Google Car Patents Show the Wild Future of Autonomy

We know a few definitive things about the Google Car. It looks a bit like a golf cart with a koala's face. There's no steering wheel. And the egg-ish autonomous cars are racking up serious mileage in on-road testing in several West Coast cities.

But outside of those factoids, the Google Car has been such a secretive project that most of what we think we know about it has been gleaned from things like patent filings. And like many things that are patented, not all of them will likely make it from simplified patent drawing to actual real-world tech.

Some of them undoubtedly will, though. Let's look at what vehicle patents Google has filed so far, and what they tell us about the unusual little self-driving car. 

It may look like a crash test dummy lounging on a police car during a snowstorm, but this drawing actually shows something far more bizarre. Google has patented a pedestrian-impact adhesive system, and the dummy in this drawing is glued to the hood of a generic Google Car. 

That sounds silly until you examine why Google is interested in doing this. For one, it prevents the pedestrian from being thrown off the car and striking another object, causing secondary impact injuries. It also prevents the pedestrian from slipping off of the car and being run over. 

The glue covers the front of the vehicle and is covered by a thin, protective coating. The force of a pedestrian hitting the coating would break it, releasing the adhesive and hopefully ensnaring the pedestrian to prevent further harm. It's an unusual but compelling idea. Will it make it to the Google Car? It'll depend on the system's cost and efficacy, but it's certainly not impossible.

Long before the Google Car prototype revealed its marsupial-aping face, way back in 2011, Google patented a self-driving system. It was this patent that laid the groundwork for the prototypes we see today – and at the same time showed a path not taken. 

U.S. patent number 8,078,349 describes a vehicle that can switch from regular human-operated driving to autonomous mode at the push of a button. Sort of. First, the operator needs to direct the machine to a predefined "landing strip." There, a "reference indicator" (think of something like a QR code affixed to the road) would combine with GPS coordinates to allow the vehicle to know its exact location.

Of course, this system isn't the one that Google adopted. There aren't QR codes embedded in the road all over Silicon Valley. And the current Google Car doesn't have a steering wheel shaped like a lollipop. Even so, it's one of the more interesting and unusual Google Car patents around.

Once again, the universe demonstrates to us that it has a good sense of humor. Google now has a patent on bus detection for autonomous vehicles. 

Google's patent technically outlines how to identify a school bus. The autonomous system would compare the relative sizes of vehicles on the road. Once it found something large enough, the software would check that against the known size of a school bus. The tech would also analyze the color, check for a stop sign, and search for the word "School" on the exterior.

Once the system positively identified the school bus, the software would tell the vehicle to operate more cautiously. It would also be ready for the vehicle's stop sign to deploy and expect a greater number of pedestrians.