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Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Google was awarded U.S. Patent No. 8,078,349 for methods and devices for Transitioning a Mixed-mode Autonomous Vehicle from a Human Driven Mode to an Autonomously Driven Mode. From the fast-tracked patent application, which was filed last May and kept under wraps at Google's request: 'The autonomous vehicle may be used as a virtual tour guide of Millennium Park in Chicago. In the example embodiment, the vehicle may have an instruction to drive to the Cloud Gate (Silver Bean) sculpture at Millennium Park. When the vehicle arrives, the autonomous instruction may tell it to wait in the location for a predetermined amount of time, for example 5 minutes. The instruction may then direct the vehicle to drive to the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park and again wait for 5 minutes. Next, the instruction may tell the vehicle to drive to the Ice Rink at Millennium Park and wait for another predetermined amount of time. Finally, the vehicle instruction may tell the vehicle to return to its starting position.'"
and kept under wraps at Google's request
They even tried to hide their patent request. So if anyone ever wants to make a driverless car, you shall pay Google for the patent.
Slashdot's reaction to this will be interesting. On the one hand, it's a patent, and we know how much Slashdot hates patents, especially when a company tries to fast-track one in a clandestine manner. On the other hand, Johnny Cab.
AutoAuto's?
???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
This contest dates back to 2004.
Google practice your motto here. Do no evil.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Google awarded first patent test vehicle
Dunno where I got that from. Wouldn't surprise me if that's what their driver-less car turns out to be.
Steve Ballmer is probably throwing Recaro seats around his office over this.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Get a Google driverless vehicle and you can talk on your cell phone all you want. (Ref: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/12/13/1845259/ntsb-recommends-cell-phone-ban-for-drivers)
Take a look at this patent ..... It could as well be the instructions someone gives to their son/daughter to go to the grocery store and back. it is only THAT complicated and specific/technical. And yet, it is granted as an 'intellectual property' in usa now. It has gone down to basic logical algorithms.
Read radical news here
I was next to a Google self-driving Prius on I-280S in San Francisco yesterday.
It was carrying three extremely stereotypical Google employees: 20-something white guy with pony tail and pocket protector, 20-something clean cut east asian engineer in REI jacket and plastic glasses and 20-something south asian engineer in polo shirt (all male).
The one behind the wheel was just barely holding it, presumably to second-guess the car if necessary. It was driving pretty well though I noticed it shares some annoying habits of human drivers, such as placing the driver in the center of the lane (should be to the left!) and briefly flashing the brakes. On the whole it was drove quite conservatively, though I think it did pass the limit once or twice.
.: Semper Absurda
... you don't even have to tell it where to take you - Google already knows.
Check your premises.
No one should have the right to prevent someone from using a solution or an idea. The problem isn't with patents existing, it is with their restrictions on re-use and elaboration by other people.
When someone claims to have invented something, they're just hiding their sources of inspiration. If we all made our sources open, then we would have so much more to "invent".
Anyone should be able to use anything and profit. Instead of it being about ownership and theft, it should be about free redistribution, transparency, and paying it backwards to those you owe credit.
I see two pieces of prior art:
1. Automated driverless trains that automatically go from stop to stop with predetermined waiting times at each one.
2. Surely there's some episode of Knight rider where Michael told KITT to wait until a predetermined time to take some action.
So...that scene in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise switches the car he's in from auto driving mode to manual driving mode, that doesn't DIRECTLY show the obviousness of this patent?
Nothing in the patent says "car". Just vehicle. I'm not an expert, but it looks to me like this is a patent for "what aeroplane autopilots have done for decades, but not mentioning the word aeroplane". It even says "landing strip" in claim 1! How the blazes did this get granted??
When the vehicle arrives, the autonomous instruction may tell it to wait in the location for a predetermined amount of time, for example 5 minutes. The instruction may then direct the vehicle to drive to the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park and again wait for 5 minutes.
Finally we've found the answer to the all-important question: "How long does the first sentient AI wait before annihilating humanity?".
and at 4.30 pm that should take 2.5 hours with wacker drive closed.
Can a passenger safely exit at any time? How does that work?
Fast forward ten years when we are all driving driverless cars. No matter who makes them, they need to get permission from Google to make such a vehicle even if they never use any google product in its production. The fact that technology will have easily progressed far enough by that point to allow fully automated vehicles, google will still be getting a huge chunk out of any car made or sold without ever having any part its design, construction, or sale, besides being the first ones to do it.
This is like all software patents. Trying to patent mathematics and language. And we are going to have a whole generation of wasted potential because there is no way to fix it, because the only ones that can change it love the way things are now.
It is sure good that we don't award patents for obvious things and that no one except Google ever had the idea for a driverless vehicle.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's all good until a T-Rex comes along and knocks your car over.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was whether or not Richard Kiley would be narrating the tour.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I bet car makers are thrilled by this patent. It'll make sure things stay the same for a few more decades.
Google: To develop this technology, we gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges, a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the U.S. Government. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the CMU team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge.
Google will be in the driver seat when there are no longer humans alive on the surface of the planet and will use video technology to clear the paths of human debris from routes that need to be open for various geo engineering tasks for the large body of anti-brethren held up under ground.
