Waymo Patents a Lidar System That Sniffs Out Retroreflectors Before They Blind It
Reflective road signs and bike reflectors can overwhelm a self-driving car's lidar sensor, flooding it with so much light that nearby objects…
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Automotive patents
Every Big Tech patent in the automotive category, in plain English. Updated weekly from USPTO.
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New Waymo Patent Sends Robotaxis on Targeted Data Hunts
Instead of waiting for interesting driving situations to happen randomly, Waymo wants to actively send its vehicles to places where those situations…
Waymo Patents a Deep Learning Model That Reads Road Wetness in Real Time
Wet or icy roads are among the trickiest situations for any driver — human or robot. Waymo is filing a patent for…
Waymo Patents a Multi-Camera System for Reading Vehicle Lights in Real Time
A self-driving car that can't reliably tell whether the vehicle ahead is braking — or just has a dirty taillight — isn't…
Nvidia Patents a 4D Scene Generator That Builds Synthetic Worlds for Self-Driving AI
Training a self-driving car requires millions of hours of real-world footage — unless you can just generate those worlds from scratch. Nvidia's…
Nvidia Patents a Road Separation Detection System for Self-Driving Cars
Self-driving cars need to know whether a concrete barrier divides opposing traffic or just marks a shoulder — and getting that wrong…
Nvidia Patents a Vision-Language System That Spots and Reports Road Hazards Automatically
Nvidia is patenting a system that lets a vehicle's cameras and sensors automatically identify road hazards — potholes, debris, accidents — and…
Nvidia Patents a Selective Radar Sampling System for Self-Driving Cars
Automotive radar generates a flood of signal data that most cars simply don't have the bandwidth to fully process. Nvidia's new patent…
Tesla Patents a Simulated-Data Training Loop for Vision-Only Vehicles
Tesla's self-driving system relies entirely on cameras — no radar, no lidar. This patent describes how Tesla plans to make that vision-only…
Zoox Patents a Lattice-Based Motion Planner That Reprices Trajectories Around Live Objects
Zoox's latest patent describes a driving system that doesn't just pick a route — it pre-bakes a web of possible paths and…
Waymo Patents a System That Predicts When Cyclists Are About to Lose Control
Most self-driving safety systems react to people who are already in the road. Waymo's new patent is about something harder: predicting that…
Waymo Patents a Real-Time Acceleration Envelope for Self-Driving Cars
Waymo's latest patent tackles one of the trickiest problems in autonomous driving: how does a self-driving car know exactly how hard it…
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