
Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality - KKKKkkkk1
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber-mobileye/mobileye-says-its-software-would-have-seen-pedestrian-in-uber-fatality-idUSKBN1H22LM
======
reificator
Look. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I
also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human
drivers.

But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car
also have run into a school shooting unarmed?

You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you
can say is that you had a similar situation under controlled circumstances and
reacted appropriately.

This is publicly patting yourself on the back for a competitor killing
someone. To say it's in bad taste is an understatement.

~~~
zer00eyz
Except their technology was ON the car that was involved... they are part of
the story -

Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.

~~~
pdpi
The whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you,
but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time
seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.

~~~
c22
Mobileye isn't a "self-driving" system, it's a collision prevention/mitigation
system, like airbags or ABS. Leaving it on while a human controls the car
hasn't been seen as a disaster.

~~~
bladers
first of all Mobileye does have a self driving system (their EyeQ4 chips is
for Level 3-4 self driving). However Amon was referring to their EyeQ3 chip
from 2014 which is installed in 24 million cars and have billions of miles

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bsaul
i get the feeling of some people here calling for bad taste, but mobileye ceo
has been a long time proponent of playing it safe, underpromise, warning
against the theoretical limits of modern technics, and has claimed for a very
long time that fully autonomous driving wasn't doable in a near future ( proof
of that in the numerous videos you can find on youtube).

i guess it's only fair for him to speak up one more time now that his fears
has materialized.

~~~
gvb
Speaking up is understandable: Mobileye supplies its technology to Aptiv who
supplies the system to Volvo for the XC90. The reports are that their system
was disabled by Uber at the time of the accident. It is understandable that
Mobileye does not want to share the blame in this case.

Ref: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-
disa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-
volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality)

 _“We don’t want people to be confused or think it was a failure of the
technology that we supply for Volvo, because that’s not the case,” Zach
Peterson, a spokesman for Aptiv Plc, said by phone. The Volvo XC90’s standard
advanced driver-assistance system “has nothing to do” with the Uber test
vehicle’s autonomous driving system, he said._

[...]

 _Intel Corp.’s Mobileye, which makes chips and sensors used in collision-
avoidance systems and is a supplier to Aptiv._

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gok
We really won’t know what happened until the NTSB report comes out, but I’m
not convinced this was an object detection failure. It seems really possible
to me that the sensors detected the bike-walking person as a bicyclist, and a
bicyclist in a different lane is not a reason to slam on the brakes. They
might have just forgotten to add a rule that a bicyclist in a parallel lane
_is_ a reason to brake if it’s perpendicular to you.

~~~
CydeWeys
Any sane self-driving system needs to be a lot smarter than this. It needs to
do motion tracking and estimation of future position. Otherwise it's going to
run into lots of cyclists and pedestrians, and continue to fail for objects it
can't identify (imagine a cyclist carrying something big and bulky). The
software needs to be smart enough to not hit anything, and in order to do so
it needs to extrapolate future positions of objects based on their current
velocity.

~~~
gok
Obviously it needs to be smarter. As for motion tracking, it might have gotten
confused as the victim stopped moving. But I’m just not sure that the issue
was the sensors or object detection.

~~~
CydeWeys
The victim stopped moving ... right in the path of the car, which never
braked. It needs to be a lot smarter if it doesn't even understand that it
should break when there's a large unidentified object, the size of a person
plus something else, right in the lane it's traveling in.

We won't know yet exactly what happened, though hopefully the NTSB is getting
full access to all sensor data from the car. It could be a huge combination
failure of multiple different things. It sounds like it's nowhere safe enough
to be driving autonomously on public roads though.

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linsomniac
I'm struggling with the question: Who's fault is this?

The pedestrian for walking across the street, wearing dark colors, being
oblivious to traffic?

The human in the drivers seat for not paying attention?

