ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,546,896, issued on Feb. 10, was assigned to Ford Global Technologies LLC (Dearborn, Mich.).
"Steering interaction detection" was invented by John Robert Van Wiemeersch (Novi, Mich.), Ryan Joseph Gorski (Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich.) and Mahmoud Yousef Ghannam (Canton, Mich.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for detecting interaction of a user with a steering wheel for a vehicle includes generating, via a time-of-flight sensor, a point cloud representing a compartment of the vehicle. The point cloud includes three-dimensional positional information about the compartment. The method further includes identifying, via processing circuitr...