Apple has applied for a patent for placing a lidar behind a windscreen for all-weather scanning. The patent application, which has been published by the US Patent and Trademark Office, is related to Apple’s self driving Project Titan programme. Placing a lidar behind a windscreen should also improve night-time performance, and the ability to recognise people and animals on the road.

Apple filed patent application number 20200348418 in March 2020, and a provisional patent for the same concept filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office in May 2019. The USPTO published the filed patent in November.

Elements of the apparatus are contained inside a compact housing which extends parallel to the windscreen of a vehicle. The lidar assembly is packed into a support structure of the windscreen.

The patent describes an apparatus consisting of “a transparent window; a LiDAR assembly, comprising a beam source, which is configured to emit one or more beams of optical radiation along a beam axis, and which is configured to scan the one or more beams over an angular range about the beam axis; and a diffractive structure mounted approximately parallel to the transparent window and positioned to intercept the one or more beams emitted by the LiDAR assembly and turn the beam axis to pass through the transparent window at an angle greater than 30 degree relative to a normal to a surface of the transparent window.”