Uber kind of gets the laundry list: For reducing the number of "safety
drivers" from 2 to 1, for not using eye tracking to ensure the safety driver
was paying attention, for faulty software or hardware that didn't detect the
pedestrian, or for software that after getting the sensor input made a
decision to not adjust speed or change lanes, for having some of the worst
"intervention" numbers in the industry yet plowing ahead with removing a
safety driver from the car...

Who gets the blame?

I'm mostly a "get rid of idiotic safety tags and let natural selection sort it
out" sort of person, but on the other hand I feel that piloting a multi-ton
killing machine needs to be treated as a huge responsibility.

~~~
2474
I wondered the same thing on the following thread, posted about a month ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16477295)

I believe some manufacturers will take entire responsibility while in some
cases it's the person that "starts" the self-driving vehicle. Legislation
seems to be on a state-by-state basis at the moment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability)

------
omgPhysics
Good for these people. If Uber really had lidar+radar [1] and disabled Volvo
safety features [2] (such as radar) there is no excuse for this. Uber should
have clarified the video released may not be representative of the information
they have.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/heres-how-ubers-self-
drivi...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/heres-how-ubers-self-driving-cars-
are-supposed-to-detect-pedestrians/) [2]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-
disa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-
volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality)

------
techtofixpeople
Good for these people. Uber has lidar+radar that should have seen this and did
not make an effort to publicly respond to the police video that was released.
Everyone who works on these problems knows camera exposure is very tricky...
And in this case deceptive.

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linsomniac
Ok, Mobileye would have seen the pedestrian 1 second before impact. That's not
important though...

The important thing is would it have saved her life? Would it have taken
action and if so when and how?

It's not clear that Uber's platform didn't see the pedestrian. In fact, I find
it unlikely that it didn't see her, between radar and the bike, lidar, and
optical (and sonar).

I think the situation here is that there were many failures and decisions that
led to this death. Some of it is Uber being too cowboy, but there are a lot of
other factors too.

~~~
ars
> The important thing is would it have saved her life?

It probably would have. Slamming on the brake for 1 second would have reduced
the car's speed enough to change things from fatal to seriously injured.

According to:
[http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/Physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Kin...](http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/Physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Kinematics/BrakingDistData.html)

In one second you can shed 20 miles/hour of speed. That would take the car
from 38mph to 18mph. (Those numbers are overly precise, but gives you an idea
of the reduction that can be accomplished.)

~~~
russdill
Not only that, she was crossing from left to right and was hit by the edge of
the right side of the car. She could have been missed entirely.

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pramodzion
Using Tensorflow :
[https://twitter.com/pramodxyle/status/978498938243227648?s=2...](https://twitter.com/pramodxyle/status/978498938243227648?s=21)

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aclimatt
Was Mobileye actually part of the implementation of Uber's self-driving
technology and was somehow disabled or not used properly? Or is this just a
piece of not-so-submarine PR? If the latter, I don't understand the point of
this article.

~~~
Mononokay
Uber disabled Mobileye's detection system in the car, from what I can
understand.

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avip
With all respect to Sha'ashua, this is empty PR. mobileye is a decision
support system for human drivers, they can't make any claim regarding this
accident.

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adamnemecek
All these people and companies trying to profit from this accident is really
poor taste.

~~~
toomuchtodo
This is not profiting, this is self preservation.

~~~
admax88q
If the purpose of a company is profit, is there really a distinction?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Definitely. One PR approach would be to capitalize off of this tragedy for
sales. That doesn’t appear to be the approach they’re taking though (“Please
don’t regulate us into oblivion” or “Self driving can be done safely, don’t
judge the industry by the failures of one participant”).

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dbsvsv
This reminds me, does anybody know what's up with Geohotz's comma.ai?

~~~
rrdharan
The project was canceled and geohotz posted the code on GitHub:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2016/10/28/commaai_car_kit...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2016/10/28/commaai_car_kit_cancelled/)

[https://github.com/commaai](https://github.com/commaai)

