ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,291,200, issued on May 6, was assigned to Waymo LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).
"Using wheel orientation to determine future heading" was invented by Jens-Steffen Ralf Gutmann (Cupertino, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The technology relates to determining a future heading of an object. In order to do so, sensor data, including information identifying a bounding box representing an object in a vehicle's environment and locations of sensor data points corresponding to the object, may be received. Based on dimensions of the bounding box, an area corresponding to a wheel of the object may be identified. An orientation of the wheel may t...