US 10234299

I'll research patent 10234299 across the USPTO and court dockets, and cross-check against the authoritative full text I have.

Let me check for any litigation, PTAB, or CAFC activity specific to this patent.

One more targeted check for any district court or CAFC case citing this patent.

US Patent 10,234,299 — Analyst Summary

Bibliographic Data

Date discrepancies to flag: Google Patents (and the authoritative full text) give priority 2016-12-16, filing 2017-12-18, issue 2019-03-19, expiration 2037-12-18. The Unified Patents portal entry shows a one-day offset throughout (priority 2016-12-15, application 2017-12-17, grant 2019-03-18, expiration 2037-12-17). This is most likely a time-zone normalization artifact rather than a substantive difference. I treat the Google Patents / full-text values as the ground truth.

Abstract

A system and method including a user management device, a server, and executable instructions that provide geo-tracking routing from point to point in a geographical location, and geo-tracking of a user's progress by tracking user location via storage of waypoints along a route to develop a "return home" path. Employable in a mapping system that may include geo-tracking services, social networking services, and geo-tracking capabilities, with determination of return paths and use of Artificial Intelligence to map location, time, and user preferences. The method analyzes user trends and recommends locations the user will identify as useful; the user's interactive input is "age-agnostic."

Independent Claims (Plain-Language Overview)

The patent has three independent claims: claim 1 (system), claim 3 (method), and claim 11 (method).

Claim 1 — System to track a user's geographical position and plot return routes via waypoints. Three elements: (i) a user device that sends/receives requests, messages, or information over a communication network and has a user interface; (ii) at least one application server plus a data store with hardware/software to execute applications for the device, handling data access and business logic and providing access-control services to generate text/graphics/audio/video content to the interface; and (iii) executable instructions stored on the user device that generate digital identifiable waypoints for path tracking and location establishment and generate a return path. Notably, in the issued claim these instructions are defined by an embedded (a)–(j) procedure: receive route-guidance instructions to waypoints; determine a first specific waypoint; display navigation instructions to the first waypoint's location; display an instruction to go to the first waypoint; query the mapping system to determine whether the user is at the first waypoint; indicate arrival; determine a second route once the first waypoint is reached and the user is still on route; display navigation instructions to a second waypoint; query whether the second waypoint has been reached; and repeat (h) and (j) for additional waypoints. (Prosecution note: the pre-grant publication's claim 1 did not contain the (a)–(j) recitation — this limitation was folded into the system claim during prosecution.)

Claim 3 — Method of providing instructions to a user for route guidance. Steps (a)–(j) as above at the method level: receive route-guidance instructions to waypoints; determine a first specific waypoint; generate a display indication with navigation instructions to the first waypoint; generate a display indication instructing the user to go to the first waypoint; query the mapping system for the user's location at the first waypoint; upon arrival generate a "waypoint reached" indication; determine a second route after the first waypoint is reached and the user remains on route; generate display instructions to navigate to a second waypoint; query whether the second waypoint has been reached; and repeat (h) and (j) for additional waypoints. (The claim as printed contains a self-referential "repeat (h) and (j)" step — an apparent drafting artifact; the intended iteration is over the subsequent waypoint steps.)

Claim 11 — Method of providing real time route guidance to a user. Steps (a)–(h): receive instructions for performing return-routing waypoints; determine an ordered list of waypoints, including at least a first specific return point chosen based on how visible the waypoint is and/or proximity to a well-known waypoint; allocate routes from the list among one or more multiple users; generate instructions to the user assigned the first route for navigating to the nearest waypoint on the list; track user movement from a point of initiation to the list's waypoints; prompt the user to determine whether the first waypoint was reached; verify by comparative analysis of the route actually traveled whether the user completed the route to the first waypoint, generating an "incomplete/not reached" indication or a "complete/reached" indication accordingly; and repeat (d)–(g) for all waypoints on the list.

Dependent claims (2, 4–10): claim 2 adds waypoint links to third-party websites (note it misspells "waypoints" as "weigh points"); claim 4 adds a task-performance instruction at a waypoint; claim 5 defines a waypoint as a public place, landmark, and/or address; claim 6 adds route-integrity checking and completion verification before advancing; claims 7–8 cover verification by user input, code, or photographic image; claim 9 covers skipping routes/waypoints on user input; claim 10 covers checking user return progress from a third waypoint.

Litigation / Docket Status

No litigation or appeal activity was found for US 10,234,299. I searched for the patent number, its inventor, and its application number against USPTO-facing sources and the CAFC September 2026 oral-argument calendar, and found no district court complaint, CAFC appeal, or PTAB proceeding naming this patent. The CAFC 2026 calendar results returned unrelated cases (e.g., Traxcell Technologies v. Cellco Partnership, Netlist, WiPQTUS) — none involve 10,234,299.

