Assessing visibility of a target object with autonomous vehicle fleet
AssigneeGM Cruise Holdings LLC
InventorsKatherine Mary Stumpf, Andrew David Acosta
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A system uses a fleet of AVs to assess visibility of target objects. Each AV has a camera for capturing images of target objects. AVs provide the captured images, or visibility data derived from the captured images, to a remote system, which aggregates visibility data describing images captured across the fleet of AVs. The AVs also provide condition data describing conditions under which the images were captured, and the remote system aggregates the condition data. The remote system processes the aggregated visibility data and condition data to determine conditions under which a target object does not meet a visibility threshold.
Claims20
An autonomous vehicle (AV) comprising:
- a camera;
- a memory to store an image of a target object and an expected location of the target object;
- a processor configured to:
- compare a current location of the AV to the expected location of the target object to determine that the AV is traveling past the expected location,
- in response to determining that the AV is traveling past the expected location, retrieving an image, captured by the camera, of a field of view comprising the expected location of the target object, and
- compare the captured image to the image of the target object to determine a visibility of the target object;
- and
- communications circuitry configured to provide, to a remote system, visibility data describing the visibility of the target object.
A fleet management system comprising:
- a vehicle manager configured to:
- instruct each of a plurality of autonomous vehicles (AVs) of an AV fleet to autonomously drive past a location of a target object, each of the plurality of AVs comprising a mounted camera, and
- instruct each of the plurality of AVs to capture, with the camera, an image of a field of view comprising the location of the target object, and provide visibility data describing visibility of the target object in the image captured by the camera to the fleet management system;
- a database configured to store, for each of the plurality of AVs, the visibility data provided by the AV;
- and
- a visibility engine configured to determine, based on the stored visibility data, whether the target object meets a threshold level of visibility.
A method for assessing visibility of a target object, the method comprising:
- instructing each of a plurality of autonomous vehicles (AVs) of an AV fleet to autonomously drive past a location of a target object, each of the plurality of AVs comprising a mounted camera;
- instructing each of the plurality of AVs to capture, with the camera, at least one image of a field of view comprising the location of the target object;
- receiving, from each of the plurality of AVs, data describing visibility of the target object in the at least one imaged captured by the camera;
- aggregating visibility data describing, for each of the plurality of AVs, visibility of the target object to the camera;
- and
- determining, based on the aggregated visibility data, whether the target object meets a threshold level of visibility.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.