Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,078,349.PN.&OS=PN/8,078,349&RS=PN/8,078,349

by meadhikari • 15 years ago

245 95 15 years ago

patft.uspto.gov

reader5000• 15 years ago

Excellent. I was hoping technological progress in this area would be oppressed. The USPTO did not disappoint!

derefr• 15 years ago

Car models aren't like software—people aren't constantly producing new, accidentally-infringing works. I'm pretty sure this is one of those patents that will get licensed by all the other big companies, rather than sued over.

einhverfr3• 15 years ago

Well, there are clear prior art examples for driverless cars, but that's beside the point. The real issue here is that a driverless car manufacturer is going to absorb all liability for all accidents while with a driver, the driver absorbs that liability.

I seriously doubt Google will monetize this patent before it expires.

cq• 15 years ago

Ironic that you think that a technology patent is the antithesis of oppression.

cbr• 15 years ago

I think you misread him.

hessenwolf• 15 years ago

If they don't patent it, somebody else would and would drag them to court. (gosh, I'm defending a multinational - I really hope they don't misbehave with this)

plaes• 15 years ago

What about prior art - DARPA grand challenge (2004-2007)?

sjmulder• 15 years ago

This patent is about switching between manual and automatic driving, not the autonomous driving in itself.

munin• 15 years ago

I'm not sure about the Grand Challenge, but a fair amount of work for DARPA involves the performers (companies/organizations who did the work) walking away from the program with full IP rights to the result with the ability to patent it or do whatever ... as long as the US government retains I think free license to at least that product/whatever and also maybe free license to anything produced by it? I think that might vary program by program.

DARPA is a "stimulating" organization. giving it patents would not fit into its mission.

peterknego• 15 years ago

The abstract says:

"Disclosed are methods and devices for transitioning a mixed-mode autonomous vehicle from a human driven mode to an autonomously driven mode. Transitioning may include stopping a vehicle on a predefined landing strip and detecting a reference indicator. Based on the reference indicator, the vehicle may be able to know its exact position. Additionally, the vehicle may use the reference indictor to obtain an autonomous vehicle instruction via a URL. After the vehicle knows its precise location and has an autonomous vehicle instruction, it can operate in autonomous mode."

So it does not patent "driverless vehicle", but a particular method of transition from mixed-mode to driverless mode.

jessriedel• 15 years ago

"Driverless Vechicle" is a compound adjective modifying patent. It's not a patent for (all) driverless vechicles, it's a patent regarding driverless vehicles.

Wilya• 15 years ago

The patent is about reading a symbol on the ground that triggers the reading of a QR-code to get precise GPS location. Roughly.

Actually, the QR-code (or equivalent) is used to fetch "instructions for performing the autonomous vehicle instruction" (which could be anything).

And the QR-code can be replaced by a lot of things (radio signal, etc).

roc• 15 years ago

Yeah, it'd be nice if more people read patent claims before passing judgement.

I took the obvious practical implementation of this to be a method to guide autonomous vehicles into a parking lot/structure. The car rolls up to the landing strip, the driver gets out, the car switches to autonomous mode, gets the connection information to the parking management server, asks for and receives a spot assignment and instructions on getting there, etc.

GPS and map data are simply insufficient to handle autonomous parking. There are precious few universals in parking laws, customs, lot-flow, etc. And automatic parking is one of the unavoidable expectations of self-driving cars.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

it'd be nice if more people read patent claims before passing judgement

Unlikely; that would put a real damper on the amount of righteous vitriol people can muster.

cabalamat• 15 years ago

> it'd be nice if more people read patent claims before passing judgement.

It'd also be nice if patents were written in a language that made them readily understandable. Then more people might read them. I'm sure I'm not the only person who finds them obscure bordering on incomprehensible.

fredliu• 15 years ago

In many cases, it is exactly their intention to write the patent in that obscure way, in order to have more wiggle room, and in most cases it's lawyers who write those patents, not engineers.

danmaz74• 15 years ago

And automatic parking is one of the unavoidable expectations of self-driving cars.

Actually, I would be perfectly content if I only had to park my car, but it drove itself from just outside the source parking lot (or street) and the destination one.

And just not having to drive on freeways (a much more controlled environment than usual roads) would be incredibly useful :)

stbullard2• 15 years ago

Does anyone know how this works in practice?

Are any measures taken to prevent someone from spray-painting a rogue QR code on the ground to reroute traffic?

Vivtek• 15 years ago

You'll need a license to purchase spray paint, of course - what are you, some kind of anarchist?

cjfont• 15 years ago

Are there any measures in place today preventing someone from throwing road spikes on a busy interstate?

mbell• 15 years ago

Presumably based on the wording of the patent, the QR code just contains a URL from which to fetch the actually instructions for the car. Thus I would assume there are security measures built into the instruction retrieval, SSL or some other authentication/encryption scheme. Thus simply changing the QR code wouldn't allow forged instructions to be sent to the car, you'd have to break the security on the data link.

vaksel• 15 years ago

or how about winter, when there is snow on the ground

BoppreH• 15 years ago

The data in the QR code could be encrypted and include geographical position that can be checked by the car.

This way you can't make your own and copied QR codes won't work.

femngi• 15 years ago

Stuff like this makes me twitch. Why are researchers so keen to have my car controlled by radio tags? The potential for abuse is seemingly never discussed because I feel that admitting it will kill this idea stone dead, as it should.

efnx• 15 years ago

Are you implying that researchers want to take control of your autonomous vehicle on behalf of the government or some overreaching corporation? The marker/URL scheme is just a solution to the problem of delivering instructions when needed, I don't think it's malicious.

thebigshane• 15 years ago

I think this would be a perfect opportunity to change the Title here on HN. Avoiding flame-bait is always a worth cause.

