The Uber victim did come from the shadows. Arizona gets dark at night, especially during a new moon. The question isn't why the optical cameras didn't see her, it's why did the LIDAR failed to detect her?
Not knowing the law as it applies for (semi-)autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, I am very curious how this one turns out.
Based on my experience driving at night (In Norway, where it also gets pretty dark), even in rural areas with no street lights, you tend to discover pedestrians -even the ones not wearing safety reflectors- significantly more than a second and a half before you cross paths with them.
So - while the vehicle is driving autonomously, there's still a driver (or whatever we should call it, seeing as they do not drive as such) behind the wheel.
If the driver had paid attention to the road, rather than her cell phone, this accident likely wouldn't have happened.
So - who is to blame, legally speaking? The 'driver' for not paying attention? The coder implementing the control algorithms? The HW engineering team deciding which sensors to use? Someone else?
This will be a lot simpler when vehicles are 'properly' autonomous - but right now, it seems AVs simply give the 'driver' all sorts of incentive for not paying attention, while still not absolving them of responsibility. That's the worst of both worlds.
The released video looks like the latter, though it could also just be standalone dashcam footage. It is also pretty mangled by compression, especially the dark parts are just completely blocky, so it is probably not a good indicator of what the vehicle saw.
OTOH, bikes can be notoriously hard on image recognition, for example it is not unheard of that reflective rims are interpreted as continuation of a curb or lane marking. LIDAR and RADAR should see them, though, and they probably did, so it is indeed unclear where it all went wrong.
The question is indeed why the electronics failed to detect her, but there's something really wrong with car lights like that.
I think there is a question of why didn't the optical cameras detect her. It doesn't seem poorly lit.
I think there are serious questions about why the Uber car didn't detect the victim, given all the sensors it was supposed to be using, but "came from the shadows" is an accurate description based on the Google Street View and overhead views of the crash site.
It helps to read the entire article before commenting.