AI In Focus – Autonomous Vehicles

One of the single largest applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in the area of autonomous vehicles (AV). Many large companies are working in the AV space, including Uber, Waymo (owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company), Uber ATG (owned by Uber), and Waterloo-based Blackberry QNX. There are also many startups including Kitchener-based Acerta. Large or small, the companies responsible for developing AVs have pursued a variety of strategies for intellectual property protection including patents, trade-secrets, copyright and trade-marks.

The "autonomous" feature of AVs is provided by many different individual systems, including:

• Sensing systems such as vision systems, radar, LiDAR, GPS;