ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 26 -- United States Patent no. 12,234,681, issued on Feb. 25, was assigned to B/E AEROSPACE INC. (Winston-Salem, N.C.).
"Contactless operation of lavatory doors" was invented by Nagaraju Sripathi (Kattigenahalli, India), Rajesh Vasudevan Nair (Sidedahalli, India) and Kannan Chidambaram Seetharaman (Bangalore, India).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A system for contactless operation of an aircraft lavatory door comprises a controller operatively connected to control an actuator for opening and closing a lavatory door. A gesture sensing system is operatively connected to the controller for sending gesture data to the controller indicative of a user gesturing for the actuator...