Toyota System Can Sense Pedestrians

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Building on already-in-use technology, Toyota has developed and improved upon technology that can sense pedestrians in a car’s path and stop the vehicle automatically. The new technology will be integrated into production in the near future.

Toyota's new system, which it says is a world's first, uses a millimeter wave radar and stereo camera to constantly monitor what's in front of the vehicle.
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that car looks like is nearly hit the dummy at a very slow speed....
try going 55mph. this seems pretty unsafe for the person driving, and what happens when the brakes get slammed on and you are not going perfectly straight? you could end up turning the car backwards.
 
Sure, Toyota's system can see pedestrians you are about to run over, but can it see why kid's love the sugary cinnamon taste of cinnamon toast crunch?
 
World's first? So the pedestrian detection system that Volvo had in their cars for over a year doesn't count?
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPUGwbpfVhQ"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPUGwbpfVhQ[/ame]
 
Detecting pedestrians is nice, but pointless if your accelerator gets stuck. :roll:
 
Brakes applying without my input? Oh wow, I can smell the lawsuits already this is going to generate

>Driving in the winter, moron walks out infront of my car, brakes apply, I slide into another lane of traffic

Congrats! You just caused a accident that possibly involved more then two people!

>Driving in the winter going around a turn, moron walks out infront of my car, brakes apply, car swerves off the road into a ditch, possibly off a ravine edge

Congrats! Instead of the moron getting killed, the moron caused me to get killed!

I have no problems with pedestrians getting hit when they aren't looking where they are going, my nephew got hit on his bike and broke his right leg, said it was the drivers fault, I promptly stood up for the driver because I have -SEEN- how he rides the bike when I bike with him, he just flies through intersections, flies around cornors, races down the driveway onto the street without looking every time, with the playground across from his house, I've seen him leave the house and race across the street to the playground without looking

The driver had a witness in the car, but I voluntarily wrote in on his behalf that my nephew doesn't pay attention to his surroundings, and that he caused the accident, not the driver

Now this driver brake thing, had it locked up and sent this man and his friend off the road, my nephew's on stupidity would have saved him, but killed two other people

I have no problems with morons getting killed, you do something incredibly stupid, you are going to pay for it. Had my nephew been going across a crosswalk or something and got hit, then I could see it was the drivers fault, but seeing how he rides on the road in the past I knew he was at fault (Swerves all over the road too for some reason, rides in circles in the middle of the road)

I love my nephew, but before he got hit, this was a lesson I tried to teach him about road safety an unbelievable amount of times (I'm talking maybe over 400+ warnings) about how to look for traffic, bike riding safety etc, and it didn't sink in -UNTIL- he got hurt, but had his own actions caused his own demise, I would feel sad he was dead, but I wouldn't have blamed the driver for his own inability to pay attention
 
Be nice if they'd make a device that allowed pedestrians to detect cars as opposed to to making so many devices that allow pedestrians to ignore everything
 
This Toyota system detects pedestrians so it can automatically engage the "stuck throttle" routine in the ECU and mow them down.
 
ShamisOMally said:
Brakes applying without my input? Oh wow, I can smell the lawsuits already this is going to generate
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One question to answer is: Are there more dumb drivers than dumb pedestrians?

I went looking for statistics, hopefully to find out if pedestrian accidents were blamed more on pedestrians or drivers, but that particular statistic doesn't seem to be reported or collected. I did find the National Highway Safety Administration's 2009 report in PDF form, which will be interesting for this thread:

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811394.pdf

In 2009, the odds were good that a pedestrian fatality was a male crossing an urban street not at an intersection at night during the weekend during normal weather conditions; 35% of pedestrians were drunk, while only 13% of drivers were drunk.

Only 1 percent of pedestrian fatalities occurred during snow conditions, so your invented scenarios of winter accidents are very unlikely.

The other question to answer is: Can a computer make better driving decisions than a human can? Absolutely yes. There were 32,788 traffic fatalities in 2010 alone; if all cars were switched to computer-driven, I have no doubt the fatality rate would fall to a thousandth or less of that.

Can you make a self-driving car that is impossible to crash? The attempt is being made.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Be nice if they'd make a device that allowed pedestrians to detect cars as opposed to to making so many devices that allow pedestrians to ignore everything
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They did, they're called eyes and ears. :p

People shouldn't be given more devices in order to be stupid and unaware of their surroundings, they should just be more careful.
 
ripken204 said:
that car looks like is nearly hit the dummy at a very slow speed....
try going 55mph. this seems pretty unsafe for the person driving, and what happens when the brakes get slammed on and you are not going perfectly straight? you could end up turning the car backwards.
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Don't you think the engineers and lawyers have thought about this? There will likely be complicated rule sets built into the program that apply or don't apply certain amounts of brake pressure at different speeds, etc....in order to make the system smart enough to avoid such issues.
 
