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 .
DETAILED ACTION
Amendments to the claims have been recorded.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments have been fully considered but they are not persuasive.
Applicant’s Arguments
Applicant argues are fully addressed with the new rejections made to the newly provided amendments. The Nonstatutory Double patenting rejection has been withdrawn based on the TD submitted.
Applicant’s arguments relating to the 101 rejection is addressed with the updated rejection based on the amendments provided. Additionally, 1. Amendments made to the claims dated 4/28/2026 do not overcome the 101 rejections. As the amendments of “perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem” only highlight “subsystems” such as files or units is a software code. The additional limitations such as “detect a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem” are simply Mental processes – concepts that are practicably performed in the human mind (including an observation [i.e. detect], evaluation, judgment, opinion, calculating, determining). There is no action beyond the abstract idea. Additionally, there is no improvement to any technology area. The claims mention “introducing reliability”, however one of ordinary skill in the art would not know what this is or how it is introduced. The claims are too abstract.
Regarding the 112 rejections, the rejections have been updated based on the amendments to the claims. Systems were amended to subsystems. Applicant argues “introducing reliability into each of the subsystems” has been amended the claims. However, the amendments to not remedy the rejection, please see the updated rejection bellow. Applicant argues “composite factor”; however, the specifications are unclear what “composite factor” is, please see rejections. Applicant argues that the claims must be read in light of the specifications relating to “reliability”, Examiner agrees, however the specifications cannot be read into the claims. Applicant argues claim 3 relating to “allowable error”; as in a type and not value or range and later states “that is greater than or equal to”; as such ether the allowable error must have a range or the errors must be on a table in rank to make a comparison between the two different types. Same argument is made to “predetermined reliability”, is it a type or a value or range. “is the allowable error” an error type i.e. flat or a value i.e. 3? Regarding “a loop that circulates through the moving object in the real world”. Circulates is a movement. How can a “loop” that is logic concept move through a physical object?
Nonstatutory Double Patenting
The nonstatutory double patenting rejection for 18/781,826 has been withdrawn as the TD filed on 4/28/2026 has been approved.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims “1-7” are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
Amendments made to the claims dated 4/28/2026 do not overcome the 101 rejections. As the amendments of “perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem” only highlight “subsystems” such as files or units is a software code. The additional limitations such as “detect a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem” are simply Mental processes – concepts that are practicably performed in the human mind (including an observation [i.e. detect], evaluation, judgment, opinion, calculating, determining). There is no action beyond the abstract idea. Additionally, there is no improvement to any technology area. The claims mention “introducing reliability”, however one of ordinary skill in the art would not know what this is or how it is introduced. The claims are too abstract.
On January 7, 2019, the USPTO released new examination guidelines setting forth a two-step inquiry for determining whether a claim is directed to non-statutory subject matter. According to the guidelines, a claim is directed to non-statutory subject matter if:
STEP 1: the claim does not fall within one of the four statutory categories of invention (process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter), or
STEP 2: the claim recites a judicial exception, e.g. an abstract idea, without reciting additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception, as determined using the following analysis:
STEP 2A (PRONG 1): Does the claim recite an abstract idea, law of nature, or natural phenomenon?
STEP 2A (PRONG 2): Does the claim recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application?
STEP 2B: Does the claim recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception?
Claim 1 reads:
An evaluation method of a driving system of a moving object, which includes a perception subsystem, a determination subsystem, and a control subsystem, the evaluation method comprising:
specifying a closed loop by modeling an interaction between each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, the control subsystem, and a real world;
specifying an error occurring in each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem; and
evaluating the error propagating in accordance with the closed loop to detect a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem.
Using the two-step inquiry, it is clear that claim 1 is directed toward non-statutory subject matter, as shown below:
STEP 2A (PRONG 1): Is the claim directed to a law of nature, a natural phenomenon or an abstract idea? Yes, the claims 1-7 are directed to an abstract idea.
With regard to STEP 2A (PRONG 1), the guidelines provide three groupings of subject matter that are considered abstract ideas:
Mathematical concepts – mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations;
Certain methods of organizing human activity – fundamental economic principles or practices (including hedging, insurance, mitigating risk); commercial or legal interactions (including agreements in the form of contracts; legal obligations; advertising, marketing or sales activities or behaviors; business relations); managing personal behavior or relationships or interactions between people (including social activities, teaching, and following rules or instructions); and
Mental processes – concepts that are practicably performed in the human mind (including an observation, evaluation, judgment, opinion, calculating, determining).
The method in claim 1 is a mental process that can be practicably performed in the human mind and, therefore, an abstract idea. The abstract ideas are:
specifying a closed loop by modeling an interaction between each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, the control subsystem, and a real world;
specifying an error occurring in each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem; and
evaluating the error propagating in accordance with the closed loop to detect a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem.
