Issued patents from early career in factory automation and manufacturing systems (1990s).
US 4,449,422 — Transmission center support mounting (Mechanical engineering — Allison Transmission / GM era)
US 5,295,242 — Apparatus and method for viewing relationships in a factory floor management system (Consilium — factory automation era)
US 5,398,336 — Object-oriented architecture for factory floor management (Issued March 14, 1995 — Consilium)
The earliest patent (US 4,449,422) reflects the mechanical engineering background from Rose-Hulman and R&D work at Allison Transmission (GM Division) — the period before the pivot into software. It's a grounding artifact: evidence that the systems-thinking sensibility that runs through all the software work started in physical, constrained, safety-critical engineering.
The Consilium patents (US 5,295,242 and US 5,398,336) reflect work on object-oriented systems for visualizing and managing complex factory operations. The core problems — how do you represent relationships between entities in a large, live system, and how do you make those relationships inspectable — are a direct continuation of the knowledge engineering mindset from the Teknowledge/Xerox Lisp Machine era. A factory floor management system is itself a kind of knowledge base: it encodes relationships, states, and constraints about physical processes.
Full details available via USPTO or Google Patents.