{
  "patent_number": "US 11919658",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "How Aircraft Automatically Adjust Exterior Lights Using Computer Vision",
  "original_title": "Automated pilot visibility lights",
  "summary": "An automated system for airplanes that turns on landing and taxi lights based on altitude and uses AI to adjust brightness depending on real-time visibility conditions.",
  "what_it_does": "This patent describes a system that manages an aircraft's exterior lights, such as landing or taxi lights, without requiring a pilot to flip switches. It uses a controller to monitor the plane's altitude; once the plane is below a certain height, the system automatically activates the lights. To ensure the lights are effective, the system captures images from exterior cameras and feeds them into a trained machine learning model. This model classifies the current visibility (e.g., fog, rain, or clear) and automatically adjusts the intensity of the light output to maximize visibility for the pilot.",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "Does not cover manual control of lights by a pilot.",
    "Does not cover systems that rely solely on GPS or weather station data without using image classification.",
    "Does not cover lighting systems that only toggle on/off without adjusting the magnitude of the light output.",
    "Does not cover interior cabin or cockpit lighting."
  ],
  "filed": "2022-03-30",
  "granted": "2024-03-05",
  "expires": null,
  "status": "active",
  "holder": "Goodrich Corp",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/goodrich-corp",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Anisha Reddy Pendeyala",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/anisha-reddy-pendeyala"
    },
    {
      "name": "Bhavya Chunchu",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/bhavya-chunchu"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 1,
  "tags": [
    "aerospace",
    "ai_ml",
    "mechanical"
  ],
  "abstract": "Automated control of one or more exterior aircraft lights is presented, for instance exterior aircraft lights that enhance visibility by a pilot and including landing lights, taxi lights, and runway turnoff lights. One aspect of this automated control is that one or more of such exterior aircraft lights may be automatically activated, for instance when the aircraft has at least initiated movement and has not yet reached a certain altitude (e.g., while the aircraft is taxiing on the ground and including during takeoff). Another aspect of this automated control is that a trained image classification model may determine a visibility classification for an image acquired by an exterior aircraft camera, and this visibility classification may be used to automatically control the operation of one of more of such exterior aircraft lights (e.g., an intensity of the light output from such an exterior aircraft light(s)).",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11919658/starship-payload-bay",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/11919658/starship-payload-bay/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US11919658",
  "relatedPatents": []
}