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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.
with all the options
They're not always good.
Auto safety features inspired by Carmageddon. That's just what we needed.
I wonder if you get a steam achievement for collecting multiple pedestrians?
between the car and another object/vehicle
Exactly my thought. The car won't be damaged because your body will cushion the (next) impact.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Self-driving cars are going to be fun after all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It will only stick pedestrians. Not dirt, birds, cats, etc ;-)
...this is what you get when you legalize recreational marijuana.
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.
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!
to the term "bumper sticker".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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)...