US Patent Issued to Siemens on July 1 for "Detecting empty workspaces for robotic material handling" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,346,120, issued on July 1, was assigned to Siemens AG (Munich).

"Detecting empty workspaces for robotic material handling" was invented by Ines Ugalde Diaz (Redwood City, Calif.), Eugen Solowjow (Berkeley, Calif.), Yash Shahapurkar (Berkeley, Calif.), Husnu Melih Erdogan (Berkeley, Calif.) and Eduardo Moura Cirilo Rocha (Albany, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "It is recognized herein that robots or autonomous systems can lose time when computing grasp scores for empty bins. Further, when grasps are attempted on empty bins, for instance due to the related grasp score computations, the robot can lose additional time through being used...