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 (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.
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.
Status of Claims
Claims 1-20 are now pending.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
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.
Claims 1, 5, 9, 13 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 1 rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being incomplete for omitting essential steps, such omission amounting to a gap between the steps. See MPEP § 2172.01. It is unclear what triggers the “last iteration” as claimed. For example, if the “last iteration” is the “last iteration” due to reaching a particular threshold or trigger to end the iterations. Alternately, it is unclear if the “last iteration” is intended to be a “previous iteration.”
Claims 5, 13 and 14 recite “MPC” as an acronym. The acronym is not defined anywhere within the claims.
Claim 9 recites the limitation "the respective iteration.” There is insufficient antecedent basis for this limitation in the claim.
Potentially Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-20 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejection(s) under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), 2nd paragraph, set forth in this Office action.
The following is an examiner’s statement of reasons for indication of potentially allowable subject matter:
The closest prior art of record, Chen et al. (“Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning”), hereinafter Chen discloses: “Mobility in an effective and socially-compliant manner is an essential yet challenging task for robots operating in crowded spaces. Recent works have shown the power of deep reinforcement learning techniques to learn socially cooperative policies. However, their cooperation ability deteriorates as the crowd grows since they typically relax the problem as a one-way Human-Robot interaction problem. In this work, we want to go beyond first-order Human-Robot interaction and more explicitly model Crowd-Robot Interaction (CRI). We propose to (i) rethink pairwise interactions with a selfattention mechanism, and (ii) jointly model Human-Robot as well as Human-Human interactions in the deep reinforcement learning framework. Our model captures the Human-Human interactions occurring in dense crowds that indirectly affects the robot’s anticipation capability. Our proposed attentive pooling mechanism learns the collective importance of neighboring humans with respect to their future states. Various experiments demonstrate that our model can anticipate human dynamics and navigate in crowds with time efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.”
Regarding claim 1, Chen, taken either singly or in combination with other prior art of record fails to disclose, teach, suggest, and/or render obvious, individually or in combination the limitations in combination of claim 1.
Other prior art of record fails to disclose, teach, suggest, and/or render obvious, individually or in combination the limitations in combination of independent claim 1 as a whole.
In particular, neither Chen nor other prior art of record teaches the limitation: “…iteratively executing processing of a two-player game algorithm until a pre-defined condition is satisfied, wherein, in the two-player game algorithm, the plurality of humans collectively represent a first player having a first cost function associated with the summed predicted trajectories of the plurality of humans, and the plurality of mobile robots collectively represent a second player having a second cost function including the potential function of the potential game;”
As such, claim 1 is considered novel and non-obvious and is therefore allowed.
Claims 2-8 and 19 depend either directly or indirectly upon independent claim 1. Therefore, these claims are also allowed by virtue of their dependency.
Regarding claim 9, Chen, taken either singly or in combination with other prior art of record fails to disclose, teach, suggest, and/or render obvious, individually or in combination the limitations in combination of claim 9.
Other prior art of record fails to disclose, teach, suggest, and/or render obvious, individually or in combination the limitations in combination of independent claim 9 as a whole.
In particular, neither Chen nor other prior art of record teaches the limitation: “… iteratively executing processing, by a controller, of a two-player game algorithm until a pre-defined condition is satisfied, comprising: transmitting, by the controller, to each of the plurality of robots, a predicted trajectory of each of a plurality of humans in an environment in which the plurality of mobile robots are configured to move; receiving, from each of the plurality of robots, a respective current best-response trajectory that is current to the respective iteration; transmitting, to each of the plurality of robots, the received current best-response trajectories of each other robot of the plurality of robots; and receiving, from each of the plurality of robots, a convergence signal in response to said transmitting; in response to the pre-defined condition being satisfied, generating, by the controller, control instructions for each robot of the plurality of robots based on output from the two-player game algorithm after a last iteration; and controlling each of the plurality of robots to move in accordance with the respective control instructions.”
As such, claim 9 is considered novel and non-obvious and is therefore allowed.
Claims 10-20 depend either directly or indirectly upon independent claim 1. Therefore, these claims are also allowed by virtue of their dependency.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Examiner notes that attempts to reach applicant’s representative to propose an Examiner’s Amendment for allowance were unsuccessful.
Conclusion
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/E.R.N./Examiner, Art Unit 3658
/JASON HOLLOWAY/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3658