US Patent Issued to Falcon Exodynamics on June 17 for "System and method for identifying and distinguishing spacecraft appendages from the spacecraft body" (California, Washington Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,330,818, issued on June 17, was assigned to Falcon Exodynamics Inc. (El Segundo, Calif.).

"System and method for identifying and distinguishing spacecraft appendages from the spacecraft body" was invented by Michael Klug (Redondo Beach, Calif.), Joseph Vermeersch (Hermosa Beach, Calif.), Matthew Banfield (Torrance, Calif.), Adriel Bustamante (Jurupa Valley, Calif.) and Jonathan Wolff (Sammamish, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An apparatus for controlling docking with a spacecraft includes at least one camera for generating at least one image pixel stream of the spacecraft. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) receives the at leas...