Apple Secures Another Autonomous Vehicle Patent

Apple has secured another patent related to autonomous vehicles even as it remains tight-lipped about its AV plans. Patent number 11,243,532 from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office relates to machine learning systems and algorithms for reasoning, decision-making and motion-planning for controlling the motion of autonomous or partially autonomous vehicles. First unearthed by Patently Apple, the patent, titled "evaluating varying-sized action spaces using reinforcement learning," details a system that evaluates actions using a reinforcement learning model to help direct the movements of a vehicle. "A set of actions corresponding to a particular state of the environment of a vehicle is identified. A respective encoding is generated for different actions of the set, using elements such as distinct colors to distinguish attributes such as target lane segments," the abstract reads.