DETAILED ACTION
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Priority
Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) were in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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 (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.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claim(s) 1, 3 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Campbell US 3388589 in view of Okada US 20040187602.
As to claim 1, Campbell teaches “An inspection device configured to inspect a center of gravity of an inspection target having a plate shape (Figure 4, 80 is the support section and 86 is the inspection target having a plate shape), the inspection device comprising: a support section configured to, on an upper end portion thereof, support the inspection target; the force and the moment acting on the support section from the inspection target in a non-rotating state (Figure 1; Column 3, lines 17-29).” Campbell does not teach a force sensor being located at the lower end portion of the support.
Okada teaches “and a force sensor coupled to a lower end portion of the support section and configured to detect a force in a gravitational direction and a moment about an axis orthogonal to the gravitational direction (Figure 1, [0289]. The prior art teaches the use of force sensors located at the lower end portion of a support section. As to the language “configured to detect a force in a gravitational direction and a moment about an axis orthogonal to the gravitational direction”, this is to be considered functional language. The force sensor and its location in the Okada reference is capable of performing the claimed action).”
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the filing of the invention to combine the teachings of Okada with Campbell. Both prior arts are in the same field of endeavor since Campbell relates to determining the center of gravity which is the determination of where a gravitational force is considered to act. Utilizing a force sensor located at the base of the support section would aid in increasing the accuracy of the device.
As to claim 3, Campbell teaches “wherein the inspection target has a disc shape (Figure 4, 80 is the support section and 86 is the inspection target. The inspection target is not limited to a disc shape according to the filed specification; therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to have utilized the device in Campbell to determine the center of gravity of objects of other shapes).”
Allowable Subject Matter
Claim 2 is objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims. None of the prior arts teach the limitations “an identification section configured to, on the basis of a result of detection by the force sensor, identify at least one of: a position of the center of gravity of the inspection target; a polar angle obtained in a case where the position of the center of gravity of the inspection target is represented by a polar coordinate in which a position of a center of gravity of a normal product is an origin; and the moment about the axis orthogonal to the gravitational direction.”
Claim 4 is allowed. This claim pertains to a specific method. The prior arts teach a force sensor, but do not teach the method step “and a detection step of detecting, with use of the force sensor, the force in the gravitational direction and the moment about the axis orthogonal to the gravitational direction, the force and the moment acting on the support section from the inspection target supported in the support step.”. This limitation specifies a specific use case for the sensor and for what it measured at a specific step.
Conclusion
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/TARUN SINHA/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2855
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