US Patent Issued to Waymo on Sept. 8 for "Road friction and wheel slippage assessment for autonomous vehicles" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,728,862, issued on Sept. 8, was assigned to Waymo LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Road friction and wheel slippage assessment for autonomous vehicles" was invented by Peter Craig Lombrozo (Scotts Valley, Calif.), Courtney McCool (San Jose, Calif.) and Daniel Lynn Larner (San Jose, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The disclosure relates to assessing and responding to wheel slippage and estimating road friction for a road surface. For instance, a vehicle may be controlled in an autonomous driving mode in order to follow a trajectory. A wheel of the vehicle may be determined to be slipping such that the vehicle has limited steering contr...