Laurent Desforges et al.Download PDFPatent Trials and Appeals BoardSep 6, 201912748278 - (D) (P.T.A.B. Sep. 6, 2019) Copy Citation UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www.uspto.gov APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE FIRST NAMED INVENTOR ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. 12/748,278 03/26/2010 Laurent Desforges HEXTC.058A 4835 64970 7590 09/06/2019 KNOBBE, MARTENS, OLSON & BEAR, LLP LECIA GEMOSYSTEM 2040 MAIN STREET FOURTHEENTH FLOOR IRVINE, CA 92614 EXAMINER DESTA, ELIAS ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2857 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 09/06/2019 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address(es): efiling@knobbe.com jayna.cartee@knobbe.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE ____________ BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD ____________ Ex parte LAURENT DESFORGES, HEINZ LIPPUNER, KNUT SIERCKS, THIBAULT DUPORTAL, DENNY ROUX, and JEAN-LUC FAMECHON ____________ Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 Technology Center 2800 ____________ Before MAHSHID D. SAADAT, CARL L. SILVERMAN, and LILAN REN, Administrative Patent Judges. SAADAT, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL1 Appellants2 appeal under 35 U.S.C. § 134(a) from the Examiner’s Final Rejection of claims 5–14 and 21–28, which are all the claims pending in this Application.3 We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. § 6(b). We affirm. 1 An oral hearing was held for this Appeal on August 15, 2019. 2 According to Appellants, the real party in interest is Hexagon Metrology AB. App. Br. 3. 3 Claims 1–4 and 15–20 have been canceled previously. Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 2 STATEMENT OF THE CASE Appellants’ Specification describes “articulated arms” and “coordinate measurement machines.” See Spec. ¶ 2. Exemplary claims 5 and 24 under appeal read as follows: 5. An articulated arm coordinate measuring machine comprising: an articulated arm comprising a plurality of articulated arm members, a coordinate acquisition member at a distal end, and a base at a proximal end; wherein at least one of the articulation members comprises an absolute encoder comprising at least one readhead and at least one encoder disk, the readhead configured to read a face of the encoder disk, the readhead producing an image having a unique pattern. 24. An articulated arm coordinate measuring machine comprising: an articulated arm comprising a plurality of articulated arm members, a coordinate acquisition member at a distal end, and a base at a proximal end; wherein at least one of the articulation members comprises an absolute encoder comprising at least one readhead and at least one encoder disk, the readhead configured to read a face of the encoder disk, the encoder disk including only a single track such that position is measured by only reading from the single track. Claims 5, 9–14, 21–26, and 28 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Raab (US 2004/0103547 A1; pub. June 3, 2004) and Bacchi (US 5,852,413; iss. Dec. 22, 1998). See Final Act. 2–7. Claims 6–8 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Raab, Bacchi, and van Zon (US 5,426,667; iss. June 20, 1995). See Final Act. 7–8. Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 3 Claim 27 stands rejected under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as unpatentable over Raab, Bacchi, and McFarland (US 2009/0025463 A1; pub. Jan. 29, 2009). See Final Act. 8–9. ANALYSIS Claim 5 In rejecting claim 5, the Examiner relies on Raab as disclosing the recited articulated arm coordinate measuring machine including a plurality of articulated arm members and a coordinate acquisition member which comprises a readhead and at least one encoder disk, but not an absolute encoder including a “readhead configured to read a face of the encoder disk with an absolute encoder disk.” Final Act. 3 (citing Raab, Abstract, Figs. 1– 7, 9, 9A–9E, 10). The Examiner finds Bacchi discloses an absolute type positional detection encoder which performs “positional detection by reading a code formed on the face of the rotary disc.” Final Act. 3 (citing Bacchi, col. 2, ll. 65–67, col. 3, ll. 11–25). The Examiner concludes it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to combine the teachings of Raab and Bacchi because it provides a better and precise way to find the position of the CMM after the off-power state or sleep mode in order to identify the actual position without having to deal with additional computation, furthermore, the surface of the disk encoding method would provide an easier and faster seek time in order to obtain the necessary data. Final Act. 3–4. Appellants contend Bacchi does not disclose or suggest “an absolute encoder” because Bacchi “requires rotation to determine position,” or “requires movement of the rotary disk to measure position” and “Bacchi Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 4 does not teach a true absolute encoder, only a virtual one.” App. Br. 5. Appellants also argue Bacchi fails to disclose a “unique pattern” and one of ordinary skill in the art would not understand the need for motion to determine the absolute position in Bacchi “to mean that multiple images are needed to read a complete unique pattern from Bacchi’s bar code, and thus also to identify an absolute position.” App. Br. 5–6. In response, the Examiner explains that, as recognized by Appellants, Bacchi explicitly states that an “‘object of this invention