Patent ID: 11928585
Assignee: HRL LABORATORIES, LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  B | IPC B  G

Claim 5:
6. A computer implemented method for operating an autonomous platform in an environment using information extracted from point cloud data in the environment, the method comprising an act of:
causing one or more processors to execute instructions encoded on one or more associated memories, each associated memory being a non-transitory computer-readable medium, such that upon execution, the one or more processors perform operations of:
training a neural network model with imageless data, the imageless data being exclusively the point cloud data, comprising:
using a parallelizable k-nearest neighbor sorting algorithm, providing a patch of points sampled from the point cloud data as input to the neural network model, wherein the patch of points has a central point;
transforming the patch of points from Euclidean coordinates in a Euclidean space to spherical coordinates; and
generating normalized points by projection onto the unit sphere;
estimating a polar angle of a surface normal of the normalized points in the spherical coordinates;

utilizing the trained neural network model on the autonomous platform; and
using the estimate of the polar angle of the surface normal to guide operation of the autonomous platform within the environment.