Read Claim 1: UATC's End-to-End Planner Patent Wants the Black Box to Show Its Work

The word "interpretable" in a motion-planner claim is doing safety-and-regulatory work. UATC's grant US11755018B2 ("End-to-end interpretable motion planner for autonomous vehicles," issued September 12, 2023; inventors Wenyuan Zeng, Wenjie Luo, Abbas Sadat, Bin Yang, Raquel Urtasun) claims a planner trained end-to-end — perception to trajectory in one learned pipeline — that nonetheless produces intermediate representations a human can inspect. The interpretability is the inventive hedge against the black-box problem.

The mechanism keeps the data-efficiency of end-to-end learning while exposing semantically meaningful intermediates (occupancy, cost maps, candidate trajectories) so the planner's decision can be examined. G01C 21/3453 (route computation) and G05D 1/0212 (position control toward a target) mark the planning-and-navigation core. The claim's distinctiveness is the conjunction: end-to-end and interpretable, two properties usually in tension.

For the control beat, this is where engineering meets the regulatory frame. A purely end-to-end planner is hard to certify because you can't say why it did what it did; an interpretable one gives you the artifact a safety case needs. Fencing the interpretable-end-to-end combination is fencing the version of learned planning that can actually survive a safety review — which is the version that ships.

From a portfolio angle, this is another Urtasun-group asset (the same inventor cluster behind UATC's 3D-detection family), and it fits a pattern: fence the learned-autonomy primitives that bridge research and deployment. An interpretable-planner claim is valuable precisely because the deployable form of end-to-end planning is the constrained, explainable one — and that's what this fences.

Caveats. End-to-end and interpretable planning each have substantial prior art; the grant survives on the specific architecture in claim 1 that achieves both, not on the aspiration. "Interpretable" is a strong word that usually forces a specific recited mechanism for producing the intermediates. Read the independent claim for what the interpretable representation actually is.

For the file: a deployment-flavored learned-planning grant whose value is the interpretability limitation. Pull US11755018B2 on PatentBear, read claim 1 for the recited interpretable intermediate, and file it under planning IP built to clear a safety case.