ALEXANDRIA, Va. — According to a report on www.carscoops.com, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released a patent application last month from Toyota for a “car wash judgement system.”
As noted in the report, Toyota’s system would allow autonomous cars to drive themselves to a carwash when needed.
Patent images can be found in the original report, here.
“In a car wash judgement system, an acquirer acquires traveling information of a vehicle. A condition retaining unit retains a certain carwash condition. A judgement unit judges whether or not traveling information acquired at the acquirer satisfies the certain carwash condition. An unpaved road information retaining unit retains unpaved road information indicating of an unpaved road. The certain carwash condition includes traveling on an unpaved road by the vehicle. When a vehicle that has transmitted traveling information is an automated driving vehicle capable of performing automated driving and when the traveling information of the automated driving vehicle satisfies the carwash condition, a carwash instruction unit transmits an instruction signal for moving the automated driving vehicle to a carwash station,” Toyota described in the patent application’s abstract.
Toyota’s system uses a set of parameters and conditional statements to determine whether or not the car needs to be washed, added the report.
The system considers such factors as positioning information, road conditions, weather and available time.
Read the entire report here.
