Most planners think in world coordinates; Skydio's claim thinks in pixels. Its grant US11592845B2 ("Image space motion planning of an autonomous vehicle," issued February 28, 2023; inventors Ryan David Kennedy, Peter Benjamin Henry, Hayk Martirosyan, Jack Louis Zhu, Abraham Galton Bachrach, Adam Parker Bry) plans an autonomous drone's motion directly in image space — reasoning about where to go in the camera frame rather than first reconstructing a full metric 3D world and planning there.
The mechanism keeps planning close to the sensor: G06T 7/246 (visual tracking) and 7/277 (filtering of tracked features) mark the image-domain reasoning; B64C 39/024 marks the drone airframe and G05D 1/106 the 3D flight control. Planning in image space is computationally lighter and degrades more gracefully than full 3D reconstruction — a sound choice for a power- and compute-constrained flying camera that has to dodge obstacles in real time.
For the control beat, the design philosophy is the story: avoid the expensive, error-prone full-3D-reconstruct-then-plan pipeline by planning where the perception already is — the image. It's a different camp from the map-heavy ground-AV approach, and it's well-suited to drones, where weight and latency dominate. Fencing image-space planning stakes out that lighter-weight philosophy.
From a portfolio angle, this is a deliberate multi-grant family: the identical title and inventor set recur across US11592844B2 (2023) and US11787543B2 (2023), a tight cluster of continuations re-fencing image-space planning. Skydio — the leading US autonomous-drone maker — built this family as the moat under its obstacle-avoidance autonomy, the capability that differentiates its product.
Caveats. Image-space and visual-servoing-style planning has robotics prior art; the grant turns on the specific image-domain planning method in claim 1, not on the concept. With a three-grant family, the enforceable scope is the union of the live claims — read the latest. The independent claim's image-space planning step is the asset.
For the file: a vision-native drone-planning family central to Skydio's autonomy. Pull US11592845B2 and its 2023 siblings on PatentBear, read the newest claim 1 for the image-space planning step, and file it as the drone camp's answer to ground-AV's map-heavy planning.