Cracked and broken screens are the bane of smartphone users. In addition to spawning a cottage industry of blog posts and screen-fixing services, the unfortunate tendency of glass to shatter on impact has inspired two
The patent, which was awarded on Tuesday and first reported by AppleInsider, describes how an electronic device in free fall could change its position in mid-air to minimize the damage caused by impact.
The patent application depicts a device behaving very much like a cat. “The first thing a cat does when it's falling is to try to figure out which way is up,” says Destin Sandlin, a missile engineer who runs a science channel on YouTube that includes falling cat experiments. “It does this either with a gyro in its ears or with its eyes.”
Similarly, Apple engineers Nicholas King and Fletcher Rothkopf describe how the motion sensor of a device would alert the processor that it was in free fall. The processor would then determine the orientation of the device, estimate the impact area and selectively change the orientation of the device by vibrating the phone, ejecting a mass such as the battery or activating an airfoil or thrust mechanism. In another scenario, the device could either tighten its grip on the headphone cord or release it.
At least one group of researchers at the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology is engaged in similar work, though the focus of their work is robots, not electronic devices such as iPhones. “As the field of robotics advances and robots become more dynamic, control algorithms for landing safely from a long, intended fall will become more necessary,” the researchers wrote in a recent paper titled “Orientation in Mid-air through configuration changes to Achieve a Rolling Landing for Reducing Impact after a Fall.”
The most important thing in determining the amount of damage caused by a fall is the landing angle, said Karen Liu, an expert in interactive computing at George Tech. But she added that current motors today aren’t fast enough to recreate feline reflexes.
It’s unclear whether the Apple researchers have succeeded in building a device that changes direction as it falls or if they have just worked out how it could be done in theory. Apple did not respond to my request to interview its researchers. But the patent makes clear that the company’s ambitions for the intellectual property are expansive.
While the diagrams included in U.S. patent 8,903,519 closely resemble an iPhone, the application explains that it could apply to any device, including a camera, digital music player or a laptop, regardless of whether it is falling or not. “The foregoing description has broad applications,” the patent states. “For example, while examples disclosed herein may focus on changing an orientation of a device prior to impacting a surface, it should be appreciated that the concepts disclosed herein may equally apply to modifying the device orientation during other situations.”
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