Warmerdam, In re, 93-1294
| Decision Date | 11 August 1994 |
| Docket Number | No. 93-1294,93-1294 |
| Citation | 33 F.3d 1354,31 USPQ2d 1754 |
| Parties | In re Thomas P.H. WARMERDAM and Bernard J.H. Verwer. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Federal Circuit |
David L. Schreiber, North American Philips Corp., of Tarrytown, NY, argued for appellant. With him on the brief was Jack E. Haken.
Lee E. Barrett, Associate Sol., Office of the Sol., Arlington, VA, argued for appellee. With him on the brief was Fred E. McKelvey, Sol.
Before PLAGER, LOURIE, CLEVENGER, Circuit Judges.
Thomas P.H. Warmerdam and Bernard J.H. Verwer (collectively Warmerdam or appellants) appeal the January 28, 1993 decision of the Patent and Trademark Office Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (Board), Appeal No. 92-3680. The Board affirmed the rejection of claims pending in U.S. Patent Application Serial No. 07/430,749 (the '749 application) in part for lack of statutory subject matter under 35 U.S.C. Sec. 101 (1988), and in part for indefiniteness under 35 U.S.C. Sec. 112 p 2 (1988). We affirm-in-part and reverse-in-part.
Warmerdam filed the '749 application on November 1, 1989. That application is directed to a method and apparatus for controlling the motion of objects and machines, such as robotic machines, to avoid collision with other moving or fixed objects.
The technique requires determining the shape and position of the edges of the objects to be avoided. The prior art teaches that collision avoidance operations can be simplified by assuming that the objects are larger and more regularly shaped than they actually are. This can be done by treating the object as if it were a circle or sphere (called a "bubble") of sufficient size to enclose the object, and by assuming that any motion that impinges upon the circle would produce a collision.
Appellants' invention claims a further refinement of prior art bubble systems. The positions of objects are determined by measuring the locations of artificial circular boundaries, but the measurement process does not end if the machine determines that the circular boundary will be violated in a potential collision. Instead, if a potential collision is detected, appellants further refine the determination of the boundary position by replacing the spherical bubble zone with a set of smaller, more refined bubble zones.
Appellants refer to their set of increasingly better defined safety zones as a "bubble hierarchy". The claimed invention includes methods for generating a "data structure"--undefined as such but presumably including the measured dimensions and coordinates of the bubble hierarchy--and a machine (presumably a general purpose computer) having a memory containing data representing a bubble hierarchy as generated by any of the claimed methods.
The bubble hierarchy is conceived by appellants in the following manner. At the highest level of the hierarchy is a single "root" bubble, which entirely bounds the object and thus represents the contour of the object at a coarse level of detail. Lower levels of the hierarchy are associated with groups of bubbles of smaller diameter, each separately bounding only a portion of the object, such that the union of all bubbles at a particular level bounds the entire object. These groups of bubbles represent the contour of the object at progressively finer levels of detail.
Collision avoidance is accomplished through a technique known as "bubble-bursting." According to this technique, the anticipated path of a robot, for example, is first compared with the perimeter of the root bubble. If the two do not intersect, the procedure terminates because collision avoidance is necessarily established. However, if the two intersect, the root bubble is "burst", revealing the group of bubbles at the level immediately below it in the hierarchy. The anticipated path is then compared with the perimeters of each of these bubbles. Again, if an intersection is not detected, the procedure terminates because collision avoidance is necessarily established. If, on the other hand, an intersection is detected, the intersected bubble is burst, and the procedure then repeats itself until it is determined either that (1) the anticipated path does not intersect any of the bubbles at a particular level of the hierarchy, indicating collision avoidance, or (2) the anticipated path intersects one of the bubbles at the lowest level of the hierarchy, indicating that a collision will occur.
A bubble hierarchy is illustrated in the following reproduction of Figure 4 from the '749 application:
NOTE: OPINION CONTAINS TABLE OR OTHER DATA THAT IS NOT VIEWABLE
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Warmerdam concedes that the use of bubble hierarchies for collision avoidance was known as of the '749 filing date. The asserted novelty of Warmerdam's method and apparatus derives from the generation and placement of the hierarchy of bubbles along the medial axis of the object. The medial axis of an object is defined in the specification to be "a line with the same topology as the object itself connecting points which lie midway between boundary centers of the object." With reference to Figure 1 of the '749 application, reproduced below, the medial axis of object O having contour C is represented by the group of lines B:
NOTE: OPINION CONTAINS TABLE OR OTHER DATA THAT IS NOT VIEWABLE
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According to Warmerdam, generation and placement of the bubble hierarchy along the medial axis results in computational efficiency in relation to prior methods of bubble generation and placement.
