[monkeynotes]

I am pretty sure that this accident happened because of the way autonomous software makes decisions on its surroundings. I am almost certain the car knew there was an object but evaluated it incorrectly.

There are lots and lots of false positives a self driving car has to disregard just to make its way along any street. Mailboxes on curbs, random parked cars, bridges, signs, and so on. I think the car unfortunately made a bad decision.

To say the LIDAR/RADAR or IR cameras didn't pick the person up is to say that these cars are woefully under-equipped to sense their environment.

I think the Police report was just working off of current operating Police knowledge and expectations of the law.

[smileysteve]

If there is a bike in the road, I want my car to stop; whether a prankster kids push it out just in time or it's a woman pushing it across slowly.

[monkeynotes]

I don't think I implied anything to say that a car should treat a bike or any other object moving into its path as a false positive. To the contrary, what I was saying is that it did treat it as a false positive but that was obviously not the intention of the engineers.

My overall point is simple, the car almost certainly saw the person - it just had to have, but the way it evaluated what to do about it was wrong because evaluating reality, as it turns out, is incredibly complex.