Data processing: vehicles – navigation – and relative location – Relative location – Collision avoidance
Reexamination Certificate
1998-10-22
2002-04-09
Zanelli, Michael J. (Department: 3661)
Data processing: vehicles, navigation, and relative location
Relative location
Collision avoidance
C701S215000, C342S357490, C340S436000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06370475
ABSTRACT:
1. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1.1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in the fields of automobile safety, intelligent highway safety systems, accident avoidance, accident elimination, collision avoidance, blind spot detection, anticipatory sensing, automatic vehicle control, intelligent cruise control, automotive navigation and other automobile and truck safety, navigation and control related fields.
There are two major efforts underway that will significantly affect the design of automobiles and highways. The first is involved with preventing deaths and serious injuries from automobile accidents. The second involves the attempt to reduce the congestion on highways. In the first case, there are approximately forty thousand (40,000) people killed each year in the United States by automobile accidents and another several hundred thousand are seriously injured. In the second case, hundreds of millions of man-hours are wasted every year by people stuck in traffic jams on the world's roadways. There have been many attempts to solve both of these problems; however, no single solution has been able to do so.
When a person begins a trip using an automobile, he or she first enters the vehicle and begins driving, first out of the parking space and then typically onto a local or city road and then onto a highway. In leaving the parking space, he or she may be at risk from an impact of a vehicle traveling on the road. The driver must check his or her mirrors to avoid such an event and several electronic sensing systems have been proposed which would warn the driver that a collision is possible. Once on the local road, the driver is at risk of being impacted from the front, side and rear, and electronic sensors are under development to warn the driver of such possibilities. Similarly, the driver may run into a pedestrian, bicyclist, deer or other movable object and various sensors are under development which will warn the driver of these potential events. These various sensors include radar, optical, ultrasonic, and a variety of others sensors, each of which attempts to solve a particular potential collision event. It is important to note that in none of these cases is there sufficient confidence in the decision that the control of the vehicle is taken away from the driver.
In some proposed future Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) designs, hardware of various types is embedded into the highway and sensors which sense this hardware are placed onto the vehicle so that it can be accurately guided along a lane of the highway. In various other systems, cameras are used to track lane markings or other visual images to keep the vehicle in its lane. However, for successful ITS, additional information is needed by the driver, or the vehicle control system, to take into account weather, road conditions, congestion etc., which typically involves additional electronic hardware located on or associated with the highway as well as the vehicle. From this discussion, it is obvious that a significant number of new electronic systems are planned for installation onto automobiles. However, to date, no product has been proposed or designed which combines all of the requirements into a single electronic system. This is the intent of this invention.
The safe operation of a vehicle can be viewed as a process in the engineering sense. To achieve safe operation, first the process must be designed and then a vehicle control system must be designed to implement the process. The goal of a process designer is to design the process so that it does not fail. The fact that so many people are being seriously injured and killed in traffic accidents and the fact that so much time is being wasted in traffic congestion is proof that the current process is not working and requires a major redesign. To design this new process the information required by the process must be identified, the source of that information determined and the process designed so that the sources of information can communicate effectively to the user of the information, which will most often be the vehicle control system. Finally, the process must have feedback that self-corrects the process when it is tending toward failure.
Although it is technologically feasible, it is probably socially unacceptable at this time for a vehicle safety system to totally control the vehicle. The underlying premise of this invention, therefore, is that people will continue to operate their vehicle and control of the vehicle will only be seized by the control system when such an action is required to avoid an accident or when such control is needed for the orderly movement of vehicles through potentially congested areas on a roadway. When this happens, the vehicle operator will be notified and given the choice of exiting the road at the next opportunity. In some implementations, especially when this invention is first implemented on a trail basis, control will not be taken away from the vehicle operator but a warning system will alert the driver of a potential collision.
Consider several scenarios and what information is required for the vehicle control process to prevent accidents. In one case, a driver is proceeding down a country road and falls asleep and the vehicle begins to leave the road, perhaps heading toward a tree. In this case, the control system would need to know that the vehicle was about to leave the road and for that it must know the position of the vehicle relative to the road. One method of accomplishing this would be to place a wire down the center of the road and to place sensors within the vehicle to sense the position of the wire relative to the vehicle. An alternate approach would be for the vehicle to know exactly where it is on the surface of the earth and to also know exactly where the edge of the road is. These approaches are somewhat different because in the former solution every road in the world would require the placement of appropriate hardware as well as the maintenance of this hardware. This is obviously impractical. In the second case, the use of the global positioning satellite system (GPS), augmented by additional systems to be described below, will provide the vehicle control system with an accurate knowledge of its location. Whereas it would be difficult to install and maintain hardware such as a wire down the center of the road for every road in the world, it is not difficult to survey every road and record the location of the edges, and the lanes for that matter, of each road. This information must then be made available through one or more of a variety of techniques to the vehicle control system.
Another case might be where a driver is proceeding down a road and decides to change lines while another vehicle is in the driver's blind spot. Various companies are developing radar, ultrasonic or optical sensors to warn the driver if the blind spot is occupied. The driver may or may not heed this warning, perhaps due to an excessive false alarm rate, or he or she may have become incapacitated, or the system may fail to detect a vehicle in the blind spot and thus the system will fail. Consider an alternative technology where again each vehicle knows precisely where it is located on the earth surface and additionally can communicate this information to all other vehicles within a certain potential danger zone relative to the vehicle. Now, when the driver begins to change lanes, his or her vehicle control system knows that there is another vehicle in the blind spot and therefore will either warn the driver or else prevent him or her from changing lanes thereby avoiding the accident. Similarly, if a vehicle is approaching a stop sign or red traffic light and the operator fails to bring the vehicle to a stop, if the existence of this traffic light or stop sign has been made available to the vehicle control system, the system can warn the driver or seize control of the vehicle to stop the vehicle and prevent a potential accident. Additionally, if an operator of the vehicle decides to proceed across an intersection witho
Breed David S.
Duvall Wilbur E.
Johnson Wendell C.
Intelligent Technologies International Inc.
Roffe Brian
Zanelli Michael J.
LandOfFree
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