Oh, the irony. Just a few weeks after Google’s self-driving car hit a bus in its hometown, the search giant received a patent titled “Bus Detection for an Autonomous Vehicle.”
To be fair, the patent mainly pertains to school buses, which the cars can detect based on word and color cues. In February, Google’s self-driving car hit an ordinary city bus, when both the driver and the car wrongly assumed they would be allowed to merge. No one was hurt in the collision.
The patent, originally reported by CNet, includes the ability to detect school buses based on relative size, as well as other cues. Google originally applied for the patent in 2014, so the timing is just a funny coincidence.
Watch a video of the incident below:
