Apple Patent Hints At Navigation System For Autonomous Vehicles

Self-driving cars come equipped with a variety of sensors and cameras, all of which have been designed to help it navigate roads, make turns, identify people or obstacles in its way, and so on. However according to Autoblog, it seems that Apple might have a potentially more efficient way of teaching self-driving cars how to navigate roads.

In a recently discovered patent dubbed “Autonomous Navigation System,” it describes a system in which the self-driving car will be able to navigate roads based on past driving experiences driven by a human. Basically after a route has been driven enough times based on its “confidence indicator”, the car will then be capable of driving that route itself. If you’ve ever played Mario Kart before and tried those timed laps with “ghosts”, you could think of this patent in a similar way, except with self-driving cars.

Of course the car won’t just drive and follow the route blindly and according to the patent, “can adapt to changes in a route independently of preexisting route characterizations, ‘maps,’ etc., including independently of data received from a remote service, system, etc., thereby reducing the amount of time required to enable autonomous navigation of the changed route.”

That being said, the patent was filed in 2015 and it is unclear if Apple might have adopted it into its current self-driving system, or if it was merely an idea that they toyed with but never implemented.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Transportation
Tags: Patent, Self-Driving Cars