Uber’s self-driving car could not detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk
> 5.6 seconds before impact, it classified her as a vehicle. Then it changed its mind to “other,” then to vehicle again, back to “other,” then to bicycle, then to “other” again, and finally back to bicycle.System can't decide what's happening.> It wasn’t until 1.2 seconds before the impact that the system recognized that the SUV was going to hit HerzbergSystem is too slow to realize something serious is happening.> That triggered what Uber called “action suppression,” in which the system held off braking for one secondA hardcoded 1 second delay during a potential emergency situation. Horrifying.I bet they added it because the system kept randomly thinking something serious was going to happen for a few milliseconds when everything was going fine. If you ever find yourself doing that for a safety critical piece of software, you should stop and reconsider what you are doing. This is a hacky patch over a serious underlying classification issue. You need to fix the underlying problem, not hackily patch over it.How is this not the title of the story? This is so much worse than the "it couldn't see her as a person, only as a bicycle". At least the car would still try to avoid a bicycle, in principle, instead of blindly gliding into it while hoping for the best.> with 0.2 seconds left before impact, the car sounded an audio alarm, and Vasquez took the steering wheel, disengaging the autonomous system. Nearly a full second after striking Herzberg, Vasquez hit the brakes.And then top it off with systemic issues around the backup driver not actually being ready to react.