Google Patents Self-Driving Car That Glues Pedestrians To The Hood In A Crash (cnn.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Google just got a patent for a special kind of coating on self-driving cars that could help prevent pedestrian injuries. The company wants to coat autonomous vehicles with a sticky substance so that if they hit a pedestrian, the person would be glued to the car instead of flying off. "[The pedestrian] is not thrown from the vehicle, thereby preventing a secondary impact between the pedestrian and the road surface or other object," says the patent, granted on Tuesday. Google explains that an "adhesive layer" would be placed on the hood, front bumper and front side panels of a car. A thin coating would protect it until an impact occurred. Google is paying Arizona residents $20 per hour to test its self-driving vehicles.

Comments

KATAMARI DAMACY 2017 MODEL

[Anonymous Coward]

with all the options

Re:KATAMARI DAMACY 2017 MODEL

[ShanghaiBill]

1. Go to Goodwill and buy some really cheap used clothes.
2. Look for a SDC going in your direction.
3. Jump onto the side of the car.
4. When you get to your destination, squirm out of the clothes, and leave them stuck to the vehicle.

Uber will also have an optional discount for riding on the hood of the car.

Or they could be pinned

[HalAtWork]

between the car and another object/vehicle

Re:Or they could be pinned

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

between the car and another object/vehicle

Exactly my thought. The car won't be damaged because your body will cushion the (next) impact.

Re:Or they could be pinned

[BigDukeSix]

Pedestrians either get hit in the street or parking lot, or they get pinned against the wall of a garage (where else are the cars?). In the latter case, the crush injury happens irrespective of the presence of the adhesive layer. We should consider edge cases, but this is a bona fide genius idea. Add a dispersive gel layer underneath the adhesive and this might make a real difference.

Disclaimer: I am a trauma surgeon, and do crash reconstruction work on the side.

Re:Or they could be pinned

[beh]

You're forgetting another important point - with one person stuck to the car, google might recoup some of the research funding by exposing their captive audience (i.e. poor schmuck on the fender) to "relevant ads" (lawyers, health professionals)...

Ideas

[HumanWiki]

They're not always good.

Great!

[Narcocide]

Auto safety features inspired by Carmageddon. That's just what we needed.

Steam achievement?

[JustNiz]

I wonder if you get a steam achievement for collecting multiple pedestrians?

I take it all back

[PopeRatzo]

Self-driving cars are going to be fun after all.

It'll be a "Smart" adhesive...

[aklinux]

It will only stick pedestrians. Not dirt, birds, cats, etc ;-)

See...

[Stormy Dragon]

...this is what you get when you legalize recreational marijuana.

Re: Are Seagulls going to be stuck to the hood?

[alvinrod]

There's bugs in their idea. Literal bugs. They're already a pain in the ass to scrape off a vehicle. This conceivably makes the problem worse. I suppose if you live in the valley the homeless are thicker than he insects, but this is worthless outside of the bubble. . . . err valley.

Re: Are Seagulls going to be stuck to the hood?

[olsmeister]

A thin coating would protect it until an impact occurred.

Afterwards?

[R3d M3rcury]

Okay, so the concept is the person is hit by the car and does not go flying 20 feet when the car hits them. They have an outer-shell that is reasonably strong so you're not picking up bugs, grass, etc. Sounds like a plan.

My question is "How do you get the person unstuck afterwards?"

So I'm standing in the road and the car hits me, I stick to his hood and I'm now traveling the speed of his car, let's say 30 MPH. He jams on his brakes because, let's face it, there's a guy stuck to his hood. The nice thing is that I'm not going to fly off the car at 30 MPH. The car comes to a stop and the driver gets out and asks if I'm okay. I may have some bumps and bruises, but I'm good.

Okay, that's gotta be pretty good stickum to hold my 180-pounds to the car while it's decelerating. So how do I peel myself off the hood of his car? I mean, I would imagine that any stickum that can hold me in place while a car decelerates from 30 to 0 is not going to let me just get up afterwards.

And Lord help the hairy shirtless men who get hit. That's gonna hurt!

Adhesive only during impact

[ilsaloving]

A very quick skim of the patent says that there would be a coating on top of the adhesive coating. This top coat is designed to break during impact, exposing the pedestrian to the adhesive underneath.

