The generation of full autonomous driving is not yet up to the expectations of Tesla owners, but Elon Musk’s company is committed to moving forward with its next projects. Musk has already promised to unveil his long-rumored Tesla robotaxi on Aug. 8 (though the public should possibly take that date with a grain of salt). But if Tesla’s autonomous taxis ever make it onto public roads, they’ll require normal cleaning between ride-hailing trips, something Tesla also needs to entrust to robots.
The plans were first detailed on June 30 through an account committed to tracking the patents of generation companies. According to the 67-page filing filed in February 2023 with the World Intellectual Property Organization and recently revealed through a patent researcher at X, Tesla intends to integrate systems aimed at “tracking environmental situations in confined spaces,” particularly into its fleets of long-running autonomous vehicles. Drive an electric robotaxis.
“[A] vehicle that transports multiple people during the day results in lower transportation costs and an environmental footprint than a vehicle used by a single user for private travel,” the patent applicants wrote.
However, these shared areas can get quite dirty. The authors of Tesla’s patents claim that existing human-led cleaning strategies “can be time-consuming, laborious, and lead to unsatisfactory hygienic conditions. “In addition, they say that it can be tricky to check for sure if an area is blank even after cleaning it. down.
But in line with Tesla’s philosophy, the company’s possible solution is to equip robotaxis with even more technologies, especially a combination of image, thermal, acoustic, pressure, radio frequency, gas and/or capacitive sensors. No longer inside the vehicle, the cleaning systems themselves can also involve everything from cleaning the interior with disinfecting UV lamps to sterilizing an electric vehicle’s hot plates that raise the internal temperature up to 132 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. It may not incredibly kill harmful bacteria and viruses, but it may also eliminate some strains after so much time, including COVID-19.
[Related: Dead Teslas Continue to Lock (and Inside) Your Cars. ]
Any effective sanitation formula would have to access all the hard-to-reach places inside a car, and Tesla’s patent application also includes a number of conceivable tactics to avoid this. In one scenario, for example, a robo-taxi that detects a tip of dirt can simply travel to an autonomous cleaning station, where another external robot formula would carry out precision cleaning. In another example, the robotaxi adjusts its seat position to reveal spaces hidden from its UV, heated, or other disinfecting tools.
Of course, all of this presupposes that Tesla develops a generation of fully autonomous vehicles (which it hasn’t done), implements the formula in a fleet of robot taxis (which don’t yet exist), and convinces paying travelers to trust its vehicle. to autonomous vehicles. cars. lives (which is not a certainty). Even if enough people agree to ride in the passenger seat of a self-driving Tesla, they might still doubt whether there’s even a slim chance that the electric vehicle will mistakenly think it’s empty and then subject its human population to (at least). at least) a test. unpleasant experience.
And while you might think it’s easy to just get out of a robo-taxi in those scenarios, several other people have recently found themselves locked in their own Tesla due to a dead 12V battery. Knowing this, the concept of connecting to a self-cleaning robot on wheels may still be a tough sell.
Andrew Paul is the editor of Popular Science covering generation news. Previously, he was a regular contributor to The A. V. Club and Input, and has recently published featured paintings in Rolling Stone, Fangoria, GQ, Slate, NBC, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Live outdoors in Indianapolis.
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