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 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
Autonomous Vehicles (AV) incorporate a large range of sensors and also typically have independent drive to at least 2 wheels.
This means that AVs can carry out manoeuvres which would be impossible for legacy vehicles. Iprova created an invention which exploits the sensing and manoeuvrability capability of an AV to help minimise injury to a passenger in the event of a collision. When a potential collision is detected by the vehicle, the vehicle positions itself to have a collision orientation which minimises occupant injury. It does this in such a way that the movement of the vehicle itself causes a movement of the passenger so that at the very moment of collision the passenger is optimally placed against the other safety features of the vehicle, such as airbags etc.