Uncertainty: Because this patent is held by an individual assignee and no third-party litigation database entry surfaced, I cannot rule out a low-profile or very recent filing; however, nothing in the sources searched indicates any. I have no authoritative evidence of an assignment to a corporate entity, so it is best treated as individual-owned as of the sources checked.

Caveats

• Claim text above is drawn from the Justia claim listings and the Google Patents full text; the two listings of claim 1 differ slightly in wording ("requests, messages, or information" vs. "requests, messages, and information"), which I flag rather than resolve.
• The one-day date offsets described above are unresolved in the sources; I did not auto-correct them.

I'll run targeted searches against litigation-focused sources for this specific patent number.

Let me check litigation-specific databases and PTAB/CAFC for this exact patent number.

Litigation Search Report — US Patent 10,234,299

Current date: April 26, 2026

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving US Patent 10,234,299. I searched litigation-oriented sources for this specific patent number, its application number (15/845,066), and its sole inventor, and found no district court complaint, no PTAB proceeding, and no CAFC appeal naming this patent. This is consistent with the earlier finding in the previously-generated summary, and I found nothing to contradict it.

Sources searched and results

Notable near-miss / false positive (flagged, not auto-corrected)

• A citing-reference hit showed US10234299B2 listed in the "References Cited" of publication US 2011/0275388 A1. That is a patent-citation relationship, not litigation — it does not indicate any lawsuit.
• Search results returned a line referencing "construing claim one of the '299 patent" in Ortiz & Associates Consulting LLC v. [Microsoft Corp.](/litigations/by-plaintiff/Microsoft%20Corp.), No. 19-cv-8262 (N.D. Ill.). This is not US 10,234,299. Following the instruction not to auto-correct or conflate identifiers, I flag it solely as a same-suffix coincidence: Ortiz concerns a different '299 patent (an Ortiz patent), not Morales's geo-location patent. It is not a hit for the subject patent.

Caveats and confidence

• No litigation found ≠ guaranteed none exists. My searches relied on publicly indexed web results and a bounded number of queries; I hit the tool's step limit before exhausting every avenue, and I was not able to directly query PACER or a subscription docket service (Docket Navigator, Lexis, etc.) in this session.
• Because the patent is held by an individual (no corporate assignment recorded), any enforcement activity would likely be a low-profile single suit; I cannot fully rule out a very recent or unindexed filing.
• The patent is recorded as Active with anticipated expiration 2037-12-18 (Google Patents full text, treated as ground truth; the Unified Patents portal shows a consistent one-day offset, as flagged in the prior summary).

Requested case table

If you need a higher-assurance negative, the next step would be a direct PACER docket search and a Docket Navigator/Lex Machina report keyed to patent number 10,234,299 and application 15/845,066 — sources I could not fully access here.

I'll verify the structured "no proceedings" result against public PTAB and IPR sources before writing this up.

Let me check for an ex parte reexam (not an AIA trial, but often filed in parallel) and any Federal Circuit appeal of an underlying Board decision.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings — US Patent 10,234,299

Search date: 2026-09-29
Canonical source: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO Open Data Portal API) — returns zero AIA trial proceedings
Corroborating web checks: PTAB petition/decision documents surfaced at ptacts.uspto.gov; Google Patents publication page; Unified Patents portal entry portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10234299-B2

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — zero IPRs, zero PGRs, zero CBMs; consequently zero claims invalidated, zero claims sustained, zero settlements, zero institution denials, and zero Federal Circuit appeals. Because no claim of US 10,234,299 has ever been tested at the Board, the patent is neither "hardened" nor "gutted": every one of claims 1–11 is untested, and a defendant today faces a blank-slate patent with no PTAB estoppel against it and no adverse Board record to exploit — but also with no helpful FWD to lean on.

Proceedings itemized

None to itemize. I found no proceeding numbers to report, and I am deliberately not supplying any placeholder or inferred numbers (e.g., no "IPR2020-XXXXX" appears anywhere in the record). Any such number would be fabricated.

False positives encountered (flagged, not auto-corrected)

These surfaced in searches and are not proceedings on this patent — I list them so they aren't mistaken for hits:

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 11 claims UNTESTED. Independent claim 1 (system), claim 3 (route-guidance method), and claim 11 (real-time route-guidance method) have never been construed by the Board; dependent claims 2 and 4–10 are likewise untouched. There is no cancellation history, no certificate of correction driven by a trial, and no reissue or ex parte reexamination on record that I could locate. The patent is recorded Active with anticipated expiration 2037-12-18 — roughly 11 years of remaining life, which is the single most important fact for a defendant: there is a long runway for assertion, and no invalidation has burned it down.

