ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,304,086, issued on May 20, was assigned to FANUC Corp. (Yamanashi, Japan).

"Deep collision avoidance" was invented by Yongxiang Fan (Palo Alto, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A system and method for providing deep collision avoidance between objects in a robotic system. For a collision between a part and an object, the method decomposes the part into a union of part balls having a known radius and center location and decomposes the object into a union of object balls having a known radius and center location. The method obtains a Minkowski difference between each pair of the part balls and the object balls, converts each Minkowski...