An ‘Apple Car’ could have embedded light sensors for collision avoidance

Let the Apple Car rumors roll on. Apple has been granted a patent (number 10,940,788) for “embedded light sensors” for a vehicle. It involves safety features.

As Apple notes in the patent data, vehicles are often driven in places that may involve various elements can cause collisions. Such elements can include static elements that don’t change location such as plant life structures, etc. Elements in an environment can also include dynamic elements which can change location within an environment, including vehicles, humans, animal life, etc. 

An Apple Car could include sensors that monitor one or more portions of an environment that can generate sensor data that can be utilized to augment navigation of a vehicle through an environment. For example, sensor data generated by sensors of a vehicle which are configured to monitor a portion of an environment proximate to a rear end of the vehicle can be utilized to provide, to an occupant of the vehicle that is a driver of the vehicle, a graphical representation of the portion of the environment via a user interface, and the driver can utilize the graphical representation to augment situational awareness of the environment when manually navigating the vehicle through the environment. 

In another example, an autonomous navigation system included in an Apple Car can utilize sensor data generated by one or more sensors of the vehicle to autonomously navigate the vehicle through the environment to avoid collisions.

Here’s Apple’s summary of the patent: “Some embodiments provide a vehicle which includes a one or more sets of light emitter devices and sensor devices included in a common element assembly of the vehicle which includes a common window element via which the light emitter devices and sensor devices can interact with an external environment in which the vehicle is located. 

“The sensor devices and light emitter devices can be communicatively coupled, and operation of the light emitter devices and sensor devices can be adjustably controlled to mitigate interference by the light emitter devices with sensor data representations generated by the sensor devices. The window element can include a reflection-mitigating layer which mitigates reflection of light beams emitted by one or more light emitter devices in an assembly towards one or more sensor elements of one or more sensor devices included in the same assembly.”