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IBM's Patent-Pending Traffic Lights Stop Car Engines
theodp writes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let your engine idle. The USPTO has just published IBM's patent application for a 'System and Method for Controlling Vehicle Engine Running State at Busy Intersections for Increased Fuel Consumption Efficiency.' Here's how Big Blue explains the invention: 'The present disclosure is directed to a method for managing engines in response to a traffic signal. The method may comprise establishing communications with participating vehicles; responding to a stop status indicated by the traffic signal, further comprising: receiving a position data from each participating vehicles; determining a queue of participating vehicles stopped at the traffic signal; determining a remaining duration of the stop status; sending a stop-engine notification to the list of participating vehicles stopped at the traffic signal when the remaining duration is greater than a threshold of time; responding to a proceed status indicated by the traffic signal, further comprising: sending a start-engine notification to a first vehicle in the queue; calculating an optimal time for an engine of a second vehicle in the queue to start; and sending the start-engine notification to the second vehicle at the optimal time.' IBM notes that 'traffic signals may include, but are not limited to, traffic lights at intersections, railway crossing signals, or other devices for indicating correct moments to stop and to proceed.'"
Hmmm, a computer at a railway crossing that can remotely disable a car's engine. To use the parlance of our times "What could possibly go wrong?"
This patent would be much less necessary if cities would install intelligent traffic lights that allowed traffic to flow and thus minimized idling engines.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
suppose your car has been told to shut off at a red light. What happens if you need to suddenly perform crash avoidance? One of the standard things taught in driver school is leaving enough room between you and the car in front of you in case you need to avoid a rear collision. I'm not sure insurance companies are going to go for this.
I've never perceived the problem of getting vehicles to turn off engines at traffic lights as being a technical issue. Rather, the problem is much more one of regulation, and forcing everyone to adopt a standard. To make the strategy work, you need to:
(a) get every state in the union, and perhaps every municipality in every state, to modify their traffic lights in the same way, and
(b) get every automaker to make cars that with electronic modules that work with the *SAME* standard as the traffic lights, and
(c) get every class action litigator to agree to not sue anyone.
Business text books clearly say to "run away" from any system that requires broad corporate/public/governmental agreement, particularly if the system involves long-term governmental and corporate cooperation.
I wish all funding for that would be diverted to making a car with a survival instinct: Proximity sensors for collision avoidance, sensors to determine road conditions of maximum safe speeds accordingly, etc.
Once it becomes rare for someone to die in a car accident, THEN they can mess around with red light idling algorithms and self-driving cars. Just pick your priorities: Safety first.
You can't take the sky from me...
The problem is the damn headline, that makes the idea sound Orwellian. It isn't. It's not about disabling your engine, or some other DRM-style idea. It's about giving your car additional information that it can choose to use to increase fuel efficiency.
Are you familiar with the idea of correlated equilibrium from game theory? By giving players a common instruction, which they can choose either to follow or to disobey, you can often get better Nash equilibria than if you simply made the players decide what to do independently. That's what this is -- applied to engine management.
Not to argue against your very strong valid points, however I would like to remind you of the seemingly similar high odds of super-market checkout scanners being adopted, everywhere, within a reasonable amount of time.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Anyone want to take bets on how long until the protocols gets hacked and spoofed?
This should be a good thread on comp.risks.
Some of this is an issue of reliability and having an engine designed for multiple restarts. For at least older gasoline vehicles, starting an engine can cause hell on the internal wear of engine parts and is generally discouraged on a practical dollars and cents level as you will be paying far more in engine repair bills than the little bit of money that you save for turning off an engine. Even if you are a backyard mechanic and figuring in the cost of the replacement parts alone, it can get quite expensive. If you factor in the environmental factors for metal refinement used to make these parts and shipping those parts across the country to get them to you, it could be argued that turning off engines actually does more harm to the environment and perhaps even more carbon pollution than simply keeping the engine running.... at least if the time you keep the engine off is but a short period of time. The rule of thumb I've heard is you start to save money if you are going to be stopped for more than a few minutes... that is not the amount of time people are typically at an intersection waiting for a street light.
The point being that you need a vehicle designed explicitly for being turned off and restarted on a whim and have that happen repeatedly during a typical driving experience.
BTW, part of the patent here is that it specifically addresses the above issue I mention, where the manufacturer puts into is electronic control system some sort of calculation for how long an engine ought to be kept on before wear and tear on the engine from restart begins to do some damage, and if the traffic signals "intelligently" indicate that the wait time is going to be longer than that predetermined time period, that the engine shuts off while the car is already stopped anyway. It is an interesting solution to the issue, but I'm not really sure how "non-obvious" that concept really is if the goal is to engage in saving fuel in this manner. A competent automotive engineer would have responded to the same engineering goals with at least that same sort of solution.... which to me makes the idea not patentable. Of course who ever said that the USPTO ever made sense on what they considered for a patent.
I had the same thought - he's probably not saving fuel by turning off the ignition at a stop light. But, I didn't want to commit to actually TELLING HIM that he's wasting fuel. Just maybe, some manufacturer has come up with a more fuel efficient method of restarting a hot engine or something.
