US 11313693

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number.

Let me check for any litigation or CAFC docket activity involving this specific patent number.

US Patent 11,313,693 B2 — Verification Summary

Search scope and grounding. I ran targeted web searches for the literal string "11313693" paired with the patent title, the assignee, litigation terms, and "CAFC 2026 docket." All bibliographic data below is taken from the authoritative full text you supplied (Google Patents mirror of US11313693B2) and corroborated by Justia Patents, the Fid-Move/EPA record of the pre-grant publication, and Patents Encyclopedia. I did not have direct query access to USPTO PatentCenter or the CAFC docket system, so absence-of-litigation statements below are search-result based, not certified.

Notably, results for the bare strings "11313693" also returned unrelated records (an SEC EDGAR "associated identifier" 11313693 for Alaunos Therapeutics, and an FEC filing page number). Do not conflate those with the patent number — they are coincidental numeric matches.

Bibliographic Data

Note on inventor names: the Google Patents "Inventor" field abbreviates the fifth name as "Benjamin J. Gaffney," while the USPTO Assignment record in the same document spells it "GAFFNEY, BENJAMIN J." A third-party aggregator (patentleaderboard.com) renders it "Benjamin John Gordon Gaffney." I am treating the assignment record as controlling and flagging the middle-name variant as unverified.

Abstract (as granted)

A system for closest in path vehicle following using surrounding vehicles motion flow includes a sensor device of a host vehicle generating data related to vehicles upon a drivable surface. A navigation controller with a computerized processor monitors the sensor data, defines a portion of the vehicles as a swarm of vehicles, identifies one vehicle as a closest in path vehicle (CIPV) to be followed, evaluates whether the CIPV is exhibiting good behavior in relation to the swarm, and when it is, generates a breadcrumbing navigation path based on the data. A vehicle controller then controls the host vehicle based on that breadcrumbing path.

Independent Claims — Plain-Language Overview

The granted patent has 20 claims, and every one of them is a system (apparatus) claim. There are four independent claims — 1, 6, 11, and 16 — that share an identical preamble and differ only in the characterizing limitation. (The pre-grant publication, by contrast, contained a method/process claim 17, and its original claim 1 did not recite the heading/curvature-error evaluation. Those limitations were apparently rewritten into granted claim 1.)

Claim 1 — Heading-error / curvature-error evaluation.
A host vehicle has a sensor generating data about multiple vehicles ahead on a drivable surface. A navigation controller processor: (a) monitors the sensor data; (b) groups some of those vehicles into a "swarm"; (c) designates one as the CIPV to follow; (d) evaluates whether the CIPV is behaving "well" relative to the swarm; and (e) if so, generates a breadcrumbing navigation path from the data. A vehicle controller then drives/controls the host vehicle per that path. The claimed evaluation specifically requires: comparing the CIPV's heading to the swarm's heading to get a heading error; comparing the CIPV's curvature to the swarm's curvature to get a curvature error; and deciding "good behavior" from those two errors.

Claim 6 — Speed- and position-gated evaluation.
Same system architecture, but the processor must additionally: determine the CIPV's speed, the swarm's average speed, and the CIPV's relative position to the swarm — and it performs the good-behavior evaluation only when the CIPV-to-swarm speed difference is below a threshold speed difference and the CIPV's relative position to the swarm is closer than a threshold distance.

Claim 11 — Quality weighting.
Same system architecture, wherein generating the breadcrumbing navigation path includes weighting the CIPV as a "high-quality candidate" to be followed based on the good behavior.

Claim 16 — Swarm construction from pairwise comparisons.
Same system architecture, wherein defining the swarm comprises: determining a first vehicle's speed and a second vehicle's speed; determining the relative position of the first to the second; and defining those two vehicles as the swarm when their speed difference is below a threshold speed difference and their relative position is closer than a threshold distance. (Claim 17, dependent, extends this iteratively to a third vehicle compared against the swarm's average speed.)

Dependent claims (uniform across all four families): warning the driver when the CIPV is not exhibiting good behavior (2, 7, 12, 18); sensor type being one of camera, radar, LiDAR, or ultrasonic (3, 8, 13); controlling following distance based on good behavior (4, 9, 14, 19); and controlling autonomous braking based on good behavior (5, 10, 15, 20).

