Land vehicles – Wheeled – Attachment
Reexamination Certificate
2000-12-14
2001-12-04
Mai, Lanna (Department: 3619)
Land vehicles
Wheeled
Attachment
C180S271000, C180S272000, C180S273000, C180S282000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06325414
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
In 1984, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a requirement for frontal crash protection of automobile occupants. This regulation mandated “passive occupant restraints” for all passenger cars by 1992. A more recent regulation requires both driver and passenger side airbags on all passenger cars and light trucks by 1998. In addition, the demand for airbags is accelerating in both Europe and Japan and it is expected that, within a few years, all vehicles produced in these areas (36 million vehicles) and eventually worldwide (50 million vehicles) will be equipped with airbags as standard equipment.
Whereas thousands of lives have been saved by airbags, significant improvements can be made. As discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,653,462 cross-referenced above, and included herein by reference, for a variety of reasons, vehicle occupants can be or get too close to the airbag before it deploys and can be seriously injured or killed upon deploymennt of the airbag.
Also, a child in a rear facing child seat, which is placed on the right front passenger seat, is in danger of being seriously injured if the passenger airbag deploys. This has now become an industry-wide concern and the U.S. automobile industry is urgently searching for an easy economical solution, which will prevent the deployment of the passenger side airbag if a rear facing child seat is present. An improvement on the invention disclosed in the above-referenced patent, as will be disclosed in greater detail below, includes more sophisticated means to identify objects within the passenger compartment and will solve this problem.
Initially, these systems will solve the out-of-position occupant and the rear facing child seat problems related to current airbag systems and prevent unneeded deployments when a seat is unoccupied. Airbags are now under development to protect rear seat occupants in vehicle crashes. A system will therefore be needed to detect the presence of occupants, position, i.e., determine if they are out-of-position, and type, e.g., to identify the presence of a rear facing child seat in the rear seat. Future automobiles can be expected to have right or more airbags as protection is sought for rear seat occupants and from side impacts. In addition to eliminating the disturbance of unnecessary airbag deployments, the cost of replacing these airbags will be excessive if they all deploy in an accident. The improvements described below minimize this cost by not deploying an airbag for a seat, which is not occupied by a human being. An occupying item of a seat may be a living occupant such as a human being or dog, another living organism such as a plant, or an inanimate object such as a box or bag of groceries.
A device to monitor the vehicle interior and identify its contents is needed to solve these and many other problems. For example, once a Vehicle Interior Identification and Monitoring System (VIMS) for identifying and monitoring the contents of a vehicle is in place, many other products become possible including the following:
Inflators and control systems now exist which will adjust the amount of gas flowing into or out of the airbag to account for the size and position of the occupant and for the severity of the accident. The vehicle identification and monitoring system of this invention will control such systems based on the presence and position of vehicle occupants or of a rear facing child seat.
Side impact airbag systems began appearing on 1995 vehicles. The danger of deployment induced injuries will exist for side impact airbags as they now do for frontal impact airbags. A child with his head against the airbag is such an example. The system of this invention will minimize such injuries.
Future vehicles may be provided with a standard cellular phone as well as the Global Positioning System (GPS), an automobile navigation or location system, which is now available on at least one vehicle model. In the event of an accident, the phone may automatically call 911 for emergency assistance and report the exact position of the vehicle. If the vehicle also has a system as described below for monitoring each seat location, the number and perhaps the condition of the occupants could also be reported. In that way, the emergency service (EMS) would know what equipment and how many ambulances to send to the accident site.
Vehicle entertainment system engineers have stated that the quality of the sound in the vehicle could be improved if the number, size and location of occupants and other objects were known. This information can be provided by the vehicle interior identification and monitoring system of this invention.
Similarly to the entertainment system, the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system (HVAC) could be improved if the number, attributes and location of vehicle occupants were known. This can be used to provide a climate control system tailored to each occupant, for example, or the system can be turned off for certain seat locations if there are no occupants present at those locations.
In some cases, the position of a particular part of the occupant is of interest such as: (a) his hand or arm and whether it is in the path of a closing window so that the motion of the window needs to be stopped;(b) the position of the shoulder so that the seat belt anchorage point can be adjusted for the best protection of the occupant; or, (c) the position of the rear of the occupants head so that the headrest can be adjusted to minimize whiplash injuries in rear impacts.
The above applications illustrate the wide range of opportunities, which become available if the identity, and location of various objects and occupants, and some of their parts, within the vehicle were known. Once the system is operational, it would be logical for the system to also incorporate the airbag electronic sensor and diagnostics system (SDM) since it needs to interface with SDM anyway and since they could share computer capabilities which will result in a significant cost saving to the auto manufacturer. For the same reasons, it would be logical for VIMS to include the side impact sensor and diagnostic system. As the VIMS improves to where such things as the exact location of the occupants cars and eyes can be determined, even more significant improvements to the entertainment system become possible through the use of noise canceling sound, and the rear view mirror can be automatically adjusted for the driver's eye location. Another example involves the monitoring of the driver's behavior over time which can be used to warn a driver if he or she is falling asleep, or to stop the vehicle if the driver loses the capacity to control it.
Using an advanced VIMS, as explained below, the position of the driver's eves can be accurately determined and portions of the windshield can be selectively darkened to eliminate the glare from the sun or oncoming vehicle headlights. This system uses electro-chromic glass, a liquid crystal coating on the glass, or other appropriate technology, and detectors to detect the direction of the offending light source. In addition to eliminating the glare, the sun visor can now also be eliminated.
The present invention adds more sophisticated pattern recognition capabilities such as fuzzy logic systems, neural network systems or other pattern recognition computer based algorithms to the occupant position measurement system disclosed in the above referenced copending patent application and greatly extends the areas of application of this technology. An example of such a pattern recognition system using neural networks using sonar is discussed in two papers by Gorman, R. P. and Sejnowski, T. J. “Analysis of Hidden Units in a Layered Network Trained to Classify Sonar Targets”,
Neural Networks
, Vol.1. pp. 75-89, 1988, and “Learned Classification of Sonar Targets Using a Massively Parallel Network”, IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Vol. 36, No. 7, July 1988. “Pattern
Breed David S.
DuVall Wilbur E.
Johnson Wendell C.
Automotive Technologies International Inc.
Mai Lanna
Roffe Brain
To Toan
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