ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,583,492, issued on March 24, was assigned to Murata Machinery Ltd. (Kyoto, Japan).
"Transport cart system" was invented by Akito Shimomura (Ise, Japan), Toru Hamaguchi (Ise, Japan), Naoki Manabe (Ise, Japan) and Hiroaki Izumi (Ise, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A transport vehicle system includes a transport vehicle to travel along a track, a controller to control the transport vehicle, and a power supply provided at each of a plurality of sections of the track. Each of the power supplies includes a sensor to monitor a state of the power supply and a communicator to transmit the monitoring result by the monitor to the controller....