ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,588,468, issued on March 24, was assigned to Murata Machinery Ltd. (Kyoto, Japan).
"Overhead transport vehicle" was invented by Yuji Shimizu (Ise, Japan) and Seiji Yamagami (Kyoto, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An overhead transport vehicle includes: a holding unit that is provided to be liftable and lowerable and configured to hold an article; a three-dimensional ranging sensor that has a detection range to include surroundings of a lower space formed directly below the article held by the holding unit; and a control device that is configured to determine presence or absence of an obstacle based on a detection result of the thre...