is to provide a simple and compact absolute position encoder’ (col. 2, lines 65–66),” which “would suggest that Bacchi considers its own device to be a kind of absolute encoder, and therefore within the scope of the recited term ‘absolute encoder’.” Ans. 2. The Examiner further finds Appellants’ Specification describes absolute and incremental encoders in general terms as “determin[ing] a unique position on the encoder by only reading a limited portion of the encoder’s coded surface” and as requiring “a return to a uniquely identified home position to re-index and determine the incremental positions away from the home position,” respectively. Ans. 3–4 (citing Spec. ¶¶ 63, 65). The Examiner explains, to the extent Appellants’ Specification provides no detail regarding the “absolute encoder” to distinguish it over a “virtual absolute encoder,” the sensor in Bacchi meets the recited “absolute encoder” because the disclosed encoder needs “to rotate a short distance, namely 0.66°, so that the sensor can read off the unique position information.” See Ans. 7. Appellants have not persuaded us that the Examiner erred in reading the claimed “absolute encoder” on Bacchi’s encoder. Bacchi is directed to “a simple and compact position encoder that has a high encoder resolution Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 5 requiring very little wasted motion to determine an absolute angular or linear position.” Bacchi, col. 2, ll. 54–57; see also col. 2, ll. 65–67. Contrary to Appellants’ discussion that “Bacchi, . . ., requires rotation to determine position” (App. Br. 5), the 0.66 degree rotation is the level of accuracy or granularity of the detection which Bacchi uses “to sense and confirm the absolute angular position of the rotary stage.” See Bacchi, col. 3, ll. 19–25. That is, using the term “angular increments” in the context of the position encoder of Bacchi relates to the resolution by which a precise position is determined. Additionally, we disagree with Appellants that Bacchi’s bar code scale 110, as shown in Figure 4, is not an image having a unique pattern because the disclosed encoding format of Bacchi provides the absolute angular position by reading all three sectors having unique and specific positional information coded therein. See Bacchi, col. 7, l. 65–col. 8, l. 2, col. 8, ll. 19–24. Therefore, we sustain the 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of claim 5. Claim 24 In rejecting claim 24, the Examiner finds Raab discloses the recited articulated arm coordinate measuring, but not “an absolute encoder with a single track, with the readhead configured to read a face of the encoder disk.” Final Act. 6. The Examiner further finds Bacchi discloses the missing limitations as the absolute encoder which reads the code from a disc having a single track. Final Act. 6 (citing Bacchi, Fig. 3, col. 2, ll. 65–67, col. 3, ll. 10–25). Appellants contend the cited portion of Bacchi in column 3, lines 1– 25 does not recite the term “single-track” and instead discloses two tracks described as “‘encoder disk 106 includes an incremental encoder scale 108 Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 6 and a bar code scale 110 that are formed as radially adjacent annular tracks.’ (Col. 6, Lines 9-11, emphasis added).” App. Br. 6. According to Appellants, elements 108 and 110 in Figure 4 refer to different tracks “because Bacchi describes two different scales and the scales are formed as radially adjacent tracks (plural).” App. Br. 6. As discussed above, Appellants’ arguments have not persuaded us that the Examiner erred with respect to the “absolute encoder” limitation. Regarding the recited term “a single track,” we agree with the Examiner that Bacchi discloses [t]he angular increments are determined to a 2,400 arc-second absolute resolution by a compact, single-track, continuously coded bar code scale and to a 0.125 arc-second relative resolution by interpolating interference patterns generated by a diffraction grating-based incremental encoder scale. The absolute and relative scales are each sensed by fixed-beam optical sensors. See Bacchi, col. 3, ll. 13–19. Therefore, although the encoded information has two parts, Bacchi’s disclosure implies reading them in one pass. Additionally, Bacchi discloses “the absolute sector-identifying bar code scale may be used without an incremental encoder scale in some applications, and the incremental encoder employed is not limited to the diffraction grating-based interpolation technique.” See Bacchi, col. 9, l. 67– col. 10, l. 4. That is, the two patterns are read together which meets the broadest reasonable interpretation of the term “single track” consistent with the broad disclosure in Appellants’ Specification. See Spec. ¶ 63 (“Each encoder can consist of a single serialized disk that is read by one or more read-heads that can be, e.g., CCD imagers.”). Therefore, we sustain the 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of claim 24. Appeal 2017-009067 Application 12/748,278 7 CONCLUSION For at least the reasons discussed above, we sustain the Examiner’s 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) rejection of independent claims 5 and 24, as well as dependent claims 6–14, 21–23, and 25–28, which are not argued separately with sufficient particularity. App. Br. 6–7. DECISION The decision of the Examiner to reject claims 5–14 and 21–28 is affirmed. No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. § 1.136(a)(1)(iv). AFFIRMED Copy with citationCopy as parenthetical citation