Disclosed but not separately claimed: the specification's scoring function (Equation 1), which combines weighted integrals of |e_ψ| (heading error) and |e_ρ| (curvature error) over a moving time window Δt with a spectral term — α₃ × the integral from 0 Hz to 5 Hz of the FFT magnitude squared of the error-vector time series; and lane-geometry fusion with the breadcrumbing path.

Litigation / CAFC Activity

No CAFC or district court proceeding involving US 11,313,693 was found. Searches for "11313693" together with "Federal Circuit," "CAFC," "docket," "lawsuit," and "infringement" returned only: (i) unrelated GM patent litigation (the LKQ Corp. v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC design-patent case, CAFC 2021-2348, which concerns a vehicle fender design patent and has nothing to do with this patent); and (ii) unrelated numeric matches. The sole forward citation of record, Honda's US 12,494,130 B2, is a later patent that cites this one as prior art — not a validity challenge, opposition, or appeal.

Confidence level: Medium-high on the bibliographic data and claim content (sourced directly from the granted text you supplied). Low on the absence of litigation — I could not query PACER, CourtListener dockets, or the CAFC docket directly, so "no litigation found" should be read as "not surfaced by available searches," not as a verified negative.

One non-authoritative data point offered for completeness: patentleaderboard.com lists this patent with an "Approx Value" of $27,015,000. That is a third-party algorithmic estimate with no legal significance and should not be relied upon.

Date note: your prompt states the current date as April 26, 2026, while my search environment reported a later date (2026-09-29). This does not affect any bibliographic field above, but I flag it in case docket recency matters to you.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11313693 across the sources you specified.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me check patent litigation databases directly.

Litigation Search: US Patent No. 11313693

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving US patent 11313693.

What I searched

I ran targeted queries for the exact patent number across sources that cover patent litigation, including:

• Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation)
• RPX Insight (insight.rpxcorp.com) litigation records
• Docket Alarm / PACER-style case-number queries
• CAFC / Federal Circuit docket references
• General web searches pairing "11313693" with "lawsuit," "complaint," "infringement," and "defendant"

I also reviewed the patent's Google Patents page (fetched in the authoritative full text you provided), which lists no litigation, no ITC Section 337 investigation, and no PTAB proceeding tied to this patent.

Result

What does exist around the patent (not litigation)

To be clear about the distinction between litigation and patent-office/portfolio activity, the following related items exist but are not lawsuits:

1. Forward citation (patent office art only): Honda Motor Co., Ltd. — US12494130B2, "Systems and methods for swarm invitation based on social values" (priority 2023-09-29, published 2025-12-09). This is a citing document / cited-by entry, not an assertion or suit.
2. Family-citing patent documents (foreign/PTO art): DE102021203080B3 (Continental Automotive GmbH), JP7592052B2 (Honda), and DE102022125849A1 (CARIAD SE). These are citation relationships, not litigation.
3. Claimed prior art cited on the face of the patent: US20100256852A1 (GM, "Platoon vehicle management") and US20190088135A1 (Qualcomm, "System and method for relative positioning based safe autonomous driving").
4. Assignee: GM Global Technology Operations LLC (original and current). No assignment or litigation record shows a transfer to a litigious third party/NPE, which typically precedes assertion activity.

Material caveats (important)

• My search is not a certified litigation clearance search. The Unified Patents and RPX Insight portals and PACER are behind interactive interfaces and login/paywalls that my search tools cannot query directly. I could not run a live case-list lookup against those databases in this session, and one of my queries was cut off before completing.
• If no litigation appears in free/public aggregators, the most likely explanation is that none exists — NPE-style suits against large automotive OEMs are heavily reported, and an assertion involving a GM autonomous-driving patent would very likely surface in RPX/Unified data.
• This does not mean the patent is not being licensed or asserted in less visible ways. It could be the subject of private licenses, indemnification disputes, or arbitration that would not appear in public dockets.

Recommended next steps for a definitive answer

1. Docket Alarm / Lex Machina / RPX Insight: run a search on patent number 11313693 (exact) and separately on the application number 16/807,749.
2. PACER: search party name "GM Global Technology Operations LLC" as plaintiff combined with the patent number in the complaint text.
3. USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records: confirm there is no post-issuance assignment indicating transfer to an NPE.
4. PTAB / ITC: check for IPR/PGR or Section 337 investigations referencing the patent.

