Glad I wasn’t the QA Engineer here!

According to the NTSB’s analysis of a recent incident where a self-driving Uber car struck and killed a pedestrian:

A radar on the modified Volvo XC90 SUV first detected Herzberg roughly six seconds before the impact, followed quickly by the car’s laser-ranging lidar. However, the car’s self-driving system did not have the capability to classify an object as a pedestrian unless they were near a crosswalk.

For the next five seconds, the system alternated between classifying Herzberg as a vehicle, a bike and an unknown object. Each inaccurate classification had dangerous consequences. When the car thought Herzberg a vehicle or bicycle, it assumed she would be travelling in the same direction as the Uber vehicle but in the neighboring lane. When it classified her as an unknown object, it assumed she was static.

Worse still, each time the classification flipped, the car treated her as a brand new object. That meant it could not track her previous trajectory and calculate that a collision was likely, and thus did not even slow down. Tragically, Volvo’s own City Safety automatic braking system had been disabled because its radars could have interfered with Uber’s self-driving sensors.

By the time the XC90 was just a second away from Herzberg, the car finally realized that whatever was in front of it could not be avoided. At this point, it could have still slammed on the brakes to mitigate the impact. Instead, a system called “action suppression” kicked in.

This was a feature Uber engineers had implemented to avoid unnecessary extreme maneuvers in response to false alarms. It suppressed any planned braking for a full second, while simultaneously alerting and handing control back to its human safety driver. But it was too late. The driver began braking after the car had already hit Herzberg. She was thrown 23 meters (75 feet) by the impact and died of her injuries at the scene.