An even more extreme example: suppose someone on the sidewalk suddenly whips out a bazooka and shoots it at you. Does your failure to anticipate this contingency count as a failure?
"Failure" must be defined with respect to a particular model. If you're driving in the United States, you're probably not worried about bazookas, and being hit by one is not a failure, it's just shit happening, which it sometimes does. (By way of contrast, if you're driving in Kabul then you may very well be concerned with bazookas.) Whether or not you want to worry about drunk pedestrians and avoid them at all possible costs is a design decision. But if you really want to, you can (at the possible cost of having to drive very, very slowly).
But no reasonable person could deny that avoiding collisions with stationary obstacles is a requirement for any reasonable autonomous driving system.
"Failure" must be defined with respect to a particular model. If you're driving in the United States, you're probably not worried about bazookas, and being hit by one is not a failure, it's just shit happening, which it sometimes does. (By way of contrast, if you're driving in Kabul then you may very well be concerned with bazookas.) Whether or not you want to worry about drunk pedestrians and avoid them at all possible costs is a design decision. But if you really want to, you can (at the possible cost of having to drive very, very slowly).
But no reasonable person could deny that avoiding collisions with stationary obstacles is a requirement for any reasonable autonomous driving system.