Uber Advanced Technologies Group

What it was

Uber Advanced Technologies Group, usually shortened to Uber ATG, was the self-driving unit of Uber Technologies.^[2] Like other companies working on automated driving, it built and tested vehicles meant to handle parts or all of the driving task themselves, with a trained human safety operator sitting behind the wheel as a backstop. That backup arrangement is what put the unit at the centre of one of the most closely examined crashes in the short history of automated driving.

The March 2018 crash

On 18 March 2018 a test vehicle operated by ATG was involved in a fatal crash with a pedestrian. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the case as HWY18MH010 and published its findings as final report HAR-19-03.^[1]

What the system did, and did not do

The board's account of the seconds before impact is unusually precise. When the system first detected the pedestrian, roughly six seconds before impact, the vehicle was travelling at 43 mph.^[1] The system picked her up 5.6 seconds before impact, but it never accurately classified her as a pedestrian and never predicted her path.^[1] For 4.7 seconds the system did not infer that emergency braking was needed.^[1] The design of the system also precluded activation of emergency braking for collision mitigation, and instead relied on the human operator to intervene.^[1]

Read together, those findings describe a gap between sensing and understanding: the vehicle could see something in its path well before the crash, but it could not decide what that thing was or what it was about to do, and it had no automatic way to act on the situation even if it had.

What the investigation concluded

The NTSB found that the probable cause of the crash was the safety operator's failure to monitor the road, because she was visually distracted by her personal phone throughout the trip.^[1] The board did not stop there. It cited as contributing factors ATG's inadequate safety risk assessment, its ineffective oversight of vehicle operators, and the absence of mechanisms for addressing automation complacency — the tendency of people who supervise a largely automatic system to stop paying attention because the system usually handles things correctly.^[1] In other words, the report treated the crash as a failure of the organisation around the technology as much as a failure of the technology itself.

Recommendations

The board issued six safety recommendations: two to NHTSA, the federal vehicle safety regulator; two to the state of Arizona; one to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators; and one to Uber ATG itself.^[1] The spread of the recipients reflects the layered way automated vehicles were then regulated, with federal, state and industry bodies each holding part of the picture.

Sale to Aurora

The unit did not continue as part of Uber. On 7 December 2020 Aurora announced that it was acquiring ATG, with Uber investing 400 million dollars in Aurora and Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi joining Aurora's board.^[2] Aurora said that ATG's team and technology would accelerate its mission and the delivery of its first product.^[2]

For a reader looking back, Uber ATG is worth knowing for two reasons. It was one of the best-funded attempts by a ride-hailing company to build its own automated driving stack, and its test fleet became the subject of a detailed public investigation whose findings about operator oversight and automation complacency apply to any system that asks a human to watch a machine that usually works.