Recently, according to foreign media reports, the US Patent and Trademark Office announced an auto-driving patent application from Apple. It is reported that the patent is a multi-modal sensing system, the main content is to detect and identify objects through night sensors to improve the safety of night driving.

Simply put, Apple's new patent is to install near-infrared lights on cars and night sensors with near-infrared lights. The principle of operation is to analyze the high-resolution image information of objects in the vehicle path or near the path through nighttime sensors. For the user, with the system prompts, driving at night can solve the problem of insufficient vision.

Apple said that compared to other autonomous vehicle computing vision systems, the patent's advantage is that it has a wider range of effective detection, three times that of a typical autonomous vehicle. In addition, it is also more intelligent, which not only can detect objects near the vehicle road, but also can be classified to ensure that users can feedback data and obstacle information in time.

In fact, automatic driving is inseparable from a wide range of environmental sensors, such as laser radar, ultrasonic radar, and millimeter radar. Before Apple, the tests for autonomous driving were mostly carried out under sufficient light conditions. This new Apple patent has a certain role in promoting the entire autonomous driving field. However, Apple has not released other research on autonomous driving recently, which means that there is still a long way to go from patent to application.