Analyzing the abstract idea we can understand that the abstract idea with the given examples.
specifying a closed loop by modeling an interaction between each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, the control subsystem, and a real world; thinking about walking foot eye coordination. Perception subsystems i.e. eye, determination subsystem i.e. should I put my foot out, do I have enough balance on one foot. Control subsystem, can I move my foot?
specifying an error occurring in each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem; and specifying error, did I get distracted while thinking of walking, or timing and which foot; error left, left.
evaluating the error propagating in accordance with the closed loop to detect a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem. Evaluating the error. How did I get distracted, why was I distracted, why left, left, happened.
STEP 2A (PRONG 2): Does the claim recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application? No, the claim does not recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application.
With regard to STEP 2A (prong 2), whether the claim recites additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application, the guidelines provide the following exemplary considerations that are indicative that an additional element (or combination of elements) may have integrated the judicial exception into a practical application:
an additional element reflects an improvement in the functioning of a computer, or an improvement to other technology or technical field;
an additional element that applies or uses a judicial exception to effect a particular treatment or prophylaxis for a disease or medical condition;
an additional element implements a judicial exception with, or uses a judicial exception in conjunction with, a particular machine or manufacture that is integral to the claim;
an additional element effects a transformation or reduction of a particular article to a different state or thing; and
an additional element applies or uses the judicial exception in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological environment, such that the claim as a whole is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the exception.
While the guidelines further state that the exemplary considerations are not an exhaustive list and that there may be other examples of integrating the exception into a practical application, the guidelines also list examples in which a judicial exception has not been integrated into a practical application:
an additional element merely recites the words “apply it” (or an equivalent) with the judicial exception, or merely includes instructions to implement an abstract idea on a computer, or merely uses a computer as a tool to perform an abstract idea;
an additional element adds insignificant extra-solution activity to the judicial exception [receiving data, data gathering, data output] further addressed in WUEC; and
an additional element does no more than generally link the use of a judicial exception to a particular technological environment or field of use.
Claim 1 does not recite any of the exemplary considerations that are indicative of an abstract idea having been integrated into a practical application.
STEP 2B: Does the claim recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception? No, the claim does not recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With regard to STEP 2B, whether the claims recite additional elements that provide significantly more than the recited judicial exception, the guidelines specify that the pre-guideline procedure is still in effect. Specifically, that examiners should continue to consider whether an additional element or combination of elements:
adds a specific limitation or combination of limitations that are not well-understood, routine, conventional activity in the field, which is indicative that an inventive concept may be present; or
simply appends well-understood, routine, conventional activities previously known to the industry, specified at a high level of generality, to the judicial exception, which is indicative that an inventive concept may not be present.
Claim 1 does not recite any specific limitation or combination of limitations that are not well-understood, routine, conventional (WURC) activity in the field.
Claim 1 does not further recites WURC extra steps.
Analyzing the WURC steps of the abstract idea with the given examples.
we can understand that the abstract idea falls within the WURC Activity MPEP 2106.05(d)(1) Evaluation
improvement consideration WURC consideration MPEP.05(a);
mere instructions to apply an exception consideration MPEP 2106.05(f)
insignificant extra-solution activity consideration MPEP 2106.05(g)
Generic computer performing merely generic computer functions, data gathering, populating tables, sending and receiving data or performing functions ‘known’ in the art.
CONCLUSION
Thus, since claim 1 is: (a) directed toward an abstract idea, (b) does not recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application, and (c) does not recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception, it is clear that claim 1 is directed towards non-statutory subject matter.
2. introducing reliability; mentally paying attention while walking.
3. error occurring in loop falling withing a probability, i.e. timing while imagining walking, left right or left, left.
4-5. circulates through; imagining walking
Claims 6, 7 are the CRM of claim of the method claim 1 and are rejected using the same analysis. Claim 7 introducing reliability; mentally paying attention while walking.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(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.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
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 of carrying out his invention.
Claims 1-7 recite “composite factor” rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claim(s) contains 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, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention. Claims 1-7 recited “composite factor” the specifications do not indicate what “composite factor” is, only usage, causes, and reflections are referred too. Composite factor my include extracting, but no definition of composite factor is given. Composite factor can be reflected, as in 268; a composite factor based on the interaction between each of the subsystems can be reflected in the design.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
The claims are generally narrative and indefinite, failing to conform with current U.S. practice. They appear to be a literal translation into English from a foreign document and are replete with grammatical and idiomatic errors.
Claims 1-7 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential structural cooperative relationships of elements, such omission amounting to a gap between the necessary structural connections. See MPEP § 2172.01. The omitted structural cooperative relationships are: the relationship between “perception system, a determination system, and a control system as the subsystems” and “specifying a closed loop by modeling, as a loop structure, an interaction between each of subsystems and a real world for a driving system of a moving object”. The claim reads “specifying a closed loop by modeling, as a loop structure, an interaction between each of subsystems and a real world for a driving system of a moving object, which includes a perception system, a determination system, and a control system as the subsystems”. One of ordinary skill in the art would not know which one of the: closed loop, loop structure, subsystems, real world, driving system, or the moving object includes “a perception system, a determination system, and a control system as the subsystems”.
