forward looking infrared) should not be pointing at asphalt.

There would still be situations when you'd be attempting to detect a human with a hot asphalt background. Such as a crosswalk at the base of a hill (C is the car and X is the crosswalk):

          ______
         /
 C____X_/

If you redefine the temperature scale so 90F is 0, then that difference between 98 and 92 becomes the difference between 8 and 2, which suddenly looks a lot more significant. So I think your concern is based more on the arbitrary 0 of the F scale.

If a thermal camera can't detect a person on the road, then a thermal camera is the wrong camera to use. The exact technology isn't important - the important thing is, the vehicle failed to detect a human being crossing in front of it.

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