Posts Tagged: "automotive technologies"

Not a single American automaker was expected to increase its market share over the next five years, according to global auditing firm KPMG in its 2015 Global Automotive Executive Survey. In terms of mass-market production, only General Motors and Ford rank in the top ten of auto manufacturers from across the globe. One country whose carmakers have done a great job of stepping in and commandeering significant parts of America’s market share for autos is Japan. Nissan and Toyota are two car brands which are incredibly familiar to today’s American consumer. However, when these companies entered the American market, it was almost laughable to think that either would manage to survive, let alone succeed.

Distracted driving is a huge problem on American roads, contributing to 16 percent of all motor vehicle crashes that happened in the U.S. during 2013. With so much focus on the role of personal electronic devices like smartphones in distracted driving incidents, it’s no wonder that we would find a number of patents directed at manipulated device function within cars. U.S. Patent No. 8952800, entitled Prevention of Texting While Operating a Motor Vehicle, claims a system with multiple sensors for measuring vehicle conditions and a monitoring module that determines the state of a phone located within the vehicle and can determine that improper use of the phone was made. This patent was issued to IBM of Armonk, NY, in February.

Google’s self-driving car development has advanced so far beyond what our country’s laws are currently able to regulate that the technology has hit some legal stumbling blocks. As a result, Google has been focusing recently Google First Quarter 2015 Text Clusteron inventing pedestrian safety systems to be incorporated with its self-driving car, even receiving a patent for an airbag that would protect pedestrians in a collision. The company even has its focus on surgical robotics, recently announcing a partnership with Johnson & Johnson to develop surgical robots that would assist human surgeons.

This year we’re placing our focus on the rapid pace of development in autonomous vehicles and self-driving car technologies here on IPWatchdog. We’re still a fair ways off from the entrance of a self-driving vehicle into the consumer marketplace; some with a knowledge of the industry believe that the debut for autonomous vehicles won’t be experienced until 2020, with widespread…

We found another pair of patents related to digital worlds, an area where IBM has been active of late. A system for ensuring that the highest number of objects contained within a three-dimensional scene are seen by a person navigating the scene is the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8970586. The patent claims a clairvoyance method for a 3D scene by acquiring parameters associated with a clairvoyance camera and a clairvoyance viewport, determining a 3D scene to be rendered according to those parameters, rendering the 3D scene to obtain a 2D image presented in the clairvoyance viewport and composing the 2D image presented in both a clairvoyance viewpoint and a general scene viewport. This system overcomes issues of inconvenient manipulation virtual contentand low efficiency in modifying a 3D scene view to uncover an object.

There have been signs that Samsung is trying to wind down its operations in its medical device businesses, but we found plenty of patent applications filed with the USPTO indicating that healthcare innovation is still very important to this corporation. A technique for the genetic analysis of human subjects to test for diagnosing certain leukemias is featured by U.S. Patent Application No. 20150038360, titled Method for Multiplex-Detecting Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia Gene Using Cleavable Probe. The kit for detecting an e19a2 breakpoint of a BCR-ABL fusion gene claimed here contains five primer sets, each having a primer comprised of a specific nucleic acid. This kit provides for the early detection of chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, including rarer varieties of the disease.

Samsung is a multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, which is comprised of a multitude of subsidiaries and affiliated businesses in electronics, ship building, construction and more. Samsung invested the 2nd-greatest amount of money into research and development of any company worldwide in 2014; it’s $13.4 billion R&D investment that year was slightly edged by Volkswagen’s $13.5 billion…

In 2014, Hitachi earned a total of 908 patent grants from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the 38th-largest total of U.S. patents issued to any single entity. When the patent activities of its subsidiaries are taken into account, however, the entire Hitachi Group earned 2,108 U.S. patent grants during 2014, according to our research using Innography patent analytics. As with most of the high tech Companies We Follow, we’re noticing a lot of innovation in control units and data storage devices, as reflected by our research using Innography search tools and represented in the text cluster diagram shown to the right. Hitachi has a very strong patent portfolio in automotive battery tech and even owns more patents in this field than Toyota.

Our research of General Motors’ recent patent activities using Innography’s research tools we created the text cluster diagram, which is shown left and relates to GM patent activity since January 2010. This diagram quickly allows us to identify improvements and innovations relating to the motor vehicle itself as accounting for nearly half of all GM patent acting, which the single largest focus being on innovations relating to the vehicle body. The Innography diagram also shows that GM is quite active in exploring innovations relating to control modules, electric motors and internal combustion engines.

In terms of what’s being invented by major innovators in the automotive industry, it seems that the vast majority of the increase in patenting activities among all carmakers can be attributed to propulsion systems. The number of patents issued annually for fuel propulsion has raced forward from less than 2,000 in 2009 to nearly 12,000 in 2013. No other segment of automotive technology has seen such a dramatic rise in patents over those few years.

Based on our own independent research conducted using the Innography patent analytics application, the state of American innovation in automobile manufacturing may not be as bleak as suggested by the Thompson Reuter’s study, but there is no doubt that there is a notable difference between U.S. patent holdings and international patent holdings for American automakers.

January is typically a very busy time of the year for automobile manufacturers. Car makers from all over the world have put together concept designs featuring the latest in automotive technology that is designed to steer the future of vehicles all over the world. Usually this takes place at the North American International Auto Show which happens in Detroit during…

Almost immediately, Anderson began to conceive a design for a windshield wiper which could be operated by a driver from within a vehicle, which improved visibility while eliminating uncomfortable interactions with the wintry environment. Over the course of many months, Anderson settled on a working prototype: a set of wiper arms constructed from wood and rubber which could be operated through the use of a lever installed close to the steering wheel. Pulling on the lever would initiate a spring mechanism that dragged the wiper arm across the windshield, clearing away snow, rain and debris. On November 10, 1903, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 743,801, entitled WIndow-Cleaning Device, to Anderson. The windshield wiper protected by this patent was removable so that it wouldn’t obstruct a driver’s vision during fair weather.