The Uber team was hoping to impress the CEO by taking him “on a ride without human interventions to demonstrate that the cars could handle so-called edge cases, tricky road situations that are hard to predict,” according to the New York Times. We now know that Uber’s Arizona team was, reportedly, in a haste to rack up real-world test-drive miles in preparation for the Arizona visit in April planned by Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive.
(Source: Siemens)Īutonomous vehicle developers, whether Waymo, General Motors, Ford, or Uber, often use the number of miles that their robocars have clocked in the real-world environment - to demonstrate the maturity of their autonomous cars and impress the media, top management, shareholders, and investment community at large. “But if this were done in simulation, we will know the exact distance and, thus, determine what happened. Furthermore, “to know ‘ground truth’ whether the distance between your car and a lamppost or a child in front of it was 31 feet away or 29 feet away, for example,” said Kashi, it needs a lot of checking.
To validate what exactly happened in the real-world environment, drivers often would annotate data at a traffic light or a stop, and they must do it while the car is still moving. Amin Kashi, ADAS/AD director, Mentor, a Siemens business, told EE Times during a phone interview, “Even with millions of miles of test drives on the road, you can still miss the ground-truth data.”