ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,371,069, issued on July 29, was assigned to Zoox Inc. (Foster City, Calif.).

"Collaborative guidance for vehicle interactions" was invented by Eunsuk Chong (Castro Valley, Calif.) and Ravi Gogna (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This disclosure is directed to techniques for collaborative driving during flagger interactions. For instance, a vehicle navigating along a path may detect a flagger using sensor data. Based on detecting the flagger, the vehicle may stop at a location that is at least a threshold distance from the flagger and also send the sensor data to one or more computing devices associated with a teleoperator....