Estoppel landscape — favorable to a defendant. Because no IPR or PGR was ever instituted, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) / § 325(e)(2) estoppel has not attached to anyone. A defendant accused today can raise:

• any § 102 anticipation or § 103 obviousness ground based on patents and printed publications, without worrying that a privy already "raised or reasonably could have raised" it;
• § 101 eligibility and § 112 written-description/enablement/indefiniteness challenges in district court — the usual PTAB vehicle for § 112 (PGR) is permanently closed for this patent;
• non-patent-prior-art invalidity (on-sale, public use, system art) — which was never available in an IPR in the first place and is now available with no estoppel overlay at all.

That last point matters here: this is a software/mapping patent where system-art and public-use evidence (e.g., prior commercial pedestrian-navigation "breadcrumb"/return-route products) is a plausible defense vector, and that art has never been put before any tribunal.

Pattern signals.

• No petitioner has filed anything, so there is no multi-petition or serial-petition pattern to analyze and no indication of a defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX) funding a challenge. Unified holds a monitoring record on this patent but shows no challenge authored by it.
• No patent-owner appeal activity, consistent with there being no adverse FWD to appeal. The CAFC calendars checked previously (including 2026 oral-argument sittings) contain no case involving this patent or inventor Morales.
• The owner is an individual assignee with no recorded corporate assignment. That is a classic profile for a patent that attracts zero PTAB attention until it is first asserted — well-asserted patents eventually generate IPRs; an unasserted one generates none. The absence here most likely reflects no campaign yet, not the patent's strength.
• Procedural timing gates: priority 2016-12-16 places this squarely post-AIA (first-inventor-to-file), so IPR is available at any time (the 9-month post-grant wait has long run). The PGR window closed 2019-12-19 (9 months after the 2019-03-19 grant) — PGR is unavailable. CBM is doubly unavailable: the transitional program expired 2020-09-16, and the claims are directed to routing/navigation rather than a "financial product or service" (AIA § 18(d)(1)).

One substantive note a challenger should bank: the issued claim set contains an apparent drafting defect — claim 3 recites a self-referential "repeat (h) and (j)" step, and the previously-generated analysis flagged a wording divergence in claim 1 between the pre-grant publication and the issued text (the (a)–(j) recitation was folded into claim 1 during prosecution). A self-referential repeat step is the kind of thing that supports a § 112(b) indefiniteness position — but since PGR is closed, that argument can only be made in district court, not at the Board. It is a litigation argument, not a PTAB one.

Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and want Board relief:

• There is no FWD to cite and no canceled claim to point at — do not represent to a court or adversary that any claim has been invalidated; the record shows the opposite (nothing has been adjudicated).
• If you have been served with a complaint alleging infringement of 10,234,299, the § 315(b) one-year clock runs from service and IPR petitions must be filed within it. That clock is the binding constraint; the statutory trial deadline is then 1 year from institution (§ 316(a)(11)), with the institution decision due within 6 months of the petition's filing.
• Because PGR is time-barred, any § 112 or § 101 challenge must go to district court and cannot be repackaged as a PGR. Budget accordingly.

If you want higher assurance before relying on the negative:

1. Run a direct PTAB E2E / PTAB API docket search keyed to patent number 10,234,299 and application 15/845,066 — the ODP-derived block is canonical, but a live E2E pull confirms ingest completeness.
2. Run a PACER docket search and a Docket Navigator / Lex Machina report keyed to the patent number and to "Osvaldo Morales" as assignee, to catch any unindexed or very recent filing. My checks were web-index dependent and I could not reach PACER or subscription docket services.
3. Check the USPTO reexamination and reissue registers directly for any ex parte reexam or reissue application on 10,234,299 (I found none, but reexam records are less reliably web-indexed than AIA trials).

Bottom line: No PTAB activity exists for US 10,234,299. For a defendant, the practical consequence is that the patent is fully intact and legally untested, the § 315(e)(2) estoppel bar is empty, and the entire prior-art and § 112 playbook remains open — with the only hard deadlines being the § 315(b) one-year IPR bar from service and the closed PGR window.

Minor contradiction flagged: the previously-generated litigation section is headed "Current date: April 26, 2026," whereas the operating date for this analysis is 2026-09-29. I used 2026-09-29. This does not affect the substance, since no proceeding exists in either window. I also carry forward the previously-flagged one-day date offset between Google Patents (2016-12-16 / 2017-12-18 / 2019-03-19 / 2037-12-18) and the Unified Patents portal (2016-12-15 / 2017-12-17 / 2019-03-18 / 2037-12-17); I did not auto-correct it, and it does not change any PTAB conclusion.

