ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 24 -- United States Patent no. 12,583,566, issued on March 24, was assigned to Zhengzhou University (Zhengzhou, China).

"Unmanned vessel-based maintenance decision-making method for diagnosing sedimentation in drainage pipelines and providing early warning for waterlogging" was invented by Hongyuan Fang (Zhengzhou, China), Danyang Di (Zhengzhou, China), Jian Li (Zhengzhou, China), Zhaoyang Zhang (Zhengzhou, China), Bin Sun (Zhengzhou, China), Bin Li (Zhengzhou, China), Niannian Wang (Zhengzhou, China), Jinping Zhang (Zhengzhou, China) and Kejie Zhai (Zhengzhou, China).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "This invention relates to the diagnosis of sedimentation in drainage netw...