DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA . In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
Status of Claims
Claims 1, 3-4, and 8-10 are pending. Claims 2 and 5-7 are cancelled.
Joint Inventors
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 24 September 2025 has been entered.
Response to Amendment/Remarks
Any reference to the prior office action refers to the final rejection office action dated 27 June 2025.
The rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) for addition of the term “exclusively” from the prior office action is withdrawn for Claim 1 (and accordingly Claims 3-4) due to the amendment, Claim 8 still recites the term “exclusively” (this portion of the claim was not amended), so the rejection of Claims 8-10 is maintained.
In response to the argument that the current claims overcome the prior art, Examiner agrees and has summarized the reasoning below.
Claim Objections
Claim 8 is objected to because of the following informality:
“obtain a motor position of the motor from an encoder” should be “obtain a motor position of [[the]] a motor from an encoder”.
Appropriate correction is required.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
Claims 1 and 8 (and thus Claims 3-4 and 9-10 due to dependency) are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a), as failing to comply with the written description requirement. These claims contain subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention. The claims have been amended to include the term occupied only by: “the first memory and the first system bus are occupied only by the first controller during the performance of the program execution function” (with similar language for the second and third processing assemblies) which is a negative limitation as it is describing not what is the invention is but what it is not. While the use of negative limitation is not always improper, it can be improver if the specification lacks written description support for the exclusions provided by the negative limitations and/or if the language makes it ambiguous as to what the inventor or a joint inventor invented as compared to what the inventor or a joint inventor did not invent. See MPEP 2173.05(i): “Any negative limitation or exclusionary proviso must have basis in the original disclosure”.
Examiner found no support for “the first [second, third] memory and first [second, third] system bus are occupied only by the first [second, third] controller during performance of the arm trajectory generation function”. Examiner reviewed an English translation of JP Application Serial Number 2022-041305 (incorporated by reference in its entirety) and could not find support (see attached NPL reference, an English translation of JP-2023135946-A, which includes “can occupy”: “the first control unit 41 can occupy the first main memory 42 and the first system bus 43”). Examiner suggests that Applicant provide a certified English translation of JP Application Serial Number 2022-041305, which is incorporated by reference, that shows this matter, to overcome this rejection for new matter (see MPEP 2163.07(b) and MPEP 2163.07(II)).
This particular negative limitation is not a circumstance where it can be established that a skilled artisan would understand that this negative limitation is necessarily present in this disclosure (i.e. inherent to the disclosure even if not explicitly mentioned). Claim 3 states “wherein the first processing unit assembly is configured to write information shared with the second processing assembly into the second memory, and the second processing assembly is configured to write information shared with the first processing assembly into the first memory”, which explicitly shows there are times that there is cross-over. Additionally, paragraph [0043] of the specification states “The robot controller and the robot system according to the present disclosure have been described above, based on the illustrated embodiment. However, the present disclosure is not limited to this embodiment”. As such, the negative limitation here is considered new matter as it lacks written description support. Appropriate corrections are required.
Claim 8 (and thus Claims 9-10 due to dependency) are further rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a), as failing to comply with the written description requirement. These claims contain subject matter which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention. The claims have been amended to include the term exclusively: “a first system bus that is exclusively configured to perform a first data communication between the first controller and the first memory” (with similar language for the second and third processing assemblies) which is a negative limitation as it is describing not what is the invention is but what it is not. While the use of negative limitation is not always improper, it can be improver if the specification lacks written description support for the exclusions provided by the negative limitations and/or if the language makes it ambiguous as to what the inventor or a joint inventor invented as compared to what the inventor or a joint inventor did not invent. See MPEP 2173.05(i): “Any negative limitation or exclusionary proviso must have basis in the original disclosure”.
There is no portion of the specification states there are ONLY certain components on any system bus. In fact, paragraph [0043] of the specification states “The robot controller and the robot system according to the present disclosure have been described above, based on the illustrated embodiment. However, the present disclosure is not limited to this embodiment”. This particular negative limitation is not a circumstance where it can be established that a skilled artisan would understand that this negative limitation is necessarily present in this disclosure (i.e. inherent to the disclosure even if not explicitly mentioned). As such, the negative limitation here is considered new matter as it lacks written description support. Appropriate corrections are required.
Potentially Allowable Subject Matter
The following is a summary of the reasons there are no prior art rejections and why subject matter would be allowable if rejections under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) were overcome:
Regarding Claim 1, the closest prior art is U.S. Pub. No. 2010/0274385 (Eriksson). Eriksson does not disclose, teach, suggest, or render obvious the third processing assembly being configured to: receive the trajectory from the second processing assembly via a second external bus and instead discloses one network communication between the hardware units of the control system (see at least Fig. 2). Additionally, Eriksson does not disclose, teach, suggest, or render obvious wherein the first memory and the first system bus are occupied only by the first controller during the performance of the program execution function, wherein the second memory and the second system bus are occupied only by the second controller during the performance of the arm trajectory generation function, and wherein the third memory and the third system bus are occupied only by the third controller during the performance of the motor control function as Eriksson discloses that the memory may be shared and does not disclose limits on when it would be shared: “At least one of the memory units 26a-d is a persistent data storages such as a memory card, a hard drive or a non-volatile memory. In one embodiment of the invention each hardware unit is provided with persistent data storage. In another embodiment only one of the memory units is provided with persistent data storage. For example, the other hardware units are adapted to retrieve the software units from the hardware unit with the persistent data storage” (see at least [0026]).
There is no combination of Eriksson and U.S. Pub. No. 2019/0329423 (Shimodaira), U.S. Patent No. 4,965,500 (Mizuno et al.), U.S. Pub. No. 2020/0061811 (Iqbal et al.), and U.S. Patent No. 4,760,521 (Rehwald et al.) that discloses, teaches, suggests, or renders obvious the entirely of Claim 1 without impermissible hindsight.
Regarding Claims 3-4 and 8-10, these overcome the prior art for at least the same reasons stated for Claim 1 above.
Conclusion
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/A.R.M./Examiner, Art Unit 3658 /JASON HOLLOWAY/ Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3658