Key links: Google Patents — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10234299B2](/patent/US10234299B2)/en · Unified Patents portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10234299-B2 · PTAB E2E — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ · PTAB decisions — https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions

I'll research the assignment chain for this patent across USPTO Assignment Center, Google Patents legal events, and NPE directories.

Let me check Google Patents legal events and the USPTO assignment database directly.

Let me look for the USPTO assignment record and the inventor's employment context.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 10,234,299

Step-limit notice: I completed the inventor/assignee/cross-reference searches, but hit the tool's step cap before I could issue a direct page-level query to the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov) itself. The findings below therefore rest on the Google Patents legal-events/assignee fields, the Unified Patents portal, the uspto.report publication record, and inventor-aggregator data. I state plainly which items are verified and which remain open. I did not access PACER, Docket Navigator, or SEC EDGAR in this session.

Inventors

• Employer at time of filing: not determinable from the patent record. The front page and Google Patents show no corporate assignee and no government-interest statement.
• Open lead, not a finding: a third-party inventor-aggregator (patentleaderboard.com) surfaced a profile titled "Osvaldo P. Morales — 66 Patents at Amazon" that lists US 10,234,299 among its 66 entries. I did not verify that this is the same person as the patent's sole inventor — the middle initial "P." does not appear on Google Patents' rendering of the patent, and the aggregator may be conflating same-name inventors. This is flagged, per the operating rule not to auto-correct or merge identifiers. If it is the same person, it raises a question worth resolving: a 66-patent Amazon inventor whose sole-inventor, consumer-mapping application issues with assignee "Individual" rather than "Amazon Technologies, Inc." is an anomaly (see Original assignee and Verdict).
• Unusual pattern? No "all inventors departed within 12 months" pattern is assessable — there are no co-inventors and no employer-of-record, so there is no assignee headcount to depart from. What is notable is the opposite of a fire-sale setup: this is a single-inventor filing with a priority date roughly 12 months before the non-provisional (priority 2016-12-16; application US 15/845,066 filed 2017-12-18), which is the classic profile of a solo filer working through a provisional, not a corporate R&D program handing off to an IP holding entity.

Original assignee

• Entity named on the issued patent: none — "Individual." Google Patents reports Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual, with its standard caveat that the listed assignees "may be inaccurate" because Google performs no legal analysis. Unified Patents likewise reports Parent Company: Individual, with blank original/current assignee fields.
• Practical meaning: the patent issued with the inventor as owner of record. There is no corporate assignee on the face of the patent and no recorded assignment transferring it to any entity in the sources searched.
• Product embodiment: I found no evidence that any product embodying the claims shipped. The specification describes a consumer "bread-crumbing" / return-home routing app (see the previously-generated summary and the full text), and the disclosure is written in prospective terms ("will allow," "will generate," "can interact"), which is consistent with a concept-stage filing. Absence of evidence here is not proof of no product — I could not search app stores or corporate filings.
• Primary line of business / current status: undetermined for the "assignee," because the assignee is a natural person rather than an operating company. The patent is recorded Active with anticipated expiration 2037-12-18 (Google Patents; the Unified Patents one-day offset to 2037-12-17 persists and remains flagged, not auto-corrected).

Assignment timeline

The USPTO Assignment Center has no recorded assignments for this patent in the sources I was able to reach.

I found no assignment, security agreement, license, merger, change-of-name, release, or correction record anywhere in the searched sources — and critically:

• Google Patents' legal-events/assignee block shows "Original Assignee: Individual" and "Current Assignee: Individual" with no transfer events populated and no litigation or PTAB section.
• Unified Patents' portal entry shows no assignment or ownership-change entries linked to the patent.
• The only assignment-style hit returned by my queries was for a different, unrelated patent (a Reel 036248/Frame 0823 record appearing in a PTAB petition download concerning "DEVICE, SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CONTROLLING SPEED OF A VEHICLE…", signed by "David P." in December 2017). That reel/frame does not belong to US 10,234,299 and I flag it only to show it was checked and excluded — I am not importing it into this chain.

Because there are no records, I cannot populate the requested per-record fields (conveyance type, assignor, assignee, correspondent of record, context). There is no correspondent of record to analyze, which is itself the key negative finding for the repeat-correspondent signal (signal 3) below.

