Patents by Inventor Rodger E. Burkley

Rodger E. Burkley has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 6362875
    Abstract: A system and method for homing, docking and tracking of one object with respect to another provides a camera for acquring images and a machine vision processor inter-connected with the camera. The machine vision processor includes a sacale-invariant and rotation-invariant pattern recognition application that retrieves stored images representative of the object being viewed that includes data representative of a fiducial within the object image. The stored image and its fiducial are compared to the acquired image. The image is aligned within the processor based upon a detected fiducial and the relative orientation and position of the object is determined based upon the acquired image. Data representative of the relative position and orientation is used to manipulate one of the objects so as to bring at least one of the objects to a predetermined position with respect to the other of the objects. The predetermined position can be a docked position or a following, on-station position, among others.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 10, 1999
    Date of Patent: March 26, 2002
    Assignee: Cognax Technology and Investment Corp.
    Inventor: Rodger E. Burkley