Claims 2-3, and 7 “introducing reliability”; One of ordinary skill in the art would not know what is introduced and why is it reliable? The limitation is very abstract, one of ordinary in the art would not understand what the claim is referring to.
Claim 3 “falls within an allowable error” seems to refer to errors which are pre-defined, however “that is greater than or equal to” seems to be a value or range i.e. mixing types with units. Additionally, the claim refers back to type “predetermined reliability”; however, the type “reliability” is compared to outcome “error”.
Claim 4 and 5 “a loop that circulates through the moving object in the real world…. the loop is completed within the moving object”. A loop generally is a value relating to a function that is feedback i.e. logic and cannot “circulate through a moving body in the real work” and cannot “be completed within the moving object” as it must be executed unless there is a physical machine that is exclusively designed for it such as a mechanical governor. No such machine is presented in the specifications.
Claims 1-7 are generally narrative and indefinite, failing to conform with current U.S. practice. They appear to be a literal translation into English from a foreign document and are replete with grammatical and idiomatic errors. However, Examiner has attempted to address the claims with art rejections.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis 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.
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Redford US 2022026979.
1. An evaluation method of a driving system of a moving object, which includes a perception subsystem, a determination subsystem, and a control subsystem, the evaluation method comprising:
specifying a closed loop by modeling an interaction between each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, the control subsystem, and a real world; Fig.1 loop model, perception 102, determination or planning 106, control 108 and real world. Also 113.
specifying an error occurring in each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem; and 113; perception system is not perfect and that its errors; errors affect the prediction [determination], planning and control systems
evaluating the error propagating in accordance with the closed loop to detect a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem. 156; 1) Apply the trained perception slice 204 to each sensor output x to compute a corresponding perception output e; [0158] 2) For each perception output e, determine a deviation (error) Δ [deviation delta is propagating] between e and the corresponding ground truth t; [0159] 3) Each error Δ is associated with the ground truth t and the set of confounders c pertaining to the corresponding sensor output x; [0160] 4) Tune the parameters θ to fit the distribution to the errors Δ, taking into account the associated ground truths and variable confounders c. 530; A PSPM is said to be mapped to a “confounder space” representing all possible confounders or combinations of confounders that the PSPM can take into account. This allows a PSPM to accurately model different real-world conditions, represented by different points in the confounder space, in a highly efficient way because PSPMs remove the need to simulate sensor data for those different conditions and do not require the perception component(s) itself to be applied as part of the simulation.
2. An evaluation method of a driving system of a moving object, which includes a perception subsystem, a determination subsystem, and a control subsystem, the evaluation method comprising:
specifying a closed loop by modeling an interaction between each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, the control subsystem, and a real world; Fig.1 is a closed loop by modeling interactions.
introducing reliability into each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem as a common measure between each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem to evaluate a composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem; and 519; In a supervised training process [introducing reliability], parameters of a perception component are tuned systematically to minimize, to a defined extent, an overall measure of difference between the perception outputs generated by the perception component when applied to the training examples in a training set (the “actual” perception outputs) and the corresponding ground truths provided by the associated annotation data (the intended perception outputs). In this manner, the perception input “learns” from the training examples, and moreover is able to “generalize” that learning, in the sense of being able, one trained, to provide meaningful perception outputs for perception inputs it has not encountered during training. Also ee 112
evaluating the closed loop based on the reliability to detect the composite factor between the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem. 604; potential errors in the planner can be explored [evaluated] if the scenario is run without the PSPM in the loop. This can be extended to automatically triage data to indicate a perception problem or a planner problem.
3. The evaluation method according to claim 2, further comprising:
specifying an error occurring in each of the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem, wherein evaluating the closed loop further includes evaluating whether the error, which propagates in accordance with the closed loop, falls within an allowable error with a probability that is greater than or equal to predetermined reliability. 335; To identify relevant confounders [errors in perception, determination, and control loop], a Relief-based algorithm is used. An outline of a general Relief-based algorithm is given in Algorithm 1. The Relief algorithm yields an array of feature weights in the range [−1, 1], where a weight greater than 0 indicates the feature is relevant, as changes in the feature tend to change the target variable. In practice, some features will have a weight greater than 0 by chance, only the features with weight greater than some user-defined cutoff 0<τ<1 are chosen.
4. The evaluation method according to wherein the closed loop includes a loop that circulates through the moving object in the real world, the perception subsystem, and the control subsystem, and the loop is completed within the moving object. See 112
5. The evaluation method according to wherein the closed loop includes a loop that circulates through the moving object in the real world, an external environment in the real world, the perception subsystem, the determination subsystem, and the control subsystem, and the loop evaluates an interaction between the moving object and the external environment. See 112
6-7. are rejected using the same rejections as made to claim 1.
Citation of Pertinent Prior Art
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure. Crego US 12,055,941
Conclusion
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
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/SIHAR A KARWAN/Examiner, Art Unit 3664
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