But, yes, in most vehicles, it is going to take more fuel to restart the engine than to just wait for the traffic light. Someone told me once what the break-even point was, but I don't really remember. 3 minutes? Maybe a bit less. It probably varies for different size engines, and different idle speeds - in fact, it's probably different between automatic and manual vehicles.
Personally, I'm not about to turn off an engine unless I KNOW that I'm stuck for 5 minutes or more.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
In a lot of busy roundabouts you still need traffic lights, otherwise you can have one flow of traffic blocking everyone else out.
In 20 years of driving, only the emergency vehicle one. I've never had any of those other situations. That's not to say they don't happen, but I am left wondering why you imagine they are common occurrences that happen to everyone.
Secondly, I wonder why whenever a new idea/patent/invention is brought up here, some people object to it on the basis of assuming that the worst possible implementation is the one that would be done; that the inventor hasn't already considered the problems that come into your mind within seconds of hearing the idea, and dealt with them. And that an implementation would be continued with if such problems remained.
a sizable number of people already do switch off their engines if they are in a quene of traffic and are going to be waiting a long time. And this doesn't seem t have caused problems. So there doesn't seem to be a problem with switching engines off in queues per se.
A rational implementation would of course not switch the engine off unless the car was already stationary with the parking break applied. And it would not stop the driver from restarting the engine with the ignition key if needed. These obvious details seem to deal with all your fears.
The ability to turn cars on and off at their whim.
How long until one hacks into the system and just turns them all off?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
One of the largest reasons for having such a huge patent portfolio is mainly to discourage patent trolls from trying to sue IBM. Especially if it is another manufacturer they can shut down competition that goes after them in the courts by throwing up enough other patents to make it a patent war on a large scale. So from a defensive standpoint, IBM is merely doing a good business practice by taking a bad system and trying not to get harmed by it.
I've never really understood the patent system in the first place, as it really doesn't protect "the little guy", in other words the lone tinkerer in a garage who comes up with some crazy idea and wants to earn some bucks from the concept. Until anybody can show that such a person is legitimately protected, I have to consider the patenting process as something more of a scam that is designed to extract money from those who are least able to afford it. For a private person to patent something, I would consider it to be 99% of the time to be an utter mistake.
For a corporation that already has full time lawyers working for them, having some of that legal time engaged in dealing with patent protection perhaps makes some practical sense. In other words, this is a system that mainly protects those who already have money and not those struggling to get some in the first place.
All this is necessary to achieve this is wider application of so called "mild hybrid" technology. Think over-sized battery, over-sized starter motor, over-sized alternator, drive by wire throttle, and a bit of ECU smarts. Any time the car is stopped (or below speed X, where X is small 3mph? ) the engine is "off" (no fuel, no spark, engine still turning if the car is in motion), and the battery and starter motor move the car. Once the speed threshold is exceeded (or battery is sufficiently low) fuel and spark are resumed. At any greater speed the vehicle is powered entirely by the engine. Having electrically powered accessories (power steering assist, air conditioning, brake booster, etc.) would be preferable, so that all of those systems still function when the engine is not spinning. It addition, making these electric tends to increase efficiency and reduce weight. If these systems remain belt or vacuum driven there can be many situation where the ECU may be forced to leave the car idling, or waste battery power spinning the engine to keep the accessories running.
One of the largest reasons for having such a huge patent portfolio is mainly to discourage patent trolls from trying to sue IBM.
Sorry but if you deal with a troll in the sense of a non-practicing (or some say non-producing) entity, there's no way you can use your own patent portfolio to countersue. The troll has no products/services against which you can assert your patents, where you have none, a few, or tens of thosuands. There's simply no counterthreat for a lack of a target area on which to drop a bomb.
The only way to defend yourself against a troll is that you get the troll's patent invalidated or prove that you don't infringe the patent claim(s) in question. All of that has nothing to do with your own patent portfolio. If you want to invalidate the troll's patent on the basis of prior art, you can use any publication (such as a magazine article or source code published on the Internet) or a patent. It doesn't have to be your own: for prior art you can use your worst enemy's stuff.
More details on the limit of using one's own patents against trolls in this blog post; there are two sections addressing the troll question, the one under the subhead "Absolutely zero deterrent effect on "patent trolls" (non-producing entities)" and the one under "Patent busting isn't a matter of having any patents of one's own".
And you need to eliminate the standard auto starter. It is not designed to take that much extra use. They have a finite life on the brushes, contactor, and Bendix.
Changing starter replacement cylcles from about 120K miles to less than 20 K is unacceptable.
Only a new starter that eliminates those issues can be used with reasonable life expectancy. The Prius for example has solved those problems. It does not use a contactor, brushes, or Bendix. It uses the main electric traction motor to turn the engine. It does not contain a traditional 12 volt starter motor.
The truth shall set you free!
First of all, starters have a limited lifetime. If you force cars to engage them at nearly every stoplight, they will wear out 10 times faster or more. If a starter wears out at a traffic light, the car can't start and the flow of traffic will stop. This will do wonders for fuel savings, but not much good for transportation, as a whole.
