ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,411,497, issued on Sept. 9, was assigned to TOYOTA JIDOSHA K.K. (Toyota, Japan).

"Information processing apparatus, method, and non-transitory computer readable medium" was invented by Yuki Kuwayama (Yokohama, Japan), Takeshi Fujiki (Shinagawa-ku, Japan), Rie Murai (Chiba, Japan), Kohei Miwa (Suntoh-gun, Japan), Akira Miyamoto (Nisshin, Japan), Tsuyoshi Okada (Nagoya, Japan) and Yu Ito (Nagoya, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A controller of an information processing apparatus is configured to control a vehicle to drive automatically by communicating with the vehicle via a communication interface, the vehicle being capable of towin...