Posts Tagged: "automotive technologies"

The recent Model 3 announcement by Tesla took the industry by storm and saw Tesla collecting a whopping $276 million in preorders in a matter of days. In focus in particular was the autopilot features on the new Tesla car – which meant that Autonomous Cars (a.k.a. driverless cars or self-driven cars) are finally breaching the line between concept and mainstream… Though efforts have escalated significantly in the last five years, autonomous cars are not a new concept. Initial research can be traced back all the way to the 1920s.

In 1903, Henry Ford was hit with a patent lawsuit while watching his first automobiles get loaded into boxcars. IP issues have plagued the auto industry every since. Today, over 110 years later, automakers still deal with IP threats on a regular basis. The number of lawsuits filed against automakers by patent trolls rose from 17 in 2009 to 107 in 2014. These lawsuits often result in six and seven-figure settlements, and represent a serious drain on the automotive industry. With this spectre hanging over their heads, automakers can’t fully innovate, grow and prosper. It is time for the industry to band together and fight back.

Thomson Reuters analysts put their research in high gear to quantify just who the major players in this space are with the “2016 State of Self-Driving Automotive Innovation.” Data was aggregated from the Derwent World Patents Index® collection to identify global patent activity and the total number of unique inventions issued in published patent applications and granted patents were analyzed from January 2010 through October 31, 2015. The findings detail a notable commitment from carmakers and tech companies to advance driverless technology, while uncovering the fact that established automakers are the most likely to have the biggest impact in the self-driving category in the near term.

Toshiba exists among the giants of the U.S. patent landscape, placing sixth among all companies in terms of patents received from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2015; it took home 2,627 U.S. patents in 2015. This sixth-place showing sees Toshiba improving upon its 2014 rankings, where it took in the seventh-most U.S. patents. In terms of total U.S. patents, however, Toshiba actually earned less than it did in 2014, when it brought in 2,850 patents. In the three months leading up to this writing, Toshiba earned 677 U.S. patents, according to Innography’s patent portfolio analysis tools. The text cluster indicates that there remains a great deal of focus on developing semiconductor layer and memory technologies at Toshiba, although activities in control units, image processing and image data are also prominent.

In his final State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress, President Barack Obama remarked that he would make a push for action that would “put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.” There were reports rumoring that Obama might make comments during his speech that were more pointed towards the development of autonomous vehicles. Although the President’s statements were couched in language relating more to alternative energy resources, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx followed up with an announcement at the recent North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) that the 2017 federal budget will include a nearly $4 billion proposal for investing into autonomous vehicle pilot projects over the next decade.

Innovation in the automotive sector was a huge story, both for the types of technologies being developed and the companies pursuing the R&D in that field. Drones and robotics also played a role in other top patent applications which we’re profiling today. Rounding out our list of top 2015 innovations includes an emotion analysis system for financial security, wireless charging schemes, low-power communications for wearable devices and a greenhouse window that can generate electricity while improving crop yield.

In many ways, 2015 has been the year of the automobile, especially in the tech world. Throughout the course of the year we’ve noted a great deal of business and technological developments that have been reshaping the entire vehicle manufacturing sector. Gone are the days that the market is completely dominated by names such as General Motors Company, Ford Motor Company or Toyota Motor Corp. As 2015 draws to a close, these traditional automaker behemoths are seeing encroachment on their position from some unusual names, especially those residing in Silicon Valley.

Many of the patents we noticed in our recent survey of BofA technologies are related to enhanced security methods for financial transactions, such as the innovation protected by U.S. Patent No. 9218596, entitled Method and Apparatus for Providing Real Time Mutable Credit Card Information. It discloses a smartcard apparatus having a microprocessor chip, a button, a dynamic transaction authorization number and a Bluetooth low energy device (BLE) that works to transmit an instruction to a smartphone for a request for a dynamic transaction authorization number when the button is depressed and receive the number from the smartphone; the smartcard further has a battery and a dynamic magnetic strip comprising a digital representation of the dynamic authorization number. This technology is designed to enhance security measures in smartcards having magnetic strips without requiring a banking institution to issue new cards. Enhanced security for banking transactions taking place on cloud infrastructures is featured within U.S. Patent No. 9184918, entitled Trusted Hardware for Attesting to Authenticity in a Cloud Environment. I

2015 was a truly remarkable year for innovation and we saw major trends in self-driving cars, wearable technologies, digital wallets and much more. I hope you will enjoy this top 10 listing, which includes innovations for providing water in arid regions, wireless charging systems for electronic devices and even the collection and retransmission of sunlight. Of course, as with all of these types of lists, the criteria used for inclusion on this list is subjective, based on my own personal preferences. Please feel free to let us know if you saw something particularly noteworthy in 2015.

