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US 9,784,837 B1Granted
Optical ground tracking apparatus, systems, and methods
AssigneeSeescan, Inc.
InventorsMark S. Olsson, Michael J. Martin, Sequoyah Aldridge, Ray Merewether
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Abstract
Apparatus, systems, and methods are disclosed for tracking movement over the ground or other surfaces of tools or instruments or equipment, such as buried object locators or other devices, and generating motion, position, location, mapping and/or related information for tracked locations, as well as measuring and storing associated signals and other information detected or generated during tracking.
Claims11
A buried object locator carried and controlled by a user over a ground to detect objects buried below the ground, the buried object locator comprising:
- a magnetic field sensing buried object locator module to detect a buried object based upon sensing magnetic fields emitted by the buried object, and generate buried object information corresponding to the detected buried object;
- a surface tracking module to:
- detect light reflected from a tracking surface;
- sense or compute a user-effected motion of the buried object locator over the ground relative to the tracking surface, based at least in part on analysis of light patterns associated with the tracking surface;
- and
- generate motion information corresponding with the sensed or computed user-effected motion;
- and
- an integration module configured to associate the buried object information with corresponding motion information and store the associated information in a memory.
5 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.