The pedestrian killed Sunday by a self-driving Uber Technologies Inc. SUV in Arizona had crossed at least one open lane of road before being hit, according to a video of the crash that puts fresh scrutiny on the ride-hailing company's autonomous vehicle technology.
Experts who reviewed video of the crash released by the Tempe Police Department on Wednesday said Uber's self-driving sensors should have detected 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg as she walked a bicycle across the open road at 10 p.m., despite the dark conditions.
The Uber SUV's "lidar [light detection and ranging] and radar absolutely should have detected her and classified her as something other than a stationary object," Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies self-driving cars, said in an email.
Smith said the video doesn't fully explain the incident but "strongly suggests a failure by Uber's automated driving system and a lack of due care by Uber's driver (as well as by the victim)."
The video shows the vehicle driving for about 4 seconds before ending just as Herzberg is about to be hit by the SUV's front, right bumper. The woman can be seen taking several steps while visible and appeared to be moving at a normal walking pace as she's crossing the road outside of a crosswalk and does not look up at the SUV. Police have said the car didn't slow or swerve to avoid the impact. The woman later died at a hospital.
"Uber has to explain what happened," said Mike Ramsey, an analyst at researcher Gartner Inc. who focuses on autonomous driving technologies. "There's only two possibilities: the sensors failed to detect her, or the decision-making software decided that this was not something to stop for."
Uber's self-driving system includes radar, cameras and lidar. The system is designed to provide a 360-degree virtual view of the environment surrounding the car. Ramsey said it is "mystifying" why the vehicle didn't react given that lidar systems like the one used on Uber's SUV have a detection range of at least 109 yards (roughly the length of a football field) and work better at night than during the daytime.
"The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine's loved ones," Uber said in an emailed statement after the video's release. "Our cars remain grounded, and we're assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can."
Herzberg becomes visible in the car's headlights as she pushes a bicycle across the road at least 2 seconds before the impact.
"This is similar to the average reaction time for a driver. That means that, if the video correctly reflects visible conditions, an alert driver may have at least attempted to swerve or brake," Smith said.
The comments contrast with those made by the Tempe police chief, who told multiple media outlets that the pedestrian moved suddenly in front of the car and the crash didn't seem preventable after reviewing footage of the collision.
"It's very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode," Sylvia Moir, the police chief in Tempe told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Sean Alexander, of Crash Analysis & Reconstruction LLC, said a human eye sees objects in dark areas better than video cameras do. That suggests the video released by Arizona police could give the impression that the pedestrian appeared in the field of view later than a human would have spotted her.
"Video makes everything in the light pattern brighter and everything out of the beam darker. A human eye sees it much clearer," Alexander said, after watching the video.
The agency released a statement Tuesday saying that "fault has not been determined in this case" and that a decision on criminal charges would be left to county prosecutors once the investigation is complete.
The video also included footage of the Uber backup driver who monitors the vehicle's operation from behind the wheel while the computers drive. Out of approximately 13 seconds of that recording, the driver was looking down and away from the road for about 10 seconds. The driver looked up about a second before the recording ends and gasped upon seeing the impending collision.
"Even if the safety driver had been totally paying attention, there's an awkwardness with the machine if you're anticipating the machine is going to be able to handle a situation," Ramsey said. "You don't know when you should jump in."
While it's too early to say why the car hit the woman, the video doesn't show the crash was unavoidable, said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington who specializes in robotics and artificial intelligence.
"The idea that the video absolves Uber is essentially incorrect," Calo said.
The important question for investigators won't be whether the woman was visible in the low-definition video, he said. It will be what the car's sophisticated sensors picked up and how the software interpreted that data.
"Even if the cameras did not perceive her in time, why didn't the lidar see her and why didn't the software predict that she would continue on the path she was on?" Calo said.
The video has been obtained by the National Transportation Safety Board and will be examined as part of its probe. The safety board has increasingly used video in its investigations and has a lab in Washington where it examines various recording devices to tease out useful forensic data.
Uber said Monday that it was pausing tests of all its self-driving vehicles on public roads in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and the greater Phoenix area. In Boston, self-driving startup NuTonomy Inc. halted its tests after city officials requested a pause following the Arizona crash.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Newcomer of Bloomberg News.
Business on 03/23/2018