Per your instructions, I did not auto-correct any identifier, and I am reporting only what the cited sources show. If you can grant me access to a specific case-list URL or provide a docket query result, I can analyze and expand on it.

I'll start by verifying the structured data against live sources.

Search results are noisy. Let me try more targeted queries.

Let me run a few final targeted checks to be thorough.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 11,313,693: 0. The USPTO ODP structured feed returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings for this patent, and my independent web checks (Google Patents' PTAB linkage for the patent, Docket Alarm PTAB dockets, and general queries pairing the patent number and title with "IPR"/"PTAB"/"petition") surfaced nothing to contradict that. Breakdown by status is therefore: active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0. Defensive posture: the patent is completely untested at the PTAB. All 20 claims — including independent claims 1, 6, 11, and 16 — remain live and uncancelled at the Office. A defendant facing assertion today gets no free invalidity win from an earlier petitioner, but also faces no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no adverse claim-construction record; the invalidity case is entirely unbuilt.

Caveat on sourcing: I could not locate any PTAB filing activity for this patent, but absence of search hits is weaker evidence than the ODP feed itself. The ODP block is the canonical list and it is empty; treat the zero count as reliable, not the search results.

Proceedings

None to report. There is no proceeding number to populate this section with, and I will not invent one. For completeness, here is the verification trail:

What I did find that is often confused with PTAB activity:

• US 12,494,130 B2 (Honda Motor Co., "Systems and methods for swarm invitation based on social values", priority 2023-09-29, granted 2025-12-09) is a third-party citation to the '693 patent — i.e., the '693 disclosure is being cited as prior art against others. That is a signal of the patent's technical relevance, not of any challenge to its validity. No petitioner is in the chain.
• US 2021/0124360 A1, "System and process for closest in path vehicle following," appears in Google Patents' "Similar Documents" list and may be a related GM filing. It is not a proceeding and I could not confirm a family relationship from the sources retrieved; flagging it as a lead only.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim is UNTESTED. US 11,313,693 issued 2022-04-26 with 20 claims and four independent claims — claim 1 (heading-error/curvature-error evaluation), claim 6 (speed-difference and relative-position thresholds versus the swarm average), claim 11 (weighting the CIPV as a "high-quality candidate"), and claim 16 (building the swarm from pairwise speed and proximity tests, extended in claim 17 to a third vehicle). None have been cancelled, narrowed by certificate of correction, or construed by the PTAB. The patent's legal status is Active with an adjusted expiration of 2040-06-03, so a defendant is litigating against a ~14-year remaining term with no Office-imposed narrowing.

Estoppel landscape. There is no estoppel. Section 315(e)(2) runs only against a petitioner (and its real parties in interest and privies) that obtained an instituted IPR and a final written decision. With no petitioner of record, the entire field of prior art remains available to any future challenger — including art that would otherwise be estopped, and including the two references already of record on the face of the patent: US 2010/0256852 A1 (GM, Platoon vehicle management) and US 2019/0088135 A1 (Qualcomm, System and method for relative positioning based safe autonomous driving). Note the practical asymmetry: because the '693 was filed 2020-03-03 and granted 2022-04-26, an IPR petitioner must contend with the § 315(b) one-year bar keyed to service of an infringement complaint. If GM has sued anyone on this patent, that clock is already running for that defendant; I found no district court assertion of the '693 in the sources I checked, but that is a negative finding from incomplete sources and should be confirmed against PACER/Docket Alarm before relying on it.

Pattern signals. None of the usual PTAB-adjacent patterns appear. No repeat petitioner, no Unified Patents or other defensive aggregator, no PTAB appeal history, no Federal Circuit activity. The patent's prosecution was ordinary: a single non-final action mailed 2021-07-30, a response 2021-10-29, notice of allowance 2022-02-07. GM's enforcement posture on this portfolio is defensive/commercial rather than troll-style — the GM litigation activity the searches surfaced involves design patents against aftermarket parts makers (e.g., LKQ Corp. v. General Motors Co., N.D. Ill. No. 20-cv-02753), which is a different patent family and a different economic dynamic. A patent that is asserted broadly would eventually attract IPRs; the absence of any here suggests the '693 has not yet been asserted in a way that provoked a challenge.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not expect an easy PTAB path, but do not expect a hardened patent either. There is no FWD to cite and no cancelled claim to rely on. Any invalidity theory must be built from scratch. Start from the two of-record references and the CN/DE family members (CN113415278B, DE102021102781B4) for prosecution-history and family-file admissions.
2. Front-load the prior-art search now, while the § 315(b) clock permits. Because no estoppel exists, you can file on any ground. Preferred vehicles: § 102/§ 103 on adaptive-cruise-control and lane-keeping art, and CIPV/lead-vehicle-selection art, given the claims' heavy reliance on threshold-based selection of a "swarm" (claims 6, 16, 17) and heading/curvature error comparison (claim 1). The claim terms most exposed are "swarm of vehicles," "good behavior," "breadcrumbing navigation path," and the purely functional "threshold speed difference" / "threshold distance," none of which the specification defines with numeric bounds except the FIG. 7 aside that "close to the CIPV target" may be "within ten to twenty meters."
3. Verify no parallel litigation that starts your § 315(b) clock. Confirm via PACER/Docket Alarm whether GM or any licensee has served a complaint alleging infringement of the '693. If service predates 2025-09-29 for your client, the one-year IPR window has closed for that party.
4. Monitor, don't wait. With zero proceedings, the first IPR filed by anyone will be high-signal. Watch the PTAB E2E docket for the patent number at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb#/dashboard and CourtListener for any appeal at https://www.courtlistener.com/?q=%2211313693%22. If a proceeding is instituted, the statutory one-year trial clock from institution makes the FWD due about 12 months later, and the institution decision itself lands roughly 6 months after the petition.
5. Treat the empty record as a litigation-timing asset. If you are a defendant now, you can seek a district court stay with a clean story ("no prior PTAB proceedings, first-filed IPR, no estoppel complications") — and you retain the option to file multiple petitions on separate grounds without the joinder and redundancy fights a second petitioner usually faces.

Bottom line: no PTAB activity on file. This is a fresh, unchallenged, fully live 20-claim patent owned by GM with roughly 14 years of term remaining. It has not been hardened by surviving an IPR — but it also has not been softened, and there is no shortcut.

I'll verify the assignment record and check for any litigation or post-issuance transfers before writing up.

Let me confirm the correspondent of record on the single assignment and check for any later transfers.

Verified against the patent's own legal-events record and cross-referenced with public assignee/inventor databases. Here is the reconstruction.

Inventors

Pattern note: No departures within 12 months of filing — the opposite. Shahriari's and Lui's continued GM filings (2023–2025) show sustained employment, which is inconsistent with the "all inventors leave right after filing" pre-fire-sale tell.

Cross-reference anomaly (unclear, likely data artifact): PatentLeaderboard groups Dorothy Lui's portfolio under "Synaptive Medical (Barbados)" while simultaneously listing US 11,313,693 — a GM patent — in that same portfolio. That grouping is internally inconsistent with the recorded GM assignment and appears to be an aggregator mis-attribution, not a real transfer. I flag it only because it could confuse an ownership search; it is not evidence of an assignment.

Original assignee

GM Global Technology Operations LLC (Detroit / 300 GM Renaissance Center, Michigan), a subsidiary of General Motors Company (NYSE: GM).

• Primary line of business: Automobile design and manufacturing, including ADAS/automated-driving features.
• Product embodying the claims: Plausible — the patent is directed to lane-following / lead-vehicle breadcrumbing control ("Closest In Path Vehicle" following, fused with lane geometry). GM's hands-free Super Cruise / Ultra Cruise driver-assistance stack is the relevant product class. I have not confirmed this specific claimed algorithm is shipped in a named product.
• Status: Operating. GM remains a going concern (it did pass through a 2009 Chapter 11, but that predates this 2020-filed application by a decade and is irrelevant to this chain).

Assignment timeline

Only one assignment is recorded against US 11,313,693. The Assignment Center / Google Patents legal-events record shows no post-issuance transfer of any kind.

• 2020-02-25 to 2020-03-02 (executed) / recorded 2020-03-03 — Reel 051997/0680
  • Conveyance: Assignment — "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)."
  • Assignor: Ryan Andrew MacDonald; Mohammadali Shahriari; Dorothy Lui; Donovan J. Wisner; Benjamin J. Gaffney ("AND OTHERS")
  • Assignee: GM Global Technology Operations LLC (Michigan)
  • Correspondent: Not determinable from the sources I could retrieve. Google Patents' legal-events feed exposes reel/frame, parties and dates but not the recording correspondent; I could not pull the USPTO notice image for 051997/0680. In GM's routine practice these inventor-to-employer recordings are filed by GM's in-house patent operations rather than a named outside attorney — but I am not asserting a correspondent name without the primary record. Flag: unable to run the "repeat correspondent" check for this chain because there is only one link and no correspondent is visible.
  • Context: Standard inventor-to-employer assignment. This is the routine first-link recording present on essentially every corporate-owned patent, not a transfer between unrelated parties.

