US Patent Issued to FANUC on July 7 for "Collision map generation and planning" (American, Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,673,423, issued on July 7, was assigned to FANUC Corp. (Yamanashi, Japan).

"Collision map generation and planning" was invented by Hsien-Chung Lin (Fremont, Calif.), Yutarou Momosaki (Yamanashi, Japan) and Tetsuaki Kato (Fremont, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An object interference checking technique using collision maps. A CAD model of a workpiece is converted to an obstacle height map defining obstacle height above a reference plane for each cell of a grid. A CAD model of a tool is used to construct a tool height map. The obstacle height map and the tool height map are used to generate a collision map defining a collision-free t...