Electronic Traction Control Systems in many new cars already independently power/brake individual wheels during loss of traction events (specifically in high speed turns or snowy/icy conditions), so there's already some implicit level of trust in the judgment of these systems not to throw you and your vehicle off the side of the ravine.

I would suspect that these pedestrian avoidance systems use more or less the same application (individually brake/power and maybe steer wheels), so it may just be an advancement of TCS.
 
I live in Miami, FL and the pedestrians here are about as smart as the roads they cross. About 2 years ago a drunk guy ran in front of my car and nearly died as I hit him at 40mph. After that no matter how carefully I drive they still cross the street without any cares. This technology will only make it even harder to drive here. :(
 
This is great, but what if I don't want to brake? Sometimes a dumbass needs to pay for their actions. :D
 
[Tripod]MajorPayne;1037547380 said:
This Toyota system detects pedestrians so it can automatically engage the "stuck throttle" routine in the ECU and mow them down.
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At the very least it should write a false log in the cars black box to show the throttle got stuck and you tried to brake to give you a legal out :D

Big D. said:
They did, they're called eyes and ears. :p

People shouldn't be given more devices in order to be stupid and unaware of their surroundings, they should just be more careful.
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Think you really missed the point I was aiming at.
 
sfsuphysics said:
At the very least it should write a false log in the cars black box to show the throttle got stuck and you tried to brake to give you a legal out :D
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It would reverse of this imo. Toyota would make sure the log would show it was the driver "overriding" Toyota's perfect system to cause said accident.


sfsuphysics said:
Think you really missed the point I was aiming at.
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Whoosh would have been sufficient imo :D
 
Big D. said:
Awesome. Some companies like bragging about their crap and calling it a world's first before they even sell one car that uses it...meanwhile, other companies have been selling them for years and just kept quiet about it.
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*cough cough* Apple *cough*
:D
 
Faugh! Junk!

Like they don't have enough trouble on their hands after that cop who had some kind of "special training for operating a motor vehicle" got the throttle stuck on and was too stupid to TURN THE DAMN CAR OFF. Ever drive a classic car? This throttle stuck situation happens. It happened to me once in a 1967 Chrysler Imperial. You know that car? One of the largest production cars ever made. You could probably fit 7 illegal aliens in the trunk to sneak over the boarder. Imagine the property damage that would do. My first reaction was to put it in neutral and just let the revving engine blow because I didn't want to loose the ability to steer by turning it off. It magically came unstuck and I was able to drive home normally. All this jazz is stupid. Either make all cars like they are in Minority Report where it's all centrally controlled or leave well enough alone. This half way shit is just bug riddled trash that's going to make the life expectancy of you new car shorter that it already is. Cars are like cell phones these days. You get them wet and they are toast..... and your warranty probably doesn't cover it either.
 
It wouldn't have to sense every pedestrian,just the idiots with cell phones and Ipods stuck in their ears.
 
No way this will work using Toyota manufactured gas pedals..."Car goes to stop but instead accelerates out of control running over 10s"
 
This is nice but are we forgetting that Toyota is having real issues with brakes not working or failing? So the car attempts to stop but oops no stopping for you.
 
How many people are gonna get injured/die, while someone is trying to show off this new technology to their friends? Especially once you throw alcohol into the mix.
 
The site freezes up all of my browsers - Chrome, FF5 and IE9. Grr.

When it stops freezing the browsers I get plugin errors and the video no workie.
 
Awesome, how much is this going to cost me? 1,000$? 5000$? At those kinds of numbers they can keep it. In 2006, there were 250,000,000 cars on the road. In 2009 there were 4,000 pedestrians killed in traffic accidents. Assuming this system only costs 1,000$ and it were equiped on every future vehicle, and it prevents every fatality, absolute best case scenario, then the cost is 62.5million dollars per life saved. If it costs only 100$ (good luck meeting that price point!) it's STILL going to cost 6.3 million per life saved. I'm pretty sure if I gave you 6.3 million dollars you'd be able to save more than one life.

Yes, it's sad people get hit but there's better places to spend the money.
 
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