You know better than to "hope" for that, no matter how "unlikely". States are already being bailed out by Federal taxes in all kinds of realms all the time. There is a tendency when seeing stupid and unethical government actions to think that surely it is so obvious that it will be corrected by someone, and in principle there is usually a "someone" who could, but it rarely is. The corruption and unjust actions just keep getting more bizarre and more extreme. That is what it means for a nation to be in decline. The cause and the solution are a lot deeper and more fundamental than what we see on the surface every day as obviously wrong.

None of the current systems under development are intended or expected to be fully automatic with no driver oversight. The "self-driving" systems do a lot more than the basic collision avoidance systems or the earlier speed "cruise control" systems, both assisting the driver in a very specific function and context, but they all require a fully competent driver behind the wheel at all times to use them only where appropriate and when using them to make judgments and act as required of a competent driver.

It is not good when a test driver for a system still in development appears to be asleep at the wheel even if in this case it appears she could not have avoided the collision no matter what she had done. It will be interesting to see what the investigation turns up and whether the driver was being as careless as it looks like in the video and whether or not the accident was in fact unavoidable. They reportedly have a lot more sensors and videos than the two videos so far released.

Well, I guess maybe the human part needs some improvement then...

Although its unlikely to happen, I hope that the rest of us do NOT bail out California from the results of its fiscal disasters.

Sorry, it's not approved by the FDA. But I heard that Uber is going into the chicken soup business as a hedge.

Politicians seem immune to all forms of restraint, auto or otherwise, now don't they?

There is what appears to be a nice city pedestrian walkway shaped like an X right in the middle of the road. It is not lit, and has small signs stating it is closed to pedestrians.

https://hotair.com/archives/2018/03/2...

(See top picture)

Well I would agree that it appears to be a foolish place and time to cross the street pushing a bike.

When will the soup be ready?

The self-driving car was going 38 mph. The outside video showed the pedestrian suddenly appearing out of the dark. If that is how it would have appeared to an awake driver there would not have been time to swerve.

So far all self-driving systems for cars and trucks are designed for require driver intervention in unusual situations.

How does a person intervene in the actions of an autonomous politician on statist auto-pilot?

To blame an accident on self-driving cars? She was playing chicken. Why did the chicken cross the road?

But what does any of this have to do with the thread you started? You've hijacked your own thread, so why not throw a chicken into the pot, too?

Radar uses high frequency radio waves, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths longer than that of light. Sonar uses sound waves, longitudinal pressure waves typically under water where EM energy absorption makes radar impractical. Lasers are coherent light so the signal can be processed in a meaningful way.

Automatic driving and other complex tracking systems use multiple sensors with their signals mathematically combined in the interpretation, including location using maps or GPS for driving. They are not intended to work everywhere, where accurate location data isn't available or driving conditions are too complex. The Toyota collision avoidance system is much simpler than that, and does not work for vehicles suddenly appearing in cross traffic or smaller objects like bicycles.

The woman walking the bicycle across the path of the car appeared in front of the car too suddenly to be able to stop in time. It would have required detection and tracking of the object off to the side well before it reached the trajectory of the car. Humans do that all the time with visible light and can do it in the dark with IR goggles (if awake and not staring at their lap).

All government is now the enemy, as it only exists for its own gratification, growth and must control everything. Moon Beam is an excellent example, he has saddled Kalifornia for almost 100 billion in debt for a train no one wanted, everyone sued to stop, and the courts sided with him. Yet they have increased the cost 300% and not one functional mile of rail yet. Idiots.

Well, the video seems a bt off as the traffic seems awfully fast, so why was the person walking a bike across the road in the dark?