Second, if my engine shut off at a stoplight in the Texas summer, my air conditioning would not work and I would effectively be baking in an oven.
How about instead of that a marquee that tells motorists the wait time and suggests shutting off their engines to save gas?
I'm betting it will be cheaper (especially since you can't patent a sign saying how long the wait is, theme parks have decades of prior art), it completely avoids an entire class of serious problems (like what if a carjacker/terrorist/bored 13 year old figures out how to send the kill signal) and doesn't require refitting every car in the U.S.
If voluntary participation isn't widespread enough once the signs are in place, put on a few PSAs encouraging kids to pester their parents about it.
Of course the whole thing will become a moot point anyway as hybrid and electric cars take over. At that point, at least my alternative suggestion can then be re-purposed to provide news and entertainment.
"Workers to power!"
That doesn't "work" very well in practice, and couldn't even compete with the Capitalism you hate in terms of worker benefits. Eating the rich is great fun until you run out of rich to eat, then everyone else goes on the exploitation menu, for the good of the workers, of course.
Capitalism leavened with a humane but not overpowering dose of Socialism arguably produces the best results. Business should be restrained by government, government restrained by business, and both restrained by the votes of an engaged and informed citizenry. Makes a lousy slogan though.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Stopping cars at the light isn't all that hard, but making it a good idea to stop them at the light is pretty far away. The trivial problem of pre-loading the oil pump so that it does not do serious life limiting of your engine is a small detail that nobody seems to care about (because they don't know that starting and stopping conventional vehicles at every intersection is murder to the lubrication system, and therefore the entire engine.) Some cars do this (prius, some police cruisers) but most do not.
Much more, you have to re-engineer cars so that A/C is not dependent on the motor running.
Many people who live in places without shit weather have no idea about this (particularly California where "green" ideas that are wildly impractical seem to come from).
Are there places in the country where you can freeze to death if your car stops? yes. Are there places in the country where infants can die of heat stroke if your car stops? Yes. those places just don't happen to be in California/NY.
Heat and A/C are not about comfort, they are about survival, at least in many places in the country.
I have encountered traffic lights which never turn green for my direction, even after waiting through many cycles for about 5 or 10 minutes. There was one light in town which seemed to be wait for its buried magnetic sensing loops to detect at least two cars to arrive before it would turn green. I would be coming back from a grocery store at about midnight and have to sit there for about 5 minutes while waiting for another car to arrive, then it would finally change. Unfortunately, there was also a no right turn sign at the intersection, which made it impossible for me to legally escape from the situation.
There were three lights in town, more or less, like that. I have wondered if perhaps something about my pickup truck or the way that I approach the intersection, fails to trigger the buried magnetic sensing loops. I once talked to another local resident who had the same problem, in his pickup truck, with one of the same traffic lights.
I would hate to encounter a traffic light which could turn off my engine in that situation, preventing me from backing up or turning right to escape the problem. Would there be an emergency override switch for the system? Would they require such a system being retrofitted to my older 1992 pickup truck? I also wonder what would happen if the power to the traffic lights goes out during a thunder storm. Would our engines default to start in such a situation, so that we could treat the failed traffic lights as 4-way stop signs?
When will manufacturers, especially software manufacturers, ever understand the concept that it is *MY* computer or device, *NOT THEIRS* ???
As noted above in all the "What could go wrong?" posts, this kind of central control is fraught with problems and unintended consequences..
If they simply take an approach to design and engineering that respects fact that it is not their device, all kinds of problems go away.
A proper approach would be for the lights to broadcast their status and schedule for the next few minutes (i.e., how long until the next change, how long will be the next red, etc.), and allow the vehicle and driver to decide what to do about it.
Sure, If we're at the beginning of a long red, then it is probably best to shut down. But, if we're making a right turn and/or trying to get someone to the hospital at 3AM, have paused to check that there is no crossing traffic, then we should drive on. If the hybrid motor is trying to recharge low batteries, the motor should keep running. Etc. We could even have a dashboard or heads-up display showing the status so the driver can make better decisions. Different car designers can code the best algorithm for *their* particular car design, e.g., a hybrid might use a completely different response pattern than a truck or a sportscar.
What is so hard about that? [Warning - oversimplification following] Decentralized systems are generally more flexible, and have shallower bugs than centralized systems. So, why do they persist in designing that way?
So, carjackers can now just hangout at traffic control light and have little to no resistance when taking someone's car. What about undercover law enforcement that is involved in a chase of a criminal? They sure as hell do not use Crown Victorias, or other "standard" law enforcement vehicles. There are also civilians that might need to run through a red light.
The fact is, no one and nothing(other than the driver) should ever have, or will ever have, control over a vehicle. There are just too many problems that arise and I can foresee this as becoming illegal(in the U.S., at least), if it were ever patented and marketed.
... why not sync the %$#@&)$$ lights better? That would save quite a bit of gas, not having to start and stop at every intersection.
Have gnu, will travel.