System and method for monitoring vehicle tires
AssigneeFord Global Technologies, LLC
InventorJoseph Whinnery
Life of this patent
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Abstract
Disclosed herein are system and method embodiments for monitoring tire conditions. For example, the system includes a sensor that is configured to: receive light that is reflected off of at least one object within a field of view (FOV) that is adjacent to a vehicle as reflected light, and provide tire data indicative of a distance between the sensor and a surface of a tire of the vehicle extending into the FOV based on the reflected light. A controller is configured to generate a message in response to a moment of a probability distribution of the tire data being less than a threshold, or tire data indicative of a rate of change of shadow length exceeding a threshold shadow length, and to provide the message to at least one of a user interface, a vehicle system, and an external computing device.
Claims20
An autonomous vehicle (AV) system comprising:
- a sensor configured to:
- receive light reflected off of at least one object within a field of view (FOV) adjacent to a vehicle as reflected light, and
- provide tire data indicative of a distance between the sensor and a surface of a tire of the vehicle extending into the FOV based on the reflected light;
- and
- a controller configured to:
- generate a message in response to a moment of a probability distribution of the tire data being less than a threshold, or tire data indicative of a rate of change of shadow length exceeding a threshold shadow length, and
- provide the message to at least one of a user interface, a vehicle system, and an external computing device.
A method for monitoring tire conditions comprising:
- receiving, by a sensor, light reflected off of at least one object within a field of view (FOV) adjacent to a vehicle as reflected light;
- providing tire data indicative of a distance between the sensor and a surface of a tire of the vehicle extending into the FOV based on the reflected light;
- generating a first tire message in response to a moment of a probability distribution of the tire data being less than a threshold;
- generating a second tire message in response to tire data indicative of a rate of change of shadow length exceeding a threshold shadow length;
- and
- providing the first tire message or the second tire message to at least one of a user interface, a vehicle system, and an external computing device.
A non-transitory computer-readable medium having instructions stored thereon that, when executed by at least one computing device, cause the at least one computing device to perform operations comprising:
- providing tire data indicative of a distance between a sensor and a surface of a tire of a vehicle extending into a field of view (FOV) adjacent to the vehicle;
- generating a message in response to a moment of a probability distribution of the tire data being less than a threshold, or a difference between a first shadow length and a second shadow length of the tire data exceeding a threshold shadow length;
- and
- providing the message to at least one of a user interface, a vehicle system, and an external computing device.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.