I would think the Toyota system would be better at that since it combines both camera and "laser radar" (which seems a misnomer since laser is light and radar is sound so the 2 together are a typical oxymoron), however that gives range and the camera motion, which would enable it to calculate a range rate, which if it was in a "you are going to hit it" window, applies the brakes and slows or stops it, essentially the way their system works. The video I saw had the cycle crossing left to right in front of the car, and the "laser radar" would (or should) be able to detect the object, range it, and then decide to stop. Autonomus vehicle s will need a huge level of built in sensor systems just to be able to avoid what happened. The fact they didn't work would tell me they are ot ready for prime time yet. Another issue I have with them is most use the internet to get data for location and travel and send information back ( a ridiculous 2-3GB/sec, acoording to my sources) and without 5G everywhere, will be pretty crippled. Let alone driving in remote areas with no cell service at all. I asked that question at a "hoo rah" session for the autonomous car systems (which will be a big booster for our sales) and no one could answer how they plan on getting around that issue.

They already have that. It would be impossible to automatically navigate without it. But the sensor processing has to distinguish between accepting normal object motion and collision avoidance. In this case the bicycle was in an uncoming lane where traffic is expected, and where much of the early part of the trajectory and location was less relevant. That is harder to deal with than detecting a large object in the same lane or a parked car (or the wall at the back of your garage) for ordinary collision avoidance.

The object has to be isolated, classified and tracked for its trajectory, before a decision is made without being over sensitive and in time. Avoiding false positives is the hard part: avoiding collisions is easy -- just stop and don't ever move (like guaranteed blocking of spam by not ever allowing incoming mail).

If sensors were using only visible light it would be much harder in the dark; if it uses infrared or some other wavelength like radar, which we expect, it would detect more than a person would see in the dark, which is an improvement, but it still has to resolve, identify and track, then decide in time.

The programming may or may not have been using too high a threshold or something else may have gone wrong. That is why the passive driver is there to intervene during testing, where they know problems are expected. In this case the passive driver could not have seen the victim suddenly appear out of the dark in time even if she had been looking for it. They could give her infrared glasses but, like the control system, she would have to be carefully trained (more cookies versus shocks) to look at the road instead of at her lap or dozing off. Testing is best done using normal humans in focus and with the required attention span.

Its hard to believe that a human driver who was awake could not have swerved enough to miss the pedestrian... based upon that video alone at the speed that it is being shown in the link. (I can't tell if I saw it at actual speed or not.) Need more data to judge fairly. I'd say that this should be a warning to all of the dangers of self driving cars to pedestrians at present level of technology. If only the danger from politicians was as obvious.

I view government today is my enemy

Fines to encourage employment of lazy, dull-witted, tax collectors with guns that are too cowardly to stop teen school shooters is the wrong answer. The culture should punish offenders. Government extracting fines to be counter-productively spent destroying liberty is a bigger offense than speeding, (or forgetting to register a vehicle being used infrequently .) Government force must be curtailed to only constitutional items of importance. State police are worse than worthless.

Absolutely, ewv, lots to be learned. However, I would think basic collision avoidance sensors and auto braking would be already part of the basic package. There are several cars out now that advertise auto braking and collision avoidance systems, even with a driver.

Here is Toyotas system in use today:

https://www.toyota.com/safety-sense/f...

Such a system should have prevented this.

The victim, a reportedly recovering homeless person, was walking across a dark busy highway about 100 feet from crosswalk at the intersection.

The passive driver monitoring the controls looked like she was asleep or staring at her lap, then looked up and was quickly startled to see what was already happening. But it looks like it would have been too late to avoid hitting the woman walking her bike no matter what the car or driver might have done differently (other than not be there) the way she suddenly appeared in the road out of the dark shadows.

There were a lot of sensors on the car and multiple cameras so more is yet to be learned. So far I have seen only two of the video angles.

Oh, that is one of the most irritating things, tax increases and fees "for the children", the most common liberal excuse in the world....

Yes, and you are still subjected to taxes (to support the state's propaganda "schools") on inflated value of the property with no services being provided in exchange for those payments.

Head for the woods! Even that has become ridiculously expensive.

Well, here is the dashcam footage, based on the speed and everything, I am not sure if the woman walking the bike had a clue what she was doing, it seems really busy and a main thoroughfare.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/22/...