I was under exactly the same impression. From the description a few days ago, I had imagined someone on the right hand side of the road stepping out from between two parked cars.
From the video this morning I was wondering how it was possible the vehicle lidar and radar didn't pick this up. This is exactly the sort of thing I would hope these additional sensors could pick up easily.
Also from the released video, it was clear to me the "human driver" of the car was not paying attention. Looks like they are looking at their phone at lap level 90% of the time, unless there was something like a "camera/lidar" view in the dash they were looking at.
Having a human in these self driving cars is useless. There is so little for the human to do that it is hard to keep them from checking out. And once they do, they might as well not be there. Seems like "Safety Theater" to me, make the public and the Uber riders feel like there is still a human in the loop, when there really isn't.
Yes, particularly the 'theatre' part. Its expensive and useless.
More useful would be to have a central location with humans monitoring dozens of cars, like a sort of air-traffic control situation. Better chance of keeping their attention with enough going on. They'd be there in case of difficulties, know when a car 'went off the rails' or notify authorities in case of an accident.
And with Central monitoring you could easily have people switch out frequently, and run drills like they do with lifeguards. The lifeguards at our neighborhood pool change positions every 15 or 30 minutes or go on break, with new ones cycling in. The water park does something where the supervisors will periodically introduce a special ball to the water which the lifeguards have to "save".
I worry that monitoring dozens of cars would be too much information for the "Road Traffic Control" to be able to respond in the 1.5 seconds that were available in this video, especially if they have such "low dynamic range" as what we see in this video. But maybe Lidar data would have showed the RTC operator something the car didn't see?
I'm really looking forward to the findings about what radar, lidar, and sonar sensors were saying during this time.
From the video this morning I was wondering how it was possible the vehicle lidar and radar didn't pick this up. This is exactly the sort of thing I would hope these additional sensors could pick up easily.
Also from the released video, it was clear to me the "human driver" of the car was not paying attention. Looks like they are looking at their phone at lap level 90% of the time, unless there was something like a "camera/lidar" view in the dash they were looking at.
Having a human in these self driving cars is useless. There is so little for the human to do that it is hard to keep them from checking out. And once they do, they might as well not be there. Seems like "Safety Theater" to me, make the public and the Uber riders feel like there is still a human in the loop, when there really isn't.