[sumodm]

> When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra.

I wonder whether this flagged alarms in Cruise's systems when the pedestrian crossed in a potentially dangerous situation. These kind of 2nd and 3rd order conditions seems particularly hard to train for.

[chroma]

This sort of thing happens all the time in SF. There are a lot of crazy people in some areas of the city. If you stopped for every one of them (even the ones a lane or two away) you’d never get anywhere. Heck, I’ve had someone run in front of my vehicle, then pull out a collapsible baton and try to rob me. I pinned the throttle and they jumped out of the way.

[05]

Is there anything here to train for? The initial collision wasn't in any way Cruise vehicle's fault; but the subsequent repositioning shows their procedures and sensor coverage are lacking. Oh, and their integrity.

[skywhopper]

Yes, if a pedestrian is crossing against the light in front of you, you slow down even if you don’t think you’ll hit them, even if they’re already past your lane. If the pedestrian stops on the street they are crossing against the light, you slow down, even if they aren’t in your path, especially if you are aware of the vehicles around you and know the pedestrian is in the path of another nearby vehicle. If you see the vehicle in the lane next to you speeding up when you’ve noticed the pedestrian is stopped in their lane of traffic, you slow down and maybe veer away if possible. If you see that the vehicle next to you has hit a pedestrian, you immediately hit the brakes rather than wait 2.4 seconds until you’ve determined you’re going to hit that pedestrian before you decide to hit your brakes.

Those are all things an alert human driver should be ready and able to do. I would expect a quality AV system to do them better than a human, but in this case, none of those things appeared to happen. This AV decided “pedestrian is out of my lane, continue accelerating!” Only stopping when the pedestrian was right in front of the vehicle.

[NavinF]

> This AV decided “pedestrian is out of my lane, continue accelerating!”

That's what human drivers do too. If you slowed down anticipating that a pedestrian's collision with some other car might fling their body in front of your car, you'd never make it to your destination. There's just too many crazy people in SF

[sumodm]

Cruise isn't at fault for the collision with pedestrian, since it was a second order impact. The primary cause being Nissan Sentra and pedestrian. But could cruise avoided the impact and is this how humans react when we drive? Here is the timeline from the report.

  - AV starts moving at -9.2s, after light changes
  - Prediction output shows pedestrian path crossing AV travel lane: -7.7s
  - Pedestrian leaves AV's travel lane: -5.3s
  - Pedestrian pauses at crosswalk : -4.7s
  - Contact b/w Nissan and Pedestrian; -2.7s