Cooperative Perception Patents: Who Leads, Trends & Gaps 2026
Cooperative Perception and Data Fusion Patents
Filing peaked in 2021 at 22 records, then fell 45% to 12 by 2024, the last year the dataset treats as complete — a real pullback, not a publication-lag artefact. Filings rose from 7 in 2017 to a peak of 22 in 2021, then declined to 12 by 2024 — a 45% drop over that three-year span. 2025 and 2026 figures are still incomplete due to publication lag and should not be read as a continued decline.
- 1QUALCOMM INC21
- 2SONY GROUP CORP12
- 3TOYOTA MOTOR NORTH AMERICA INC7
- 4INTEL CORP6
- 5VOLKSWAGEN AG5
See the full cooperative perception and data fusion analysis in Eureka
- The complete ranking, not just the top five
- Every IPC branch with its share of the corpus
- The most-cited records, and where claim space is still thin
Common questions about this landscape
What counts as a cooperative perception patent in this dataset?
Records were selected for combining a sharing or fusion concept — cooperative perception, sensor data sharing or point cloud fusion — with a mechanism that makes that sharing workable in practice, such as temporal alignment, coordinate transformation, occlusion handling, data redundancy, transmission latency management or object matching. This dual requirement filters out patents that merely mention sensor sharing in passing without addressing how it is actually implemented. The scope covers 125 published records filed between 2017 and 2026.
Who are the leading filers in cooperative perception and sensor fusion?
The ranking covers 60 companies, with the single leading assignee holding 21 of the 125 records in scope and the top five together accounting for 40.8% of all records. Beyond the top ten, which together hold 56.8%, the ranking flattens into a long tail of companies with only a handful of filings each. That shape means a competitive read should focus on the handful of large portfolio holders rather than treating the field as evenly distributed.
Is patent filing in this space growing or slowing down?
Filing volume rose from 7 records in 2017 to a peak of 22 in 2021, then fell to 12 by 2024, a 45% decline over that three-year span. That is the most recent year the dataset treats as complete; 2025 and 2026 counts are still filling in because publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so those final years understate true activity and should not be read as evidence of an accelerating decline.
Disclaimer. This analysis is based on Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent records and is provided for general information and reference only. Patent data carries inherent limitations — recent filings are under-counted because of publication lag, counts may be on a record or family basis, classification and applicant-name data may contain errors or duplicates, and the underlying search query defines the scope shown — so the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing here is an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Verify independently and review with qualified patent and legal professionals before acting on it.
Method: Filing trend and technology composition. Derived from a Patsnap search on Cooperative Perception and Data Fusion covering 2015–2026, data cut-off 2026-07-31. Counts reflect published records only and shift as new filings publish. Every share divides by all records in scope. Data: Patsnap Eureka. See the full landscape report.