Fatal crash of Uber car was due to software not seeing pedestrian crossing

Uber’s self-driving Volvo XC90 car, which was involved in a fatal accident with a pedestrian in the US in March last year, was found to have software on board that was insufficiently able to account for pedestrians crossing the road in unintended places. .

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board reports in a released document that the Uber car did not have the software onboard to respond to pedestrians jaywalking, meaning pedestrians crossing a road “illegally” in an area where, for example, no zebra crossing. or crosswalk.

Within two weeks, the NTSB will publish its full report on the March 18, 2018 crash, in which a 49-year-old woman in Tempe, USA, was killed when she crossed the road in the dark in a place where there was no transition. She was holding a bicycle when she crossed the road.

The latter also turned out to be a fatal element. The Volvo car was still traveling at 70 km/h when the woman was hit. When the car detected her, 5.6 seconds before the impact, the woman was identified as a vehicle. Then the brain of the car changes that to ‘other’ and back to vehicle again; that pattern repeated itself two more times. The system only recognized the situation correctly 1.2 seconds before the crash.

With that remaining 1.2 seconds of slack, the system could have applied the brakes, but Uber technicians turned out to have disabled a Volvo built-in braking system. The automaker previously indicated that that system might even have prevented the accident. Uber engineers had disabled this because it would be unsafe for the car to have two active software systems operating in parallel.

The NTSB report further confirms that there was a one-second delay built into the software between detecting a situation where a crash is likely and responding to it. Uber had done this because the company was afraid of too many false positives. During the 1.2 seconds before the impact, this resulted in the car not applying the brakes, as it first verified the nature of the hazard. The Volvo driver who was present was not looking at the road at the time. With 0.2 seconds to go, the car gave an audible warning, after which the driver took the wheel, but only braked a second after the collision had already occurred.

The research report states that Uber has now made changes to its safety program. The company has also tightened up the training of safety drivers and two people are now driving the self-driving cars.