Autonomous vehicles (AVs) offer a game-changing new platform that could provide a blizzard of diverse and lucrative consumer services. The revenues generated by such services are likely to eclipse those of driverless vehicle sales alone – as AVs offer valuable new ways for retailers to access their target markets.
Iprova is therefore extremely active in not only creating inventions that will help make AVs safer and more efficient, but also in creating AV-enabled inventions around valuable day-to-day consumer needs, from nutrition to entertainment to healthcare.
Our work
Our clients, which include world leading technology companies in California and Europe, are aiming to develop inventions that could be the basis of high value services as part of their AV roadmaps.
Iprova delivered cross-domain inventions that were both additive and complementary to those coming from these companies’ own research teams. In the case of one client, external patent attorneys appointed by our client evaluated our inventions and compared them to those of our client’s own AV research group. The attorneys found that Iprova’s inventions contained more new subject matter and also had better forward-looking commercialisation prospects. Iprova also won the best overall invention score.
Example invention
Streetlights, which illuminate highways and other main road networks, are usually on during the hours of darkness to provide lighting for the vehicles that use the road.
Iprova created an invention which detects the level of automation for each vehicle using the road and, based on this, determines if the vehicle’s guidance system can benefit from street lighting.
In the case of autonomous vehicles, sensors within the vehicles may mean that street lighting is not required. Accordingly if the road is only occupied by autonomous vehicles, the street lighting can be reduced, hence saving energy and bringing a more sustainable approach to street lighting.
Patent:US10178740 (B2) Road Lighting