Caveat: an empty result here means "no recorded assignment surfaced in the sources searched," not a certified null. Confirm at the Assignment Center by patent number and by application number 15/845,066:

• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10234299
    2016 : Priority date 16 Dec
    2017 : Application filed by Osvaldo Morales
         : Assignee recorded as Individual
    2019 : Patent issued
         : Still Individual
         : No assignment recorded

NPE / troll-pattern signals

One non-NPE item that bears on ownership risk (flagged, unresolved): the aggregator profile associating "Osvaldo P. Morales" with 66 Amazon patents including 10,234,299. If confirmed, it implies a corporate employer at filing whose rights are not reflected in any recorded assignment — a potential ownership/standing defect or a simple aggregator conflation of two same-named inventors. This is an open question requiring EDGAR/employment-record verification, and I am explicitly not treating it as evidence of NPE activity in either direction.

Verdict

Insufficient data (no recorded assignments; ownership stands at the original individual).

Justification: The record contains only the original ownership state — Google Patents reports Original Assignee: Individual and Current Assignee: Individual for US 10,234,299, and no Reel/Frame entry exists to cite because no assignment was recorded in any source searched. With zero transfers there is no assignee LLC, no correspondent of record, and no transfer date to test against any of the eight NPE signals — so none of them can be marked "present," and I decline to manufacture a finding from the absence of an entity name. The one live thread is the unverified "Osvaldo P. Morales / Amazon" aggregator match, which, if true, would make this a possible unrecorded employer-owned invention rather than a troll pattern — the opposite of an NPE signal.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent 10,234,299 and by application 15/845,066) and https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

Cross-reference note: This section is consistent with, and does not contradict, the previously-generated Patent Summary ("no corporate assignment recorded") and Litigation Search Report ("no litigation"). No contradiction found between the prior sections and the findings here. The Amazon lead in the Inventors section is new information not present in the prior sections and should be reconciled before any final ownership opinion.

I'll research the prior-art citations on the face of US 10,234,299. Let me pull the citation data from multiple sources.

Let me pull the specific citation list from patent databases and the USPTO full-text record.

The general searches aren't surfacing the citation list directly. Let me try the USPTO full-text record and the patent's front-page PDF.

Prior-Art / Citation Analysis — US 10,234,299 B2

Method note and an upfront limitation (read this first)

I was unable to retrieve the authoritative "(56) References Cited" list printed on the face of US 10,234,299 B2. I hit my tool-step budget before I could pull the patent's front-page PDF or the USPTO full-text record, and my general searches kept returning the specification/description and classification text of the '299 patent rather than its citation table. Because the operating rules forbid me from fabricating citations, I will not invent a clean 21-row (56) table with made-up dates. Instead I give you:

1. what the sources I did retrieve authoritatively establish about the citation set;
2. the specific references verifiably tied to this patent in those sources (with the caveat that some are reverse "cited-by"/"similar-document" links, not face-of-patent citations);
3. the § 102 framework you'd apply once the (56) list is in hand;
4. the exact next step to close the gap.

Flagging this honestly is more useful than a plausible-looking but unverifiable table.

What the retrieved sources establish

Important structural caveat: the "21 patent art" count from Unified Patents is a platform-normalized figure and may blend face-of-patent citations with family/related-art links. It is a useful anchor (21 patent documents, 0 NPL) but I have not independently confirmed it against the printed (56) list.

References verifiably tied to the '299 patent (with relationship type labeled)

These are the only prior-art documents I could connect to US 10,234,299 with a retrieved source. None of these is confirmed as a face-of-patent (56) citation — they surfaced as similar-document / citation links on the pages of other patents. Treat them as the closest verified neighbors in the art, not as the examiner's cited art.

1. US 2011/0275388 A1 — "Methods and apparatuses for geospatial-based sharing of information by multiple devices"

• Source of link: appears on the Google Patents page patents.google.com/patent/US20110275388A1/en, which lists "US10234299B2 (en) * | 2016-12-16 | 2019-03-19 | Osvaldo Morales | Geo-location tracking system and method."
• Relationship: similar-document / citation-table entry, not a confirmed face citation. (Note the timing logic: a 2011 publication cannot cite a 2019 patent, so this is almost certainly US 10,234,299 appearing in US 2011/0275388's forward similar-document/"cited by" table, i.e., the '299 patent cites or is grouped with it.)
• Subject-matter overlap: geospatial location sharing among multiple devices — relevant to claim 11's multiple-user route allocation and location tracking.

2. US 10,165,059 B2 — "Methods, systems and apparatuses for the formation and tracking of location sharing groups"

• Source of link: patents.google.com/patent/US10165059B2/en, which lists the same "US10234299B2 … Osvaldo Morales" row.
• Relationship: similar-document / citation-table entry.
• Subject-matter overlap: location-sharing groups and tracking — relevant to the '299 multiple-user and shared-route aspects.

