US Patent Issued to Google on May 27 for "Engagement detection and attention estimation for human-robot interaction" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,315,301, issued on May 27, was assigned to Google LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Engagement detection and attention estimation for human-robot interaction" was invented by Sean Kirmani (San Francisco), Michael Quinlan (Sunnyvale, Calif.) and Sarah Coe (San Francisco).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes receiving, from a camera disposed on a robotic device, a two-dimensional (2D) image of a body of an actor and determining, for each respective keypoint of a first subset of a plurality of keypoints, 2D coordinates of the respective keypoint within the 2D image. The plurality of keypoints represent body locations. Each respective...