ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 30 -- United States Patent no. 12,748,201, issued on Sept. 29, was assigned to SEMICONDUCTOR COMPONENTS INDUSTRIES LLC (Scottsdale, Ariz.).
"Self-cleaning ultrasonic sensors" was invented by Marek Hustava (Bratislava, Slovak Republic) and Jiri Kantor (Hrusky, Czech Republic).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Ultrasonic sensors, sensor controllers, and sensor control methods are provided with self-cleaning functionality. An illustrative method includes: driving a piezoelectric transducer to generate a short acoustic burst for obstacle detection or distance measurement; obtaining a receive signal to monitor for reflections of the short acoustic burst; and operating to clean t...