No further recorded assignments, security interests, mergers, or change-of-name filings exist for this patent. Expiration is docketed at 2040-06-03 (with the February 2020 provisional/priority structure).

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11313693
    2020 : Filed by five GM inventors
         : Inventors assign to GM Global Tech
    2022 : Patent issued to GM Global Tech

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The sole recorded transfer (reel 051997/0680) runs to an operating automaker. No "IP / Holdings / Licensing / Ventures" entity appears anywhere in the chain.
2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. Neither GM Global Technology Operations LLC nor any affiliate matches the Acacia / Marathon / IV / Wi-LAN / Conversant / Pendrell / Round Rock etc. lists. The only downstream citation is US 12,494,130 (Honda, 2025), a defensive/continuation item with no assignment bearing on this patent.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not present. Only one recorded assignment exists, and its correspondent field is not exposed in the sources retrievable here (see timeline note). There is no chain of LLCs to compare correspondents across.
4. Cascading transfers — not present. One assignment in the patent's entire life. Nothing within 24 months, no shared-address assignees.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No infringement suit naming US 11,313,693 surfaced in search. The only recorded assignment predates issuance by two years and is the original employer assignment, not an assertion-enabling transfer.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. GM's 2009 restructuring predates this 2020 filing and does not touch this patent. No Chapter 7/11 sale record for this asset.
7. Privateering — not present. GM has not transferred the patent to an NPE, and no competitor-facing assertion campaign is documented.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN; it terminates at GM.

Verdict

Insufficient data — only the original assignment exists.

The entire assignment record is a single inventor-to-employer conveyance, executed 2020-02-25 to 2020-03-02 and recorded 2020-03-03 at reel 051997/0680, from the five named GM inventors to GM Global Technology Operations LLC, with no subsequent assignments, security interests, name changes, or mergers on the file. That absence of post-issuance activity is itself the finding: ownership has never left the operating automaker, so there are zero signals of an NPE chain. I stop at "insufficient data" rather than "operating-company assertion" only because I found no evidence of GM asserting this patent against competitors — merely owning and (apparently) practicing it.

Verify at the USPTO Assignment Center, searching patent number 11,313,693: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (mirror: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html).

Caveat on methods: the correspondent-of-record field — the single most useful NPE tell you asked me to capture — is not exposed in the Google Patents legal-events feed, and I could not retrieve the underlying USPTO notice image for reel 051997/0680 during this session. If you have Assignment Center access, pull that one record directly and read the "Correspondent" line; that is the only unverified field in the chain.

I'll research the patent and its cited prior art references.

Now let me research the Qualcomm reference.

Prior Art Analysis — US Patent No. 11313693

1. USPTO Record Confirmation (exact-number search)

Searching the specific number 11313693 (not a range or similar number) returns exactly one record:

Effective prior-art cutoff for § 102: 2020-03-03 (the US priority date). Any reference published or filed before that date is available as prior art. The patent is AIA-first-inventor-to-file, so § 102(a)(1) (public disclosures) and § 102(a)(2) (earlier-filed published applications/patents) govern.

Note on the record: the face of US 11,313,693 lists only two patent citations, both marked as examiner-cited. That is the entire § 102/§ 103 reference set relied upon during prosecution. I analyze each below, plus the family-level citations for completeness.

2. The Two Face-of-Patent Citations (examiner-cited)

Reference A — US 2010/0256852 A1 ("Platoon vehicle management")

Full citation: US 2010/0256852 A1, "Platoon vehicle management," applicant/assignee GM Global Technology Operations, Inc.; inventor Upali Priyantha Mudalige; application US 12/749,659; filed 2010-03-30; published 2010-10-07; estimated priority 2009-04-06 (some aggregators list 2009-04-05). Corresponding granted patent US 8,352,112 B2. Status: Active Grant (per RPX Insight).

Brief description: Discloses controlling a group of vehicles to operate as a platoon. A leader vehicle monitors, via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, the actual GPS position of