Self-driving Uber Vehicle Strikes & Kills
Uber has halted testing of its autonomous vehicles across North America, the company announced Monday 19th March, after a woman was struck and killed by one of its self-driving cars in US Tempe, Arizona.
The moratorium on testing includes San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Toronto, Uber said.
It is believed to be the first fatality in any testing program involving autonomous vehicles.
The National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation into the crash, NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said.
Uber issued a short statement.
“Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident,” a company spokeswoman said.
The vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash, though a driver was behind the wheel, Tempe police said in a statement. The crash occurred about 10 pm Sunday 18th March in the area of Curry Road and Mill Avenue, a busy intersection with multiple lanes in every direction.
Police said the vehicle was northbound on Curry Road when a woman, identified as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, crossing from the west side of street, was struck. She died at a hospital, the department said.
Missy Cummings, a robotics expert at Duke University who has been critical of the swift rollout of driverless technology across the country, said the computer-vision systems for self-driving cars are “deeply flawed” and can be “incredibly brittle,” particularly in unfamiliar circumstances.
Companies have not been required by the federal government to prove that their robotic driving systems are safe. “We’re not holding them to any standards right now,” Cummings said, arguing that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should provide real supervision.
Federal transportation officials have relied on voluntary safety reporting to oversee the burgeoning industry, which has emphasized the life-saving potential of the technology in arguing against government mandates.
Arizona has aggressively courted driverless tech firms, based largely on its light regulatory touch. That approach has consequences, Cummings said. “If you’re going take that first step out, then you’re also going to be [the] first entity to have to suffer these kinds of issues,” she said.
Driverless technology firms generally say they painstakingly map an area digitally before running their vehicles there, so that the vehicles essentially have banked information about the surroundings that can be compared on the fly to what cameras and sensors are picking up at any moment.
The victim was “walking outside of the crosswalk” and was crossing a road at about 10 p.m. when she was struck, the Tempe police said.
“Just because you map an area doesn’t mean your computer system is necessarily going to pick up a pedestrian, particularly one that wasn’t in a cross walk,” Cummings said.
Another industry-wide issue is to what extent autonomous vehicles can deal with unanticipated problems.
“The car cameras, the vision systems, they don’t perform inductively, meaning they can’t guess about the appearance of someone in a particular place and time,” Cummings said. “Pedestrians get hit by human drivers all the time for similar reasons,” though the exact cause of this crash remains unclear, she said.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a tweet that the company was working to learn what went wrong.
“Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona,” he said. “We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened.”
A spokesman for Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, whose administration has provided a more permissive regulatory environment for deploying driverless cars than in states such as California, said “our hearts go out to the victim involved.”
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