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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.
AutoAuto's?
???
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
I haven't RTFA yet, but if it's not a patent solely on software I don't think most folks here will have too much of a problem with it.
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)
Dream come true for drunks, too.
yssh shhirr I've p_ssed me pants, sh_t me drawers an' c'n not stannup, thss why me carss takin' me home. *hic*
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
... 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.
It's pretty much a patent on software. Software for controlling a vehicle, but software nonetheless. Claim 15, for example:
An article of manufacture including a tangible non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-readable instructions encoded thereon, the instructions comprising: instructions for detecting a landing strip with a first sensor responsive to a vehicle stopping; instructions for detecting a reference indicator with a second sensor, responsive to the first sensor detecting the landing strip; instructions for identifying reference data associated with the detected reference indicator, wherein the reference data comprises an internet address; instructions for wirelessly retrieving the autonomous vehicle instruction based on at least the reference data; instructions for switching a vehicle to autonomous operation mode; and, instructions for performing the autonomous vehicle instruction.
This claim format is known as a Beauregard claim. Such claims have long been used as one of several ways of claiming software-implemented inventions, though their long-term viability is somewhat suspect (hence all the "tangible non-transitory" hedging language). The other claims are to a method (also basically software) and to a vehicle running the software on a control module (since Google didn't invent the car, that's basically another software claim).
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??
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.
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.
I think the consensus* will be that the DARPA Challenge constitutes Prior Art as many of those vehicles were converted from human to fully autonomous.
I also think the consensus* will be that the patent will make it impossible for DARPA to continue running its challenge, as having Google demand royalties from every entrant would make it impossible for highly innovative/inventive colleges or individuals from taking part as these are not the kinds of groups that will have money to spare for paying off Google.
*consensus here is defined as "the view of the actual geeks and nerds on this site".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
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.
There is a catch:
Since google is at the end of the day just a huge web based ad agency, you are forced to watch a wireless internet connected screen thats feeding you audio commercials all the way to your destination. :P
See this is why I hate software patents. It's not because they are software, but because I haven't seen a single software patent that comes close to alluding how to actually implement the invention in the patent. If you take a patent for a mechanical device, it's usually described in such a way (using diagrams and such) how one who is skilled in the field would actually construct the mechanical device. When it's a software patent, they don't give any source code, pseudo code, or even allude to how one would actually program such a thing. So, even when the patent does expire, anybody wanting to take advantage of the invention in the patent has to come up with their own implementation from scratch. Sure you know the end goal of the program, but if there are no instructions on which algorithms one would use to create a driverless car, then the patent is useless. So Google gets a monopoly on driverless cars for the next 17 years, And after that, we all get nothing because we have no more information on how to implement said driverless car, because all the source code is locked up in copyright and trade secrets.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
placing the driver in the center of the lane (should be to the left!)
No, the driver should be in the center of the lane. Sometimes there's a shoulder only on the right, sometimes only on the left, but all that's irrelevant because that lane is your lane, this lane is my lane is more than a song, it's a way of life... for some of us. Unfortunately you can find people who are careless about the lane markers just by going for a drive, so realistically you want to be protected from people who might enter your lane from either side. And moreover, in cases where there is no divider, you most emphatically do not want to be at the left side of the lane, because head-on collisions are not good things.
What I'd like to know is how one of these cars would handle driving around my town, where there's potholes big enough to lose a Prius in completely and still have room for a couple of motorcycles.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And on the third hand, it's Google, who according to Slashdot groupthink can do no wrong.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.