They definitely seem to be referring to the Uber self-driving system. The sentence "At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2)." has this footnote attached to it: "In Uber’s self-driving system, an emergency brake maneuver refers to a deceleration greater than 6.5 meters per second squared (m/s^2)".