Apple canned its long-in-the-works Apple Car project in February 2024, but the company still occasionally files for a patent regarding automotive technology. The latest is for “Systems And Methods For Autonomous Vehicle Communication.”
About the patent filing
The patent filing related to vehicle navigation. More specifically, some aspects relate to vehicle data communication during vehicle navigation.
In the patent filing Apple notes that modern vehicles may upload or download significant amounts of data. For example, autonomous vehicles may upload data continually to the cloud (e.g., a data center, a cloud computing environment, and other cloud-based data environments), data that may be used for tuning autonomous driving algorithms based on individual data or based on test vehicle fleets.
Vehicles may also continually download data, such as real-time surrounding car data, map downloads, media downloads, or other data. Although some wireless communication (e.g., 5G) channels may provide high data bandwidth, these communication channels often require expensive vehicle data plans.
Other wireless communication protocols, such as Wi-Fi and WiGig technologies, provide data communication but with significant bandwidth (e.g., bits per second throughput) constraints for large amounts of data. The performance of each of these communication protocols may be reduced further, such as due to non-line of sight communications and outdoor environment challenges. Apple says what’s needed is an improved solution for transmission of vehicular data. Its new patent filing involves such solutions.
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing: “The subject matter described herein presents various technical solutions for the technical problems facing autonomous vehicles (e.g., fully autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles). To address technical problems facing wireless communication cost and latency, a heterogeneous roadside infrastructure can be used to improve the ability for a vehicle to communicate with a data source.
“To address technical problems facing interruption of vehicle services due to an abrupt loss of connection, a quality of service system provides the ability to determine and share quality of service information, such as location-based information, maps, interference data, and other quality of service information. To address technical problems facing high volume data upload and download between autonomous vehicles and cloud-based data services, optical wireless communication (OWC) provides increased data throughput and reduced complexity and may be beneficial for short-range high-mobility wireless communications.”
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