Uber plans to resume autonomous driving program

Uber plans to hand over its autonomous car technology to the streets of the US state of Pennsylvania after suspending the program earlier this year. The carpool company ceased operations in several cities following a fatal crash involving one of its cars in Tempe, Arizona in March.

An Uber spokesman told Gizmodo that the company did not immediately plan to return its autonomous cars to public streets, although it has resumed road tests in manual mode. After making its safety report to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Friday, the company is now waiting for clearance from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation before resuming testing of its self-driving technology.

According to Reuters, the company said in its report that it would allow automatic braking, would strengthen the monitoring and training of its workers and would ensure that two employees take up positions on one of the front seats of its autonomous vehicles during tests. By Reuters:

Uber said that one of the key recommendations of an internal review after the Tempe accident was to improve the "overall design of the autonomous vehicle software system". Uber said in its safety report released on Friday that the vehicle had improved the "system latency", allowing it to detect objects and actors earlier and run safe reactions faster.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which opened an investigation, said in May that Uber had recorded pedestrian sightings about six seconds before the impact, but that the system did emergency braking was necessary before 1.3 seconds before the impact.

The company has also published a summary of its internal and external reviews as well as a separate external review by the law firm LeClairRyan.

In a letter included in her report and published in Medium, the company's general manager, Dara Khosrowshahi, said the company deeply regretted the crash.

"The competitive pressure to build and commercialize stand-alone technology can cause developers to remain silent about the remaining development challenges," he added. "At Uber, we believe that it is extremely useful to share operational security approaches and coordinate with other industry players to develop methods to measure and demonstrate progress in development." autonomous. "

Uber suspended his self-driving program earlier this year after one of his vehicles hit and killed a pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, aged 49, while she was performing tests. autonomous driving mode.

At the time of the accident, the images recorded in the dashboard showed that the substitute in the vehicle might be watching her phone, despite what Uber said later was "a strict policy prohibiting the use of mobile devices to anyone using our autonomous vehicles ". Police reports issued by the Tempe Police Department later found that the accident was "totally preventable".

The National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report in May that indicated that the vehicle's sensors were recording the woman a few seconds before the accident, but were unaware of it and were unsuccessful in stopping it. . The report indicated that this was due to the fact that an emergency braking system had been disabled to ensure a smoother ride when the car was in standalone mode.