Patent ID: 9733093
Date: 2017-08-15
CPC Classifications: G01C,G06F

Claim:
1. A method for making a component for a vehicle system that provides a precautionary action in a vehicle when the vehicle approaches a potentially hazardous location along a road of a road network, wherein the component comprises an augmented version of a database that represents the road network in a geographic region, the method comprising: determining a type of hazardous condition to identify which may impair control of the vehicle, and, based thereon, identify a first condition and a second condition, the satisfaction thereof at a same location is indicative of the hazardous condition, wherein the first condition comprises existence of a first feature at a location represented in the database, that an attribute of the first feature exceeds a threshold or a combination thereof, and the second condition comprises existence of a second feature at or around the location, that an attribute of the second feature exceeds a threshold, or a combination thereof; evaluating, prior to operation of the vehicle system to provide a precautionary action when the vehicle approaches a potentially hazardous location along a road of a road network, data contained in a first version of the database to identify locations along roads of the road network where the determined hazardous condition might exist, wherein the hazardous condition comprises a combination of the first condition and the second condition which are satisfied together at a same location along a road of the road network, wherein the step of evaluating further comprises: evaluating a first type of data that represents geographic features of an identified location along the road of the road network to determine if the first condition is satisfied thereby, and upon determining that the first type of data that represent geographic features satisfies the first condition, evaluating a second type of data that represents geographic features which are geographically located around the identified location along the road of the road network at which the first condition is satisfied to determine if the second condition is satisfied at or around the identified location at which the first condition was satisfied; and upon determining satisfaction of the second condition at or around the identified location at which the first condition was satisfied, adding precautionary action data to the first version of the database in association with the identified location to form the augmented version of database to indicate that a precautionary action is to be taken by the vehicle system when the vehicle system determines that the vehicle is approaching the identified location along the road of the road network; and wherein the vehicle system, upon determining that data representations of a part of the road of the road network around the current position of the vehicle system stored in the augmented database includes precautionary action data, takes a precautionary action as the vehicle system is approaching the location associated therewith.