Better Vision: How Self-Driving Cars See In The Dark

The Uber driverless car fatality raises questions about how well sensors can “see”.

THE VIDEO OF the Uber driverless car’s fatal crash is disturbing. The Arizona road is unnaturally dark, with the car’s headlights picking up the pedestrian and her bike fewer than two seconds before the crash. From another camera angle, the Uber safety driver is looking down, glancing up in horror as the car strikes and kills the woman, Elaine Herzberg.

The March incident raises a host of questions, with investigations underway by the local Tempe, Arizona police department as well as Uber, which has pulled its driverless test cars from US roads. “The video from the Uber crash seems to point to a clear failure of the technology,” said Jack Stilgoe, senior lecturer at University College London, although he adds it’s unclear whether the problem was with the sensors or the algorithms interpreting their data. “The car’s lidar and radar sensors should have detected the pedestrian, as they can see in the dark. This suggests that the car decided the pedestrian was a ‘false positive’.”