Lessons from the Cruise Robotaxi Pedestrian Dragging Mishap

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Koopman, Philip
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Koopman, Philip
author_facet Koopman, Philip
contents A robotaxi dragged a pedestrian 20 feet down a San Francisco street on the evening of October 2, 2023, coming to rest with its rear wheel on that woman's legs. The mishap was complex, involving a first impact by a different, human-driven vehicle. The following weeks saw Cruise stand down its road operations amid allegations of withholding crucial mishap information from regulators. The pedestrian has survived her severe injuries, but the robotaxi industry is still wrestling with the aftermath. Key observations include that the robotaxi had multiple possible ways available to avoid initial impact with the pedestrian. Limitations to the computer driver's programming prevented it from recognizing a pedestrian was about to be hit in an adjacent lane, caused the robotaxi to lose tracking of and then in essence forget a pedestrian who was hit by an adjacent vehicle, and forget that the robotaxi had just run over a presumed pedestrian when beginning a subsequent repositioning maneuver. The computer driver was unable to detect the pedestrian being dragged even though her legs were partially in view of a robotaxi camera. Moreover, more conservative operational approaches could have avoided the dragging portion of the mishap entirely, such as waiting for remote confirmation before moving after a crash with a pedestrian, or operating the still-developing robotaxi technology with an in-vehicle safety driver rather than prioritizing driver-out deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05281
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lessons from the Cruise Robotaxi Pedestrian Dragging Mishap
Koopman, Philip
Robotics
A robotaxi dragged a pedestrian 20 feet down a San Francisco street on the evening of October 2, 2023, coming to rest with its rear wheel on that woman's legs. The mishap was complex, involving a first impact by a different, human-driven vehicle. The following weeks saw Cruise stand down its road operations amid allegations of withholding crucial mishap information from regulators. The pedestrian has survived her severe injuries, but the robotaxi industry is still wrestling with the aftermath. Key observations include that the robotaxi had multiple possible ways available to avoid initial impact with the pedestrian. Limitations to the computer driver's programming prevented it from recognizing a pedestrian was about to be hit in an adjacent lane, caused the robotaxi to lose tracking of and then in essence forget a pedestrian who was hit by an adjacent vehicle, and forget that the robotaxi had just run over a presumed pedestrian when beginning a subsequent repositioning maneuver. The computer driver was unable to detect the pedestrian being dragged even though her legs were partially in view of a robotaxi camera. Moreover, more conservative operational approaches could have avoided the dragging portion of the mishap entirely, such as waiting for remote confirmation before moving after a crash with a pedestrian, or operating the still-developing robotaxi technology with an in-vehicle safety driver rather than prioritizing driver-out deployment.
title Lessons from the Cruise Robotaxi Pedestrian Dragging Mishap
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05281