Caution: both of the above belong to the same location-sharing patent family (Haney/Wavemarket-Location Labs lineage) and clearly sit in the '299 patent's technical neighborhood, but I have no retrieved evidence that the examiner cited either of them against claims 1, 3, or 11.

False positive to disregard

Earlier searches surfaced DE 10234299 B4 (an unrelated German patent cited in EP 2128431 B1's description). This is a literatim numeric coincidence with the US number; per the "do not auto-correct identifiers" rule I flag it as not the subject patent and not prior art for it.

The § 102 framework to apply once the (56) list is retrieved

The three independent claims define the novelty question, so any face citation must be mapped against these:

• Claim 1 (system) — user device + application server/data store + stored executable instructions performing the embedded (a)–(j) loop: receive route-guidance instructions → determine first waypoint → display navigation-to-first-waypoint → display "go to first waypoint" → query mapping system for user location at first waypoint → indicate arrival → determine second route once first waypoint reached and user still on route → display navigation to second waypoint → query second waypoint reached → repeat.
• Claim 3 (method) — same (a)–(j) steps at the method level.
• Claim 11 (method) — ordered list of waypoints selected by visibility and/or proximity to a well-known waypoint; allocating routes among multiple users; tracking from a point of initiation; prompting; and verification by comparative analysis of the route actually traveled (actual vs. expected), with complete/incomplete indications.

For each retrieved (56) reference, the analyst should record:

1. Full citation (number, kind code, title, inventor/applicant).
2. Filing/priority date and publication/issue date — then decide the § 102 subsection:
   • § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) (post-AIA, which governs here given the 2016-12-16 priority / 2017-12-18 filing): was the reference patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use/on sale before the effective filing date? Or was it described in a U.S. patent/application publication effectively filed before the '299 effective filing date?
   • Because the '299 patent is post-AIA, § 102(e) pre-AIA and the "swear behind" grace period do not apply; the operative provisions are § 102(a)(1) and § 102(a)(2), plus the § 102(b)(1)/(b)(2) exceptions (the inventor's own disclosures and common-ownership).
3. Brief description / what it discloses.
4. Which claims it potentially anticipates — and a candid judgment on whether it discloses each and every element (anticipation requires all elements in a single reference; otherwise the reference supports an obviousness rejection under § 103, not § 102).

Preliminary substantive read (based on the claims and the art space, clearly labeled as provisional): the strongest § 102 exposure for the broad independent claims is from location-history / "breadcrumb" tracking systems that record a user's outbound path and reverse it, and from turn-by-turn waypoint-guidance systems with arrival confirmation. The elements most likely to resist a clean single-reference § 102 hit are (i) claim 11's "ordered list … based on how visible the waypoint is" and (ii) claim 11's explicit allocation of routes among multiple users — these are the most distinctive limitations. I cannot confirm which references address them until the (56) list is retrieved.

What I could NOT establish (explicit uncertainties)

• The identities of the 21 cited patent documents on the face of the patent.
• Whether any single one of them is a true § 102 anticipation reference versus § 103 combination art.
• The examiner's specific rejections during prosecution of application 15/845,066 (I did not retrieve the file wrapper / office actions).
• Whether the "Patent Art (21)" count from Unified Patents is face citations, family members, or a blend.

Recommended next step to close the gap

To produce the definitive per-reference table you asked for, the (56) list must be pulled from one of:

1. USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) or PatentCenter for application 15/845,066 — gives the granted (56) list and the office actions/rejections.
2. The front-page PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US10234299.pdf — the printed "(56) References Cited / U.S. PATENT DOCUMENTS / FOREIGN PATENT DOCUMENTS" block.
3. The Google Patents "Patent Citations" accordion section on patents.google.com/patent/US10234299B2/en (collapsed in my retrieved snippets).

Once I have that list, I can deliver the full table — full citation, publication/filing date, brief description, and the specific claims each reference potentially anticipates under § 102 — with the § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) analysis applied reference-by-reference. I'd rather hand you a verified table in a follow-up than a fabricated one now.

I'll research the prior-art references cited in (and against) US 10,234,299, then build the § 103 analysis.

Good — I've located the cited prior-art list. Let me pull the full reference set (including the Unified Patents "Patent Art" section) and details on the key references.

Let me characterize the key cited references so I can map them to claim elements.

§ 103 Obviousness Analysis — US 10,234,299 B2

Note on sources. This analysis is built on the prior-art section of the patent page — i.e., the "References Cited" / Patent Art portion of US 10,234,299 (18 U.S. patent documents recovered from the granted patent's front page; Unified Patents lists "Patent Art (21)"). I could not retrieve the full 21-entry Unified Patents list or the full text of every cited reference before hitting the research step limit, so each mapping below is marked with a confidence level. Where I lack the reference's actual disclosure text, I say so rather than assume it.

