Found this
useful blog post on the subject by a software engineer who's worked with robocars.
The police released a short video clip of the accident that Uber turned over from a dashboard camera and an interior camera inside the car; it's linked in the blog post if you want to watch it. The point of impact is removed from the video, but you do see the person who's about to die about a millisecond before she's hit, so be aware of that.
To the layperson, a few things are immediately obvious. One, the pedestrian crossed on a dark road with few streetlights, but doesn't appear to react at all to the car moving toward her
with its headlights on until it hits her, like she was unaware it was even there. Two, she was not at a crosswalk or anything, so as a rule legal fault for the accident would lie with her for being in the road where pedestrians weren't supposed to be. Three, Uber's "safety driver" spends most of the video looking down at something like she's on her phone. She only looks up a couple times briefly before going back to looking down, and during the crucial seconds before impact when there was still time to stop she was looking down, glancing up and panic-shitting herself only a fraction of a second before impact.
The post makes these points, as well as some more technical ones. Here's the top-line summary; all the points are elaborated on in more detail later in the post:
She is crossing, we now see, at exactly this spot where two storm drains are found in the curb. It is opposite the paved path in the median which is marked by the signs telling pedestrians not to cross at this location. She is walking at a moderate pace.
The road is empty of other cars. Here are the big issues:
- On this empty road, the LIDAR is very capable of detecting her. If it was operating, there is no way that it did not detect her 3 to 4 seconds before the impact, if not earlier. She would have come into range just over 5 seconds before impact.
- On the dash-cam style video, we only see her 1.5 seconds before impact. However, the human eye and quality cameras have a much better dynamic range than this video, and should have also been able to see her even before 5 seconds. From just the dash-cam video, no human could brake in time with just 1.5 seconds warning. The best humans react in just under a second, many take 1.5 to 2.5 seconds.
- The human safety driver did not see her because she was not looking at the road. She seems to spend most of the time before the accident looking down to her right, in a style that suggests looking at a phone.
- While a basic radar which filters out objects which are not moving towards the car would not necessarily see her, a more advanced radar also should have detected her and her bicycle (though triggered no braking) as soon as she entered the lane to the left, probably 4 seconds before impact at least. Braking could trigger 2 seconds before, in theory enough time.)
To be clear, while the car had the right-of-way and the victim was clearly unwise to cross there, especially without checking regularly in the direction of traffic, this is a situation where any properly operating robocar following "good practices," let alone "best practices," should have avoided the accident regardless of pedestrian error.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn