Ford Global Technolgoies, LLC

Xue Iuan Wong

Vidya Nariyambut Murali

Punarjay Chakravarty

Gaurav Pandey

Shubham Shrivastava

Shannon Brooks-Lehnert

Lihui Chen

Upon initiation of trailer-hitching, an image is obtained of an area behind and in a horizontal plane with respect to a vehicle, the area including a rearwardly extending trailer hitch, with a hitch ball mounted thereto, mounted to the vehicle. The hitch ball is located in the image. An overshoot zone, having a length extending from a vehicle rear bumper to a nearest point on the vehicle hitch ball and having a width that is a sum of a diameter of the hitch and two times a lateral offset, is defined within the area, as is a misaligned zone having a border extending from the vehicle rear bumper to a line tangent to a rearmost point of the hitch ball. A vehicle action is caused upon determining that the trailer coupling is detected in the overshoot zone or the misaligned zone.

Hitching maneuver

A computing device is programmed to generate a plurality of raw 3D point clouds from respective sensors having non-overlapping fields of view, scale each of the raw point clouds including scaling real-world dimensions of one or more features included in the respective raw 3D point cloud, determine a first transformation matrix that transforms a first coordinate system of a first scaled 3D point cloud of a first sensor to a second coordinate system of a second scaled 3D point cloud of a second sensor, and determine a second transformation matrix that transforms a third coordinate system of a third scaled 3D point cloud of a third sensor to the second coordinate system of the second scaled 3D point cloud of the second sensor. The computing device is programmed, based on the first and second transformation matrices, upon detecting an object in a first or third camera field of view, determine location coordinates of the object relative to a coordinate system that is defined based on the second coordinate system; and output the determined location coordinates of the object.

Object detection

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Dearborn, MI, United States of America

Xue Iuan Wong