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Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent
- reader5000 15y agoExcellent. I was hoping technological progress in this area would be oppressed. The USPTO did not disappoint!
- cq 15y agoIronic that you think that a technology patent is the antithesis of oppression.
- cbr 15y agoI think you misread him.
- derefr 15y agoCar 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.
- einhverfr 15y agoWell, 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.
- randallsquared 15y agoI seriously doubt Google will monetize this patent before it expires. How does this opinion square with their lobbying efforts to legalize driverless vehicles (e.g., in Nevada)?
- damoncali 15y agoDo you really think there will be commercial driverless cars on the road in a volume that is financially meaningful to Google before this patent expires? A lot of things have to happen first - and the liability issue is just one of them. The auto insurance markets and laws have to adapt and change, and who knows who will object to this. Consumers have rethink the very meaning of car. Safety needs to be worked out. Someone has to pay for all this. This is decades away at best. If/when this happens, it's more likely that Google doesn't exist than Google profiting from driverless cars.
- randallsquared 15y agoI think that there will be a significant number of driverless cars operating on the road by 2020. I would be very surprised if they're banned, but only mildly surprised if by 2020 there's a mandate or serious talk of a mandate for driverless technology on all cars sold, like emissions legislation now.
- libraryatnight 15y agoIs it just a hunch you have? Why specifically 2020? No snark, just wondering if you've read something that indicates they're coming sooner than later. I mean, I want my driverless car in my lifetime :)
- jberryman 15y agoconsumer cars being sold today already partially drive themselves (can stop for you, swerve to avoid debris, parallel park). Autonomous cars have been under test for decades and google has already solved the problem of creating a car that can drive itself safely in traffic. Everything I've been hearing indicates they are coming sooner than later, and that it's a revolution not many people are that aware of.
- randallsquared 15y agoThe technology is already available, and merely allowing it would have enormous savings in time and money for virtually everyone who isn't being paid to drive. Further, the savings can be captured by the person making the decision to put it on, so as soon as it's allowed, I expect to see widespread adoption, retrofitting, etc. Again, as soon as the statistics come in about accidents with driverless systems, I expect a push for mandating that all ordinary vehicles have them, because putting them on every car would likely save almost 30K lives a year in the US alone: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx . Interesting sidenote: why did vehicular deaths decline by 25% between 2007 and 2009, without any real decrease in miles traveled? Odd.
- ugh 15y agoIs that actually the case? In Germany you are always liable for all damage your car does, no matter whether it is caused by your own mistakes or because of a technical failure. This might not seem fair but the second piece to this puzzle is that you are also forced to have insurance. Making it clear and unmistakable who is liable makes sure that it is always clear who has to pay for the damage done by cars. The insurance makes sure that whoever is liable can also actually pay. That way the victims don’t get left with the costs (no matter how much money the liable person has) and for the liable person accidents don’t turn into life-destroying events. This is a working system and I see no reason why it wouldn’t work with driverless cars. (Even if you want to change it and switch liability from the owner to the manufacturer, that’s not really an insurmountable problem. The solution is – as always – called insurance. Google would just have to insure every car they sell. That’s no big deal, seeing as cars are already pretty much all insured. The cars would get more expensive but the cost of ownership would decrease since it wouldn’t be necessary any longer to pay for insurance. Such a change would be pretty pointless, though. It would only serve to switch around who pays. In the end, though, the owner still has to bear the costs.)
- dmooney1 15y agoI agree the manufacturer would not necessarily take on the bulk of the risk. However, there is supposed to be less risk once this technology is perfected. If the technology is indeed superior to human drivers, auto insurers will offer discounts to self-driving car owners. Furthermore, autonomous cars make more sense economically if they are part of a fleet service like a robotic taxi service. The future subscription-based Zipcar or ad-based Google Cars service would carry the insurance. The human is just a passenger no more responsible for an accident than a human-driven-taxi passenger.
- JabavuAdams 15y ago> auto insurers will offer discounts to self-driving car owners No, the market doesn't work like that. Auto insurers will raise the price for human-driven car owners.
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- roel_v 15y ago"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." Says who? That's far from a decided matter.
- damoncali 15y agoTrue. I think the point, however, is that the enormous amounts of money at stake will ensure that this decision process will take quite some time to work out.
- nt_mark 15y ago1. Google is NEVER going into the auto business, but they'll licence or even donate their software to run on any auto manufacturers car. 2. The auto manufacturers will only tepidly roll this out very with tons of regulatory and legal tiptoeing. 3. The end user will have to sign away any legal rights to recourse and/or the government(s) will have to amend statutory rights accordingly before the first cars hit the road. 4. It will happen, eventually. It will save hundreds of thousands of lives/year.
- Kadrith 15y agoI wonder if the use of this patent, and any associated software, would be tied to Android or other Google services.
- ScottBurson 15y agothey'll licence or even donate their software to run on any auto manufacturers car Of course, as you're riding down the road in your Google-powered driverless car, there will be ads on the dashboard monitor, paid for by the businesses you pass by on your route.
- einhverfr 15y ago3. The end user will have to sign away any legal rights to recourse and/or the government(s) will have to amend statutory rights accordingly before the first cars hit the road. Since the end user will probably not be the plaintiff "The care you made owned by my neighbor ran over my son!" it will have to be a statutory fix IMO. Question: How do you get "hundreds of thousands of lives per year?" How much safer do you expect these to be and where do you expect them to be driven?
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y agoNot all driverless vehicles will carry passengers. e.g., I can see this patent being applied to automated forklifts in a warehouse, robotic supply carriers in hospitals (a la HelpMate robots), etc.
- hessenwolf 15y agoIf 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 15y agoWhat about prior art - DARPA grand challenge (2004-2007)?
- sjmulder 15y agoThis patent is about switching between manual and automatic driving, not the autonomous driving in itself.
- munin 15y agoI'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 15y agoThe 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 15y 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 15y agoThe 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 15y agoYeah, 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.
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- sliverstorm 15y agoit'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 15y 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.
- nitrogen 15y agoIf you want more people to read patents, you need to make them more understandable (as you say), and get rid of treble damages for potentially accidental infringement of a patent you "should have" been aware of because you were reading patents.
- mmcconnell1618 15y agoThis 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 15y agoPractical 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.
- dkastner 15y agoPrior 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 15y agoDo trains use QR codes to park? I can't find a good source.
- hkolek 15y agoI 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?
- dkastner 15y ago
- rafamvc 15y agoWhen 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 15y agoHuh? I would expect insurance discounts for every mile you drive under automation.
- geogra4 15y agoGoogle is one of the few companies that legitimately has me excited for the future.
- gerggerg 15y agoWhile 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.
- omouse 15y agoFuck patents of all sorts. They do nothing but stifle innovation.
- dpcan 15y agoAgreed. 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 15y agoKeep in mind that they probably submitted this to the patent office 3 years ago
- kamjam 15y agoDoesn't KITT from Knight Rider count as prior art? :) (I didn't read the patent!)
- dreamdu5t 15y agoWhen 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 15y agoMusic and software piracy are not patent violations. They are copyright violations. It's a completely different issue.
- ChuckMcM 15y agoThe most amazing thing about this patent is this: Filed: May 11, 2011 Issued: December 13, 2011
- Natsu 15y agoThat's incredibly fast for the PTO.
- devindotcom 15y agoI 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 15y agoI 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 15y agoHere 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWhu_aa9kM