Apple Project Titan Patent Details Safety In Autonomous Vehicle

A new Apple patent has emerged online, detailing the safety of the driver and the passengers inside Project Titan’s autonomous vehicle. This is the eighth patent pertaining to the Cupertino giant’s electric car project that’s secretly been going on since 2015.

Patently Apple reported Tuesday that Apple has recently been granted a new patent for Project Titan, titled “Energy Absorbing Assembly.” According to the Apple-centric news site, the documentation details the safety of the people inside Apple’s autonomous car thanks to deformable energy-absorbing structures.

Apple indicated in the patent that transportation vehicles should be designed to provide protection to the people occupying them. The tech giant then pointed out that certain body structures of cars have the purpose of ensuring the safety of the driver and the passengers. The structures include externally visible body panels, chassis, frame, subframe and many others.

The iPhone X maker noted that during vehicular collisions, extreme forces may deform the body structures inside the vehicle. Hence, it is important that these body structures are reinforced to resist deformation. Apple claims that by doing so, injuries caused by any of the aforesaid body structures can be reduced.

Apple patent 9,932,071 also implies that Apple is looking at another way to ensure the safety inside its autonomous vehicle. Samsung’s biggest rival is thinking that other portions of a vehicle’s body structures may be designed in such a way that they would be able to deform in a controlled manner. The deformation, according to Apple, could absorb the energy of the impact of a collision.

The new patent was filed by a couple of inventors, whose previous works speak volumes about their involvement in Project Titan. Engineering Director Tom Rivellini previously worked for NASA as the chief engineer of the low density supersonic accelerator project. Then there’s Product Design Analysis Engineer Andrzej Baranski, who formerly worked for Dassault Systèmes as the technical team leader for automotive occupant safety and biomechanics. He also worked on virtual crash dummy projects for BMW.

Although Apple has been very secretive about Project Titan, details related to the project still manage to emerge online every once in a while. Just last month, the Financial Times learned from the Department of Motor Vehicles in California that Apple has been given permits to test a total of 45 self-driving vehicles on public roads. A year ago, the Cupertino giant was only allowed to test three of its vehicles on the road. The huge jump could be hinting at the significant development of Apple’s mysterious autonomous driving technology.