Patent Law Practice Center

Recent drone patents focus on avoiding midair collisions

Recently on IPWatchdog.com, we published an article about how Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Senator John Hoeven (R-ND) have teamed up to support bipartisan legislation that seeks to take the first steps to regulate commercial drone use. See Senators Booker, Hoeven draw up bipartisan bill promoting commercial drone use. Whenever we cover a story relating to technology we always like to take a look at the recently issued U.S. patents in that particular area to get a sense of what is going on in the industry. With that in mind, we took a look at recent patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the field of drone technologies.

In this search, we found a fair number of patents being issued to foreign firms, which could be some evidence that drone R&D in other countries might be outpacing those inventions produced by American firms. (more…)