TheOneWithTheHairDriverless Cruise car runs over woman hit by another driver
JoBoShould the Cruise car have not started moving if there was a person still on the crosswalk? This whole sad affair raises many questions.
There are some questions but “should cars start moving while a person is still on the crosswalk?” is surely not one of them.
halcyoncmdrA person laying on the ground in a crosswalk was likely never considered by the team to include in their training data. Those outlier situations are exactly what real world data is needed for. And the only way to properly train for most of these situations is to drive in the real world. The real world isn’t perfect situations and nice lines on fresh asphalt so while base training in perfect situations is useful, it will still miss the exact same situation in a real world environment with crappy infrastructure.
Not sure what or how Cruise uses the data collected in real-time, but I can see camera visuals categorizing a person laying in the crosswalk as something like damage to painted lines, and small debris that can be ignored. Other sensors like radar and lidar might have categorized returns as something like echoes or false results that could be ignored, again because a person laying in the crosswalk is extremely unlikely. False data returns happen all the time with things like radar and lidar, millions of data points are ignored as outliers or info that can be safely ignored, and sometimes that categorization is incorrect.
A person laying on the ground in a crosswalk was likely never considered by the team to include in their training data
I didn’t bother reading any further than this. The person was on the crosswalk when both cars started moving. Neither car should have been moving while anyone was still on the crosswalk.
Thats the whole point of their comment. The car did not recognize anyone was on the crosswalk because it was never trained to look for people laying in the crosswalk.
She was standing up when the cars started moving.
ChozoThey are 100% trained on bodies laying prone on the ground.
And that’s fine. But if it’s unable to recognize any object in the road, it’s not fit for purpose. The fact that the object was a person just makes it so much worse.
Agreed. I'm not defending Cruise at all. They should have humans in the car if they are testing. Or at least a drone-style driver sitting in a room watching a camera feed. I wonder if the car thought there was just a speed bump ahead. Some speed bumps are striped similar to crosswalks. I can see situations where the autopilot can't determine if something is a speed bump or genuine obstruction (either false positive or negative).
That was the exact moment I called bullshit as well. You’d damn well better plan for people tripping and falling. It happens all the time, but generally is pretty minor if not exacerbated by being run over. This is like saying they didn’t train it on people holding canes or in wheelchairs.
It’s not about the ability to recognise someone lying in the road (although they obviously do need to be able to recognise something like that).
She was still walking, upright, on the crosswalk when both cars started moving. No car, driverless or otherwise, should be moving forward just because the lights changed.