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 .
The current application relates to Provisional application No. 63/699429 filed o Sep. 26, 2024.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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) 1-20 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Morrison (20160178371) in view of Larsen (20160187142).
With regard to claims 1 & 14, Morrison discloses a system comprising:
a vehicle (an aircraft, see [0016]+);
a navigation processing unit onboard the vehicle, wherein, the navigation processing unit including an Earth magnetic model, a sensor compensation module, a navigation filter, and a magnetic anomaly map storage (a calibration system 100 onboard the aircraft includes an Earth Magnetic Field model, a NOLL to Body Transformation module 114, a Magnetic Calibration mode module 120, and etc., see [0016]+); and
Magnetometer Measurements are obtained from at least one magnetometer on an aircraft, see [0016]+).
wherein the navigation filter hosts one or more magnetic anomaly navigation algorithms, the navigation filter in operative communication with the sensor compensation module and the magnetic anomaly map storage (The magnetic calibration mode 220 includes a Calibration Kalman Filter 222, see [[0029]-[0030]+);
wherein the sensor compensation module hosts a program module having instructions for performing a method to provide enhanced magnetic anomaly navigation for the vehicle (the magnetic compensation 216, see [0031]+), the method comprising:
performing data acquisition by recording temporally synchronized magnetometer measurements from the magnetometers (receiving the measured magnetic field, see [0031]+);
performing blind source separation with a set of constraints including: a far-field assumption, in which a signal of interest that includes Earth magnetic field and a magnetic anomaly, is assumed to be measured quasi-identically across the magnetometers (observed deviation between the Earth magnetic field model and the actual earth magnetic field, see [0028]+); and
spatial coherence, which exploits known spatial relationships between the magnetometers to differentiate between global and local interference sources (providing a true altitude and heading angle, see [0010]+;
performing interference source elimination to zero out or reduce irrelevant interference sources (see [0021]-[0023]+);
reconstructing the signal of interest to generate enhanced magnetic field measurements (outputs the compensation coefficients, see [0029]+; and
feeding the enhanced magnetic field measurements to the one or more magnetic anomaly navigation algorithms in the navigation filter (the corrected Earch magnetic field vector data are feeded into the calibration Kalman filter, see [0028]-[0029]+).
Morrison fails to teach a plurality of magnetometers onboard the vehicle.
Larsen discloses a inertial navigation system which comprises a plurality of magnetometers onboard the aircraft (see [0016]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify Morrison by including a plurality of magnetometers onboard the vehicle as taught by Larsen for accuracy the measurements.
With regard to claims 2 & 15-16, Morrison teaches that the system of claim1,wherein the instructions for performing the method further comprise: performing initial filtering of the magnetometer measurements to remove noise characteristics; normalizing the magnetometer measurements; and using Tolles-Lawson equations to mitigate some signal interference (the adder 212 for the Earth magnetic field model correction vector output, see [0028]+).
With regard to claims 4-10 & 19, Morrison teaches that the system of claim 1, further comprising: one or more aiding sensors such as (IMU, gyroscopes, acetometers, GPS, and etc. ) onboard the vehicle and in operative communication with the navigation filter (see [0011]-[0015]+).
With regard to claims 11-13 & 20, Morrison teaches that the system of claim 1, wherein the magnetometer calibration system is an aerial vehicle (see the abstract), and it is obviously enable to use for the ground vehicle and in the water.
Claim(s) 3 & 17-18 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Morrison (20160178371) in view of Larsen (20160187142) as applied to claim 14 above, and further in view of NIkulin (20210372793).
With regard to claims 3 & 17, Morrison and Larsen disclose the claimed subject matter but fail to teach performing source classification to classify separated interference sources.
Nikulin discloses a system for unmanned aerial vehicle based magnetic survey. The system collects data to identify and classify the sources, see [0116]+.
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the claimed invention to modify Morrison by including a plurality of magnetometers onboard the vehicle as taught by Larsen, and further classifying the collected sources as taught by Nikulin. The combination of Morrison, Larsen and Nikulin is an adapted system for navigating safety.
With regard to claim 18, Nikulin teaches that the method of claim 17, wherein the source classification is performed using a trained machine learning algorithm, which performs techniques for automated classification of signals of interest and interference sources, see [0027]+).
Prior Arts Cited
The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure:
Gan (20170074660) discloses a magnetic field gradient navigation aid.
Conclusion
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NGA X. NGUYEN
Examiner
Art Unit 3662
/NGA X NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3662
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