US Patent Issued to TOYOTA JIDOSHA on July 21 for "Vehicle control device and vehicle control method" (Japanese Inventor)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 21 -- United States Patent no. 12,686,438, issued on July 21, was assigned to TOYOTA JIDOSHA K.K. (Toyota, Japan).

"Vehicle control device and vehicle control method" was invented by Takuro Kikuchi (Nagoya, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A vehicle control device capable of autonomously controlling the steering of a vehicle includes: a necessity determination unit that determines whether offset travel offset from a center of a traveling lane to a side opposite to an opposite lane side is necessary based on a state of an oncoming lane; an execution determination unit that determines whether an execution condition for executing offset travel is satisfied based on a ro...