Way to go Google
Knowing how your search engine will "change" my keywords when doing a search, I have a feeling it would not take me to where I wanted to go.
This sucks, destroys any idea I had of developing an algorithm that drives a car.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
Given how vague the patent is, wouldn't this also cover attraction ridecars (the more modern trackless ones anyway).
This is not a patent on autonomous driving. That would be very hard to do given the extensive prior art. Instead, the patent is basically focused the vehicle switching modes or executing an autonomous motion based on a QR code or some other infrastructure based marker that points at an URL. Many other teams have used infrastructure markers to indicated a change in vehicle mode. For example, California PATH encodes a binary 0101 signal using N-S-N-S magnet orientation, several Japanese teams use RF-based roadway beacons, and a variety of teams use painted markings (e.g., Civis bus in Las Vegas). However, most of these use internally stored references and maps on the vehicles. Also, some of the DSRC implementations conceived by US DOT include autonomous actions based on information received over RF from nearby vehicles. The difference here is that this patent is about using the reference to look up a command over the internet. It is a small delta on existing work.
Having said this, the idea raises all sorts of questions about man-in-the-middle attacks.
One of the original reasons to have a patent system was to help ensure the spread of knowledge and know-how. By providing limited time legal protection to patent holders, they had an incentive to put their ideas out in the public domain. Once the patent expires the entire world is free to copy the design etc. In contrast if someone keeps their product/idea as a trade secret instead ( WD-40 and coke for example) no one gains the ability to make your product unless they can figure out how you did it.
That concept seems to work just fine until we get into software. I have not read the patent but I have a feeling that you could not recreate whatever Google did just from reading it. From the write up it sounds like a common sense concept. Basically they get legal protection but don't really have to show how they do it. My hope is that Google is being defensive with this and ensuring that no one else gets the patent and then licenses the tech for free and the betterment of mankind (which they could do). I'm not a huge Google fanboi and they confuse me some times by doing one thing that seems very progressive and then turning around and taking a hard business view on something else.
In general I like the concept of patents and IP but the implementation is so bad that we might just be better off without it. At the least, if you apply for a patent on a device the patent should be a manual on how to make it from scratch by someone with the required skills. That way once your patent expires the knowledge is truly free for anyone to pickup and expand/make cheaper/whatever the fuck they wanna do with it. I think that would be more in line with the original idea of why we have patents.
"Making a driverless car" is a concept people have talked about for a long time - that's not what you get to patent. Google's specific methods for making a driverless car probably are, but you can find other ways to make driverless cars and Google's patents aren't supposed to affect you.
One of the big problems with software patents, and especially with business method patents, is that the Patent Office was pretty clueless about prior art and obviousness to skilled practitioners and allowed a lot of patents about "Do X Using a Computer!" or "Do Y On the Internet!" where those were obvious things to want to do, and usually done in obvious ways, and of course, there have been lots of patents like "A wheel, with this very specific new technique for building part of the axle" and then trying to extort money from anybody using wheels or other rotating devices.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unless you're disabled and need a cart, Millenium Park makes no sense as an example. None of the features named are accessible by car... you can walk to one or another in a minute or two.
Tour Bots have been in existence in Second Life for years, I myself have written a robotics language in SL's scripting LSL tool that provides the same functions.
Just because it's a virtual object, doesn't mean that the methods were not already created and used.
Just make sure it can run away from dinosaurs.
T-Rex don't just eat goats.
Under U.S. law, all patent applications are published at 18 months after the filing date or date of earliest priority claim. Since Google filed for accelerated examination (either qualify under a specific program or pay extra money), the application was examined so fast that it was issued as a patent before the 18 month point (we would never see it before its issue date anyway).
It did however have a non-publication request. Nonpublication is permitted under U.S. law (see 35 USC 122(b)) and is not unusual (although almost all applications are published at 18 months). However there are two downsides for the patent owner: 1) requesting nonpublication in the US gives up all chance of foreign filing, 2) it means that the application cannot serve as published prior art until it issues as a patent.
Lets say I spend millions on R&D to make an automated tour car happen.
Then I also have to pay google royalities to use the basic concept of replacing a human tour guide with a computer? Why?
This seems absurd to me especially since automated tour trains have been around for years.
Didn't Jurassic Park already have this technology? Dammit, get me Hammond on the phone!
We keep seeing stories of crappy patents that were proposed or are being accepted. However, I've never heard of any patent rejection stats. Does the patent office list those? Can we get a list of rejects patents and see how crazy those are?
Seriously? They've patented the act of telling something where to go and to wait when it gets there? Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't automated manufacturing machinery had this sort of functionality for years? How does this pass the "novelty" requirement?
The US needs to stop granting software patents, which this essentially is. And it will most likely be overturned after a long and expensive trip to court. The automotive industry as a whole won't go for it.
Long ago, there was a show on Discovery Channel 'Beyond 2000'. They had a show one time with a section on self-driving vans.
Ahh, I miss when Discovery actually had to do with interesting discoveries most of the time, now it's full of crabs. (ok, and Mythbusters making things explode, I have nothing against that part)