Yet another tech developer known for consumer electronics is getting into the autonomous vehicle market, a sign that we can continue to expect disruption for the conventional automaker model in that sector. A recent data breach settlement underscores the growing cybersecurity threat the world faces. The latest theory about alien life on other planets starts to fizzle and fade. Also, we hear some stories featuring notable names in the tech business world, including Michael Bloomberg and Elon Musk.

U.S. Patent No. 9180882, which is titled Avoiding Blind Spots of Other Vehicles, covers a method for maneuvering a vehicle protected here involves receiving sensor data collected along a roadway, detecting objects in the roadway from the data, identifying a set of objects relevant for blind spot detection, determining a blind spot area defining a lane space adjacent to a particular identified object and maneuvering a vehicle if it’s predicted that future locations of the vehicle would be within the determined blind spot area for any object. This technology is intended to both keep drivers safe on the road as well as improving the comfort of those drivers who might not want an autonomous or semi-autonomous car driving in their blind spot.

At the end of October, the FTC again made a push on Capitol Hill for stronger data privacy standards, this time dealing specifically with the idea of connected cars. In prepared testimony for the hearing, entitled Examining Ways to Improve Vehicle and Roadway Safety, the commission brought up concerns it had with certain provisions of rules currently being drafted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which will require auto manufacturers to outfit their cars with vehicle-to-vehicle communications units in an effort to improve safety on America’s roads. The testimony was presented by Maneesha Mithal, an associate director of the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, during an October 21st hearing of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade.

We’ve been seeing a great influx of high tech companies entering the automotive industry this year, especially in the field of autonomous self-driving vehicles, so we’re not too surprised to see the issue of U.S. Patent No. 9134731, entitled Locality Adapted Computerized Assisted or Autonomous Driving of Vehicles. This Intel patent protects an apparatus for computerized assisted or autonomous driving of vehicles which has at least one processor, a policy generator operated by a processor to receive data associated with a plurality of vehicles within a locality and to generate locality specific policies for computerized assisted or autonomous driving of vehicles within the locality so that vehicles are driven in a manner that is adapted for the locality. This innovation is intended to improve the deployment of autonomous vehicles in developed economy markets, like America and Japan, where there are large populations of experienced drivers as well as strictly enforced codified traffic laws.

With the nearly $1 billion drop in Caterpillar’s 2015 revenue forecast, the corporation has recently announced a corporate restructuring in its dealer and customer support divisions, including new divisions in global aftermarket solutions, marketing and digital as well as wear components & aftermarket distribution. Despite the issues, the corporation still has a heavy research and development presence. It earned 488 patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2014, placing it 88th overall among all companies petitioning the USPTO for patents that year; this figure was an incredible 47 percent higher than Caterpillar’s 2013 U.S. patent levels. Caterpillar’s 2014 patent earnings were much greater than heavy industry rivals Deere & Company (NYSE:DE) and Komatsu Ltd (TYO:6301), organizations which earned 214 and 132 U.S. patents in 2014 respectively. In the three months leading up to this writing, Caterpillar earned 170 U.S. patents, a quarterly pace that would see them increase the amount of patents earned in 2015 if maintained.

The most intriguing patent application we’ve seen recently is Apple’s patent application titled ‘Fuel Cell System to Power a Portable Computing Device.’ It would protect a fuel cell system for a portable computing device comprising a fuel cell stack converting fuel into electrical power, a fuel source for the fuel cell stack and an interface to the portable device which includes a power link providing power to the portable device and a bidirectional communication link providing communication between the portable device and a fuel cell stack’s controller which sends fuel state information to the portable device and receives fuel cell control information. This innovation seeks to incorporate fuel cell electricity generation tech into portable computing devices for which it’s difficult to provide cost-effective and portable fuel cell systems, as the patent application itself points out.