ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,287,629, issued on April 29, was assigned to Ford Global Technologies LLC (Dearborn, Mich.).

"Detection of autonomous operation of a vehicle" was invented by David Michael Herman (West Bloomfield, Mich.), Alexander George Shanku (Grosse Pointe Park, Mich.) and Yashanshu Jain (Dearborn, Mich.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A computer includes a processor and a memory, and the memory stores instructions executable by the processor to receive operation data generated by first components of a vehicle; determine that the vehicle is being operated autonomously by an on-board autonomous-operation module based on the operation data without using ...