Apple patent involves ‘vehicle motion control’ for an ‘Apple Car’ — Apple World Today

Apple says that, even with today’s fast processors, large memories, and advanced algorithms, the task of making “timely and reasonable” decisions regarding an autonomous vehicle’s trajectory in the context of unpredictable behaviors of other entities (such as other drivers or other autonomous vehicles) and incomplete or noisy data about the vehicle’s environment in real-world traffic remains a significant challenge. The company is working on solutions to meet this challenge.

Here’s the summary of the invention: “A behavior planner for a vehicle generates a plurality of conditional action sequences of the vehicle using a tree search algorithm and heuristics obtained from one or more machine learning models. Each sequence corresponds to a sequence of anticipated states of the vehicle. At least some of the action sequences are provided to a motion selector of the vehicle. The motion selector generates motion-control directives based on the received conditional action sequences and on data received from one or more sensors of the vehicle, and transmits the directives to control subsystems of the vehicle.”