Suggestion: "Google awarded patent involved with driver-less vehicles"

jacquesm2• 15 years ago

Symbols on the ground are infrastructure, you should not be able to patent a thing like that. Imagine every company that makes vehicles having to license someone else's tech in order to be able to use public roads, or a huge variety (one for every brand) of competing symbols polluting the roads.

Signs on roads == traffic signs, open formats and readable by everybody.

notyourwork• 15 years ago

They won't be called public roads when this happens.

hamrickdavid• 15 years ago

The person who invented the original traffic signal patented it in 1923 (http://www.google.com/patents?id=EHJoAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...). The idea was unique, novel, and non-obvious at the time. It's easy to see an invention now that is ubiquitous and say that it's obvious.

mmcconnell1618• 15 years ago

This may indicate the Google has found 100% autonomous operation is not practical yet and so they spent time working on how to easily transition in/out of that mode. I could see a situation where you have a toll-both type area before entering highways that would trigger your vehicle's autonomous mode and another one to switch back to manual as you exit.

jws• 15 years ago

Practical or not, I think the first jurisdictions to permit robot drivers will limit where they are permitted[1]. This would work well for that, though realistically, I think an online map of allowed regions and a GPS will be the real solution unless regular drivers want to be informed that others are robot driven, then it will be road side signs.

EOM

[1] I drove south through Nevada at 70+mph on a ruler straight road for 90 minutes without encountering another vehicle, human, or cow. Start there, expand as experience with the systems is gained.

dkastner3• 15 years ago

Prior art: trains.

Seriously, though, this is a complete waste of time. Mass transit has been solving the problem of getting people from point A to point B without them having to do the piloting for a hundred years. What we really need to be spending our money on is rebuilding the streetcar and intercity rail systems that used to connect nearly every town in the country and electrifying them. This will drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels (because oil is the only portable energy source cheap and powerful enough for automobiles) and reducing greenhouse gasses. Instead, we're talking about an overly complex solution involving creation of an automated driving system on all our highways and compelling thousands of users to upgrade to driverless cars, which may or may not be electric.

In other words, Google's driverless car is to transportation as Dart is to DOM scripting.

thebooktocome• 15 years ago

Do trains use QR codes to park? I can't find a good source.

dkastner3• 15 years ago

Yes, I know that patent is actually more specific than "driverless car." I was just being snarky.

hkolek• 15 years ago

I get the impression you think that electricity is automatically clean energy. Have you ever thought about how that electricity is generated? Ever heard about coal or nuclear power plants etc.? Do you think they're are environmentally friendly?

dkastner3• 15 years ago

Yes, I realize that most of our electricity comes from coal, natural gas, and nuclear. However, that fact doesn't preclude the idea of using solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy to generate all electricity. It's much more difficult to use these energy sources to power automobiles than it is for trains.

JabavuAdams2• 15 years ago

So, I've been a life-long rider of mass-transit in Toronto, and Southern Ontario. I think I was 30 before I actually had to drive to a job.

You know what -- I hate transit during rush hour. It's uncomfortable, you don't get a seat. Ugh. During the off-times, it's great.

Traffic sucks, but at least you've got a little bubble of space over which you have control. This is psychologically significant.

Think of the difference between having a desk whose layout (or lack thereof) you control, versus working elbow-to-elbow at a long table with other people's jostling you and their crap falling in your space.

People need a certain amount of control over their space.

rafamvc• 15 years ago

When those cars make into our roads, I expect them to have way less accidents than us, humans. Therefore, more and more the human driving insurance will start to spike to levels that make it not cheap to drive your own car.

TheFuture• 15 years ago

Huh? I would expect insurance discounts for every mile you drive under automation.

geogra4• 15 years ago

Google is one of the few companies that legitimately has me excited for the future.

gerggerg• 15 years ago

While I am super excited for the future of auto-driving auto-motives, does this patent really prove anything novel and non obvious? QR codes are already used for orientation by many systems, and it seems quite obvious that an autonomous car would need orientation sensors and a computer with at least one line of code relating the operation of an autonomous vehicle. I think google has made some real patent-worthy innovations with their driver-less vehicles but this seems to be of the overly broad progress stifling type of patent.

omouse2• 15 years ago

Fuck patents of all sorts. They do nothing but stifle innovation.

dpcan• 15 years ago

Agreed. The entire patent departments of all world governments should be abolished. There is no reason the human race should be putting these restrictions on ourselves. It's completely absurd.

mrbgty• 15 years ago

Keep in mind that they probably submitted this to the patent office 3 years ago

kamjam• 15 years ago

Doesn't KITT from Knight Rider count as prior art? :)

(I didn't read the patent!)

dreamdu5t• 15 years ago

When the issue is music or software people pirate, patents are scorned and declared the enemy of progress. When the issue is driverless cars, the attitudes seem much more relaxed.

saraid216• 15 years ago

Music and software piracy are not patent violations. They are copyright violations. It's a completely different issue.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

The most amazing thing about this patent is this:

Filed: May 11, 2011 Issued: December 13, 2011

Natsu• 15 years ago

That's incredibly fast for the PTO.

devindotcom• 15 years ago

I noticed that too. I was actually patenting after I published my post on this earlier today because I thought such a quick turnaround was impossible and the patent was not in fact granted. But it was! Really mind-blowing considering we've seen some take four or five years.

mturmon• 15 years ago

I was surprised that Sebastian Thrun is not on the inventors' list. At least two CMU robotics types are among those on the list. Perhaps it speaks to the depth of Google's robotics expertise?

nswanberg• 15 years ago

Here is a concept video from Google that indirectly shows some context for how the landing strip and QR codes might be used: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWhu_aa9kM

Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent

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