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 .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 9/26/24 and 1/30/26 are 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 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Applicant Admitted Prior Art (APA) in view of US 2017/0208498 by Lee et al. (Lee).
Applicant Admitted Prior Art: Applicant establishes current existing systems in the Background section of the specification. This includes known conveyance systems as well as referenced Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication 2016-118845.
With respect too claim 1, APA teaches A conveyance system comprising a transport vehicle configured to transport an article to or from a passive device, wherein the transport vehicle includes:
a communication unit configured to transmit and receive a wireless signal to and from the passive device; and an output unit configured to output when a time-out error has occurred in the transport vehicle, the time-out error being a state in which the communication unit has failed to recognize the wireless signal output by the passive device during a predetermined period of time (APA – in the Background of applicant’s specification, applicant indicates a known conveyance system where signals are exchanged between a transport device and passive device, wherein if a signal exchange has not been performed a time-out error occurs. Publication 2016-118845 provides further indication of using timing data for analyzing the cause of the time-out error).
The APA does not explicitly disclose constantly transmitting and receiving received signal strength to and from the passive device during transfer of the article; a counter configured to generate a counter value corresponding to an elapsed time from a timing when the communication unit has missed receiving the received signal strength transmitted the passive device during the transfer of the article where the counter value, and the counter resets the counter value every time the received signal strength has been received. Lee teaches in a signaling environment, determining whether a time-out error is correlated to a wireless network quality such as signal strength. A received signal strength indicator (RSSI) acts a wireless parameter as a part of a function of determining wireless quality. IF the threshold (equivalent to a counter value) is met then it is determined the time-out error correlates to the signal strength. A new links state would be determined for the next time-out error. (Paragraph 81, 86, 97-103 – noting this is similar to applicant’s determination of error correlation in paragraph 7 of applicant’s spec ‘counter value equal to or larger than a certain value’).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have the conveyance system of APA have the signal strength determination as in Lee. One would be motivated to have this as discerning the nature of the time-out error advantageously allows for adaptive recovery from the error (Lee paragraphs 19-20).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2, 3 and 6 are 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.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to DAVID R LAZARO whose telephone number is (571)272-3986. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8-4:30.
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/DAVID R LAZARO/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2455