Google Receives Patent For Autonomous Mode Cars

Google has just been granted a patent that will allow your future car to switch from manual driving to an autopilot mode.

Specifically, the patent describes the process of transitioning a "mixed-mode autonomous vehicle from a human driven mode to an autonomously driven mode."

According to the patent summary, the transitioning process may only be possible on a "predefined landing strip" and only when the vehicle has detected that it is in such a location. That would, of course require the vehicle to connect to location services, which will be based on maps and GPS services. Those services "may require more precise position information then when driven by a human operator." The instructions to operate the autonomous vehicle are provided via a URL.

Among the listed inventors are Christopher Urmson and Nathaniel Fairfield, who came from Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and participated in the team than won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge; as well as Philip Nemec, who joined Google as a graphics rendering engineer from Nvidia.

The patent states that GPS alone is not precise enough to "give enough accuracy for autonomous vehicle operation." GPS may have a 30 ft margin of error, which would not be acceptable. Google indicates that it may use the landing sensor to detect its position and then retrieve its exact position via an internet address such as an Internet Uniform Resource Locator (URL), global coordinates. Drawing data from this information enable much more accurate autonomous driving: "For example, in a specific location, a vehicle may know it can only operate in one predefined path, when the reference indicator designates that location, the vehicle knows the exact path of travel."