I'm not sure the patent designer considered what to do when the car is inevitably hit with gravel or other objects that are sharp or have enough energy to break the topcoat.

adds a new meaning

[Black Parrot]

to the term "bumper sticker".

physics!

[goombah99]

I suspect the logic for this idea comes from considering an elastic collision between a heavy and light object.
for a car with mass M, and intial velocity Vi and pedestrian of mass m, with initially no velocity and then final velocity Vp we can write:

MVi = MVf + mVp

MVi^2 = MVf^2 + mVp^2

for conservation of momentum and energy.

Solving these equations for Vp we get

Vp = 2 Vf *M/(M+m) ~ 2Vf

so an elastic collision throws the pedestrian off at a speed of twice the car's velocity, who then hits the ground.

If the pedestrian sticks to the car their final velocity if half that and four times less energtic.

Even if it's not a fully elastic collision the point is taken it's better to stick to the car.

Re:physics!

[rgbatduke]

Super-good physics. Now consider the practical aspect of driving a car with active glue all over the paint through:

* Bugs. I can coat my windshield with bug guts in a single night drive from my house to the coast through various swampy regions. And my windshield isn't sticky.

* Pollen. I live in NC, and in the spring my car -- well, really everything, not just my car, inside and out -- is coated with a layer of tree pollen so thick that it is virtually opaque. Again, this sticks to hard finish PAINT. I can only imagine how tightly it will adhere to glue as it sits out in the sun.

* Dust. Even when the pollen season is over, there is always dust in the air. Always. That's why we have to wash our cars a few times a year unless we want people to write "wash me" with their fingers on our fenders and windshields.

* Salt + grime. Yes I live in the south without that problem so much but h/t to our northern cousins who have to drive through slushmelt. I'm guessing immersing an active glue surface in slushmelt would pretty much end the effectiveness of the glue.

* Fall leaves. For that matter, summer leaves if you park under live oaks or evergreens. Maple seeds. Acorns. Birds. Squirrels. I can't wait to come out some morning and see my self-driving car with a seagull glued to the front fender. Oh my.

* Children, pets, old people.

I would say that all of this makes it impractical to drive a car with active sticky flypaper instead of paint as a "permanent" primary front coating. Laughably impractical.

Which leaves us with the only alternative -- a "glue bag" as a sort of external equivalent of an internal airbag. Now, is it possible to come up with a formula for stickum that can be sprayed in the (say) millisecond before a collision so that it coats a pedestrian -- but not their mouth or eyes or lungs, which would be "bad" -- and the front bumper just in time to catch the human and stick them and hold during the millisecond or so that they are actually in contact with the bumper/hood? Personally I doubt it. I know of no glues that can be applied and will stick and set in a millisecond, especially glues that are non-toxic and safe to spray onto random humans to lower risk of death. Can you imagine an explosion of super-glue all over somebody -- not that super-glue can come close to bonding in a millisecond.

So this seems like a really stupid idea too. Which makes the entire idea sound incredibly stupid, not worth the money required to patent it. If they wanted to accomplish the same thing in a PRACTICAL way, they could just mount airbags on the front fender that were triggered by certain conditions, such as an impending collision. That would actually be USEFUL -- and not just for humans. Having a heavy-duty airbag go off to cushion a regular collision between two cars could actually significantly reduce the average force during the impulse by spreading it out over a meter BEFORE starting to crumple the front bumper accordion. It would also do exactly the same thing as the glue to a pedestrian only better -- catch them on a meter or so of compressing air while the impulse matches their speed to that of the car. You might even be able to make the bag itself "sticky", although I suspect that would interfere with its explosion -- at least you might be able to make it out of e.g. neoprene with a non-stick stickiness.

Not impressed, wouldn't invest.

Re:Dirt, leaves, road grime, etc.

[eth1]

It can’t JUST be a sticky layer, otherwise it’ll last about 5 minutes before it gets a layer of environmental debris on it.

And another 5 minutes until the miscreants realize how much fun it is to stick crap on people's cars while they're sleeping.

Other Mammals?

[VorpalRodent]

I live in Wisconsin. On the back roads, it's not uncommon to see deer attempt to cross traffic, and there are quite a few unlucky motorists who manage to hit one.

Now, if the impact doesn't kill the deer, I have an angry/terrified deer thrashing about on my hood.

If the impact *does* kill the deer, I'll need to have tags with me, since I'm now transporting a deer that I just killed.