As filed, the '749 application contained seven claims of which only claims 1-6 are at issue in this appeal. The other claim, claim 7, was indicated by the examiner as allowable. Claims 1-4 are method claims, of which claim 1 is the sole independent claim:
1. A method for generating a data structure which represents the shape of [sic] physical object in a position and/or motion control machine as a hierarchy of bubbles, comprising the steps of:
first locating the medial axis of the object and
then creating a hierarchy of bubbles on the medial axis.
Claims 2-4 recite both top-down and bottom-up procedures for creating the bubble hierarchy. Claim 2 is directed to the top-down procedure:
2. The method of Claim 1 wherein the step of creating the hierarchy comprises a top-down procedure of:
first placing a root bubble which is centered at the center of gravity of the object and has a radius equal to the maximum distance from the center of gravity to the contour of the object;
next, if the medial axis has a plurality of branch lines, placing a plurality of first successive bubbles each of which encompasses a distinct part of the object which is described by one of said branch lines; and
then successively dividing each line of the medial axis into two new line parts and placing a pair of next successive bubbles each of which encompasses a distinct part of the object which is described by one of said new line parts.
Claims 3-4, by contrast, are directed to the bottom-up procedure for creating the bubble hierarchy:
3. The method of Claim 1 wherein the step of creating the hierarchy comprises a bottom-up procedure of:
first representing the medial axis as [sic] large plurality of discrete points;
next placing the centers of a plurality of lowest level bubbles at said discrete points, where the radius of each bubble is equal to the minimum distance from the corresponding center point to the contour of the object; and
then successively creating new bubbles by merging the smallest bubble remaining with its smallest neighbor(s) to create a new bubble and repeating this step until only one root bubble remains.
4. The method of Claim 3 wherein two old bubbles are merged to yield a new bubble in accordance with the formulas r' = (r1 k j k r2)/2,
x' = 1/2(x1 k x2 k r1 - r2 (x1 - x2))
j
y' = 1/2(y1 k y2 k r1 - r2 (y1 - y2))
j
z' = 1/2(z1 k z2 k r1 - r2 (z1 - z2));
j
wherein r1 and r2 are the radii of the old bubbles, j is the distance between the centers of the old bubbles (x1, y1, z1) and (x2, y2, z2) are the coordinates of the center of the old bubbles, r' is the radius of the new bubbles, and x', y', z') are the coordinates of the center of the new bubble.
Claim 5 is directed to a machine:
5. A machine having a memory which contains data representing a bubble hierarchy generated by the method of any of Claims 1 through 4.
Claim 6 is directed to a data structure:
6. A data structure generated by the method of any of Claims 1 through 4.
The examiner rejected claims 1-4 and 6 for lack of statutory subject matter under 35 U.S.C. Sec. 101, and claim 5 for indefiniteness under 35 U.S.C. Sec. 112 p 2. After the rejection was made final, Warmerdam appealed to the Board. On appeal, the Board sustained the rejections. With respect to claims 1-4, the Board was of the view that these claims recited no more than a mathematical algorithm in the abstract, and thus failed to comply with Sec. 101. 1 With respect to claim 5, the Board considered that claim to be indefinite under Sec. 112 p 2 because it left "unclear and unexplained how a memory is made or produced by the steps of generating recited in claims 1 through 4." With respect to claim 6, the Board determined that the claim failed to satisfy Sec. 101 on the ground that a "data structure" is not within one of the categories of patentable subject matter listed in Sec. 101, to wit, a process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or improvements thereof.
Warmerdam appealed the decision of the Board to this court.
Despite the oft-quoted statement in the legislative history of the 1952 Patent Act that Congress intended that statutory subject matter "include anything under the sun that is made by man," S.Rep. No. 1979, 82d Cong., 2d Sess., 5 (1952), reprinted in 1952 U.S.C.C.A.N. 2394, 2399; H.R.Rep. No. 1923, 82d Cong., 2d Sess., 6 (1952), Congress did not so mandate. Congress included in patentable subject matter...
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