US Patent Issued to Waymo on May 6 for "Using the presence of road surface and surrounding area illumination to detect occluded objects" (California Inventor)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,291,236, issued on May 6, was assigned to Waymo LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Using the presence of road surface and surrounding area illumination to detect occluded objects" was invented by Mehmet Akman (Santa Cruz, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The technology relates to detection of a nearby occluded object based on illumination emitted from that object. Illumination by the occluded object of one or more areas in the surrounding area, for instance by headlights of an occluded vehicle, is detected by a perception system of a self-driving vehicle. The self-driving vehicle can classify the detected object to determine whether the ...