ALEXANDRIA, Va., Nov. 18 -- United States Patent no. 12,472,949, issued on Nov. 18, was assigned to TOYOTA JIDOSHA K.K. (Toyota, Japan).
"Travel controller and travel control method" was invented by Eiki Kitagawa (Edogawa-ku Tokyo-to, Japan), Satoru Akahane (Shinjuku-ku Tokyo-to, Japan) and Yoshihiro Aotani (Kawasaki Kanagawa-ken, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A travel controller determines whether a traveling lane in which a vehicle is traveling is a merged lane into which a merging lane merges using peripheral data that represents a surrounding situation of the vehicle, and while the traveling lane is the merged lane, repeatedly performs yielding determination to detect a merging veh...