Systems and methods for detecting and identifying hazardous materials and hazardous material events

Abstract

Systems and methods are described herein for detecting and identifying hazardous material on a roadway and causing a vehicle to perform an action in response. The disclosed methods use one or more sensor devices (e.g., an IR camera) to capture data associated with material located within a surrounding environment of the vehicle. The detected material may be determined to be hazardous by analyzing an image of the material captured by the sensor devices. Based on a determined size and location of the hazardous material, the system may determine that a hazardous material event is imminent (e.g., an interaction between one or more vehicles and the material). The vehicle then performs an action to ameliorate the hazardous material event, such as implementing one or more suggested driving maneuvers to avoid an impact with the hazardous material and/or notifying nearby drivers of information related to the hazardous material event.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.