So while y’all have been debating whether or not the engineers can get it right...
Intel and Aptiv came out with news that the Volvo Uber was using had the Volvo safety collision avoidance system on board.
And it had been disabled.
And Intel took the grainy crappy footage provided by Uber from the visible light camera and fed it into the Volvo system and the vehicle would have started braking approximately one second before impact.
BUT... the Volvo system uses a much better camera than Uber was apparently using. Aptiv and Intel have been kind to Uber and not discussed how many seconds sooner their standard camera and chipset would have reacted but most people who are analyzing it say the accident never would have occurred with the Intel/Aptiv system on, that was already in the vehicle.
The system on board the Volvo has been deployed and working since 2014. It’s not new.
To add insult to inury, numerous amateur investigators have now driven the exact same stretch of road and filmed it with awful cell phone cameras and sensors that are ancient, and some with more modern cameras.
The consensus? There literally was no “dark shadow” hiding the pedestrian at all. There’s plenty of ambient light for even a many year old cell phone camera to see between cars, and well past the curb into the grass.
It would appear. That Uber’s camera is a POS.
Which doesn’t matter anyway. Again, their system had a LIDAR on board.
But people are still judging the accident by the footage from their absolutely POS camera. In fact many are now speculating that they used this crappy camera in case they did have an accident. The footage would look to most drivers like the accident was “unavoidable” in the eyes of a horrid camera. Why not let it stay awful, then? A number of cell phones have handily beaten this camera now.
Footage of the Intel system detecting the object, and the same system detecting multiple things to track and showing the tracking of all of them properly in day and night conditions, the system already working since 2014 in the Volvo model used, published now also.
The more investigation that goes into this, the worse it looks for Uber. Which, considering their screw-employees business model and documented sub-par behavior of their so-called leadership that’s been in the news, is starting to look less and less like an accident and more and more like negligence.
Turning off the safety system on the Volvo to keep it from interfering with their system is reasonable, but not if their system couldn’t already perform in the lab BETTER than a system deployed and working since 2014.
They’d have been better off leaving it enabled and having their system drive and not handle safety or better, a combination of the two, with any triggering of the already on board Intel/Activ built system considered a severe failure of their system.
Whole Intel system is one bit fat chip and a camera with high speed data busses directly connected to the camera, processing objects at some crazy high rate, I forget now.
Nothing but a board with a camera mounted on top of it. Fully baked and working for three years now.
Uber must know by now what a great break the Police Chief gave them in giving them a pass from looking at their crappy footage from their crappy camera and applying only the knowledge that a driver wouldn’t see that pedestrian.
No acknowledgement of LIDAR that surely saw her, or even using cheap/better cameras in old cell phones that easily showed the whole street and well beyond odd of the road.
Nice discussion about learning systems and testing cycles and all that, but Uber disabled a better safety system and substituted their own far inferior one.
Interestingly the press is covering it as being about Uber disabling it. But reporters these days really don’t seem to get that part about Intel’s product likely making this accident, at worst, just some bumps and bruises for the pedestrian.
Oh yeah. Did I mention this is version 3 of Intel’s product in this Volvo. Version 2 was sold from 2010-2014. It likely also would have avoided the accident.
In other words. The system that could and should have stopped this car, was available 8 years ago.
