Company patents
Waymo LLC
Waymo LLC's patent strategy reveals a strong, sustained focus on core autonomous driving technologies, with Vehicle Control Systems (39.9% of portfolio) and Radar / Sonar / Lidar (31.8% of portfolio) dominating its portfolio, despite a general decline in patenting activity across most categories in 2025 and so far in 2026. A surprising shift is the rapid emergence of Pattern Recognition & ML Models, which saw a remarkable 108.3% YoY growth in 2024, indicating an increasing emphasis on advanced AI for perception and decision-making, even as other computing-related categories like Computer Vision and Machine Learning & AI experienced declines in 2025.
Patent Trend by Technology Area
Yearly patent publications since 2023
Product themes
Product-level themes inferred from filings since 2023, with category chips showing where each theme appears. Select a theme to filter the patents below.
1,733 US filings (since 2023) · 12 categories · 32 themes
Algorithms and systems for generating, optimizing, and executing trajectories for autonomous vehicles or robots to move through an environment, often involving obstacle avoidance, route validation, and goal reaching.
Innovations in the physical components and architectures of radar, lidar, and sonar systems, including antenna design, RF signal generation, beam steering mechanisms, and optical elements for improved performance.
Algorithms and systems for planning and executing complex vehicle maneuvers, often involving cooperation with other vehicles or infrastructure, to optimize traffic flow, avoid collisions, or navigate challenging scenarios. This includes lane changes, cut-ins, and traffic congestion.
Techniques and hardware for autonomous systems to gather and interpret data about their surroundings, including obstacle detection, object recognition, and depth estimation, to inform control decisions.
Systems and methods for enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users (pedestrians, cyclists) by improving their detection, prediction, and precise localization relative to the vehicle, often leveraging communication technologies and specialized markers.
Techniques and architectures for ensuring the reliability, fault tolerance, and performance validation of autonomous driving systems, including redundant computing platforms and perception system monitoring.
Techniques for combining data from disparate sensor types (e.g., cameras, radar, mobile device signals) to achieve a more robust and comprehensive understanding of an environment or subject, often leveraging machine learning for interpretation and correlation.
Systems that combine data from multiple camera sensors or capture multiple images from different perspectives or qualities, often involving image processing techniques like synthesis to create enhanced or comprehensive views.
Integrated systems for managing parking facilities, guiding vehicles to available spots, and providing notifications, often leveraging sensors, communication, and remote control.
Methods and apparatus for detecting objects and determining their three-dimensional position and orientation (pose) using imagery or point cloud data, often for navigation, surveying, or environmental understanding.
Techniques for generating, updating, and utilizing highly detailed digital maps that include lane-specific information, and for precisely determining a vehicle's position within these lanes, often using sensor data.
Methods and systems for managing the interaction, communication, and collaborative tasks among multiple autonomous entities, or between autonomous entities and a central control system or users.
Technologies for detecting adverse weather conditions or road hazards and providing timely alerts and adaptive control strategies to vehicles and drivers to enhance safety.
Systems and methods for dynamically adjusting traffic signal timings and phases at intersections based on real-time traffic conditions, priority vehicles, and predictive analytics to optimize flow and reduce congestion.
Systems enabling wireless communication between vehicles (V2V), vehicles and infrastructure (V2I), or vehicles and other entities (V2X) to share information for traffic management, safety, and navigation.
Systems that employ imaging and image processing to automatically detect defects, verify states, or ensure quality control in manufactured goods, printed materials, or industrial processes.
Development and optimization of novel neural network layers or architectures specifically designed to improve performance or efficiency for computer vision tasks.
Methods and systems for accurately determining the absolute or relative position of an object or device, often integrating satellite navigation (GNSS), inertial measurement units (IMU), and local ranging or wireless communication technologies.
Systems that monitor a vehicle operator's physiological state, attentiveness, or behavior using in-cabin sensors and machine learning to enhance safety or personalize vehicle functions.
Methods and systems for improving the quality of video streams, generating intermediate frames, or continuously locating and following objects within a sequence of images, even under occlusion.
Techniques used by sensing systems to identify the presence, location, and characteristics of objects or unusual conditions in an environment, including methods to suppress false positives or 'ghost' detections.
Methods and apparatus for improving the visual fidelity, resolution, or compression efficiency of video signals, often through advanced processing, up-scaling, or neural network-based filters.
Hardware and control techniques for optimizing memory access latency, ensuring data integrity, and managing storage resources efficiently. This includes error correction, read/write voltage control, and intelligent data placement or in-memory computation.
Control systems for managing vehicle braking and maintaining a stationary state, including brake pedal actuation sensing, automatic brake hold functions, and coordination with parking brakes.
Technologies for establishing and managing high-bandwidth, low-latency communication pathways between computing components, peripherals, or systems, focusing on signal integrity, synchronization, and interface standards.
Methods and components for optimizing the performance, efficiency, and control of electric motors, inverters, and power converters within electric vehicle and hybrid vehicle drivetrains.
Integration and processing of data from diverse sensors (e.g., magnetometers, odometers, IMUs, vision sensors) to achieve robust and accurate positioning, especially in environments where GPS is unreliable or unavailable.
Specialized hardware, architectural designs, and computational methods to improve the speed, efficiency, and security of artificial intelligence and machine learning model execution, particularly for inference and data processing.
Techniques for generating human-like text or other content using large pre-trained models, often involving prompt engineering, speculative decoding, or multi-modal inputs for content creation.
Techniques utilizing deep learning models like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or diffusion models to create new images, modify existing ones, or generate synthetic data based on various inputs or conditions.
Methods for training machine learning models across multiple decentralized devices or servers while keeping data localized, often involving aggregation of model parameters and secure communication.
Systems and methods for automating the lifecycle of machine learning models, including pipeline deployment, model management, versioning, and configuring for different inference environments.
Patents
Showing 1-10 of 321
Cooperative Driving & Maneuver Planning