1. Legal framework and assumptions

Critical threshold point: several documents in the References Cited list issued after the 2016-12-16 priority date — e.g., US 9,788,156 B1 (10/2017), US 9,940,663 B2 (4/2018), US 9,599,717 B2 (3/2017), US 9,538,332 B1 (1/2017). Under AIA § 102(a)(2) these qualify only if their effective filing dates predate the '299 priority date; under § 102(a)(1) only if published before it. If those dates are not established, these references must be excluded from the § 103 combination. I flag this rather than assume qualification.

The patent's own admissions count as prior art. The Background is unusually candid and can itself supply § 103 rationale:

• "Conventional use of mapping services determines an 'A to B' route…"
• "Conventional methods of mapping … can include routine, commonly used paths and the safest, most accurate return route … generally working from predetermined lists of waypoints and predetermined routing or outcomes."
• "Modern communication devices have substantial compute capacity. This compute capacity allows GPS tracking and other mapping capabilities to be installed on the device."

The second admission is significant: the patent concedes that using predetermined lists of waypoints to build a "safest, most accurate return route" was conventional. That admission substantially narrows the space between the claims and the art.

2. Prior art of record (from the patent's References Cited)

Also adjudged prior art (found in search, not on the '299 face):

• R19 — US 2009/0187340 A1 (Magellan Navigation, "Method and apparatus for hybrid routing using breadcrumb paths") — discloses generating a first route, detecting the device has left the route, generating a second route by tracking the device's position and recording/storing the traveled path ("breadcrumb"), storing the breadcrumb as a new map segment, and generating a return route from the destination back to the start using the stored breadcrumb path. This is the single most on-point "bread-crumb return path" reference I located. (Confidence: high — abstract and claims retrieved.)

Flagged false positive (do not use): DE 10234299 A1 (Otte, Eberhard) is a completely unrelated German document (appears in PCT search reports of unrelated applications). Per the litigation report it is a same-number coincidence only. It is not prior art to this patent.

3. Element-by-element claim mapping

Claim 1 (system) & Claim 3 (method) — the (a)–(j) core

Claim 11 (method) — the differentiating features

Dependents

4. Combination #1 — the primary § 103 rejection (claims 1 and 3)

Haney (R1) + Magellan breadcrumb (R19) + POI/waypoint ranking (R3/R7)

Why this renders claims 1 and 3 obvious:

1. R1 Haney supplies the entire hardware/architectural skeleton: wireless user devices with GPS, a central server, exchange of position data over a network, display of positions and tracks, and server-side comparison of device position against a defined geographic area with alerts on entry/exit. That is limitations (i), (ii), (e), (f), and the tracking infrastructure of the independent claims.

2. R19 Magellan supplies the missing "bread-crumb" heart of the invention: record the path traveled, store it, detect when the device leaves the route, and generate a route back to the start using the stored breadcrumb path, in successive segments. That is the "digital identifiable waypoints to ensure path tracking … and to generate a return path" limitation, plus limitations (c)/(d)/(g)/(h)–(j) (generate instructions, advance to the next segment, repeat).

3. R3 Sheha / R7 Gu supply the waypoint selection-and-ordering function — ranking candidate points by attributes such as prominence and proximity — which the '299 claims as choosing the first return point by "how visible the waypoint is" and "proximity to a well-known waypoint."

Motivation to combine (KSR):

• Same field, same problem: Both R1 and R19 are navigation/location services aimed at a user moving through real space with a GPS device. The problem R19 solves (a user who has wandered off the planned route and needs to get back) is precisely the problem the '299 Background says conventional A-to-B routing does not solve.
• Predictable result: bolting R19's breadcrumb recording/return-route logic onto R1's multi-device tracking server is the simple substitution of one known routing module (breadcrumb/return-path computation) for another (static waypoint routing), with no change in the underlying architecture — the classic "combination of familiar elements according to known methods … yielding predictable results."
• Design incentive / market forces: the patent itself states the field's demand for "a safe and known return path"; both R1 (safety/group monitoring) and R19 (safe return) are driven by the same safety incentive.
• The patent's own admission that "predetermined lists of waypoints … [for the] safest, most accurate return route" were conventional almost by itself closes the gap for claim 1's system version.

Verdict: Claims 1 and 3 would have been obvious over Haney in view of Magellan (R19) and, secondarily, a POI-ranking reference (R3/R7). Confidence: moderate-to-high, contingent on establishing R19's publication/filing date (it is pre-2009, so it is § 102(a)(1) art on its face).

5. Combination #2 — claim 11's differentiated features

Haney (R1/R2) + Magellan (R19) + Abhyanker (R8/R9) or Gu (R7) + Ward (R17/R18)

Claim 11 adds three things beyond the (a)–(j) core: (i) ordering the waypoint list by visibility/proximity; (ii) allocating routes among multiple users; (iii) verification by comparative analysis of the route actually traveled.

• (i) visible/well-known waypoints: R8/R9 Abhyanker and R7 Gu both concern community-curated points of interest and location-based matching, which is exactly the "public places / landmarks … augmented by users" concept the '299 specification describes. POSITA would rank them by prominence/proximity as a routine optimization ("a matter of design choice").
• (ii) multi-user allocation: R1/R2 Haney is the multi-user location-sharing family — it tracks a group and shares routes/tracks among members. Splitting a return-route list among group members (the '299 spec's "divide the aforementioned routes between two or more users") is a straightforward extension of R1's group model. Ration 1: R1 already coordinates multiple devices toward a common location.
• (iii) comparative route analysis: R19 expressly compares the device's actual traversed position against the route to decide on-route vs. off-route and to generate a corrective second route. That is "verify by comparative analysis of the route traveled."

Verdict: Claim 11 would have been obvious over Haney in view of Magellan and a POI/community reference. Confidence: moderate — the "allocate routes among multiple users" limitation is the least squarely met and is where a validity challenge is weakest; a petitioner would likely need R1's group teachings plus an allocation/assignment reference.

6. Dependent-claim combinations

7. Weak links, counterarguments, and honest uncertainty

1. Claim 11's "allocate routes … to one or more multiple users" is the strongest nonobviousness candidate. R1 Haney shares location, not necessarily route assignments; a challenger must supply a real allocation/assignment teaching (dispatch art) to close it. I could not confirm such a teaching inside the cited list.

2. Claims 7–8 (verification by code or photographic image). The specification's "capture an image … compare 'actual route' to 'expected route'" feature is a well-known verification paradigm, but among the references I could actually retrieve, I did not find an in-list reference squarely disclosing image-based waypoint verification. I therefore do not assert a specific § 103 combination for claims 7–8 beyond "image/code verification of arrival was a known technique" — which a petitioner would need to substantiate with a concrete reference. Treat this as the weakest-supported row in my chart.

3. Reference-date exposure. Four in-list references issued after the '299 priority date (R13, R15, R16, R17). If their effective filing dates are not earlier, they drop out. My combinations above deliberately rely chiefly on pre-2016 art (R1, R2, R3, R4, R7, R8, R9, R14, R19), which is safer.

4. Admissions cut both ways. The Background's admission that "predetermined lists of waypoints and predetermined routing" for the safest return route were conventional is helpful to a challenger and arguably undercuts the patentee's nonobviousness story. Conversely, the patentee can point to the Background's assertion that "none provide a service ensuring a route has been 'pre-seeded'" as the alleged gap — but that is a statement about commercial offerings, not about the technical state of the art, and is not dispositive under § 103.

5. Drafting defects reduce the claim scope available for a nonobviousness argument. Consistent with the previously-generated sections: claim 3 recites a self-referential "repeat (h) and (j)"; claim 2 misspells "waypoints" ("weigh points"); and claim 1 (system) embeds the (a)–(j) method steps that were added during prosecution. These artifacts do not create patentability, but a "repeat (h) and (j)" clause is ambiguous and could be construed narrowly, and the method-steps-in-a-system-claim structure invites a § 112/§ 101 collateral attack (not the subject of this § 103 task).

6. Not to be conflated: DE 10234299 A1 is unrelated and must not be cited as prior art. US 10,165,059 B2 and US 2011/0275388 A1 surfaced only as "References Cited/Cited By" citation relationships (Haney/X One family) — the latter may itself be prior art, but I did not confirm it appears on the '299 face, so I do not rely on it.

7. Verification limits. I could not retrieve: the full 21-entry Unified Patents "Patent Art" list; full texts of R3, R4, R5, R6, R10, R12, R15, R17; or confirmation of effective filing dates for the post-2016 references. Any of these could either strengthen (more on-point art) or weaken (a reference may not disclose what its class suggests) the combinations above. Rows marked "Low" confidence in §2 are classification-based inferences only and should not be relied on without reading the documents.

8. Bottom line

Overall: US 10,234,299 appears to be a combination patent whose independent claims substantially overlap the patent's own admitted conventional practice (waypoint lists for "safest return route") plus a well-known breadcrumb/return-route concept (Magellan) implemented on a conventional multi-device location-tracking architecture (Haney). Under KSR, the combination is a strong obviousness candidate, with claim 11's multi-user route-allocation limitation and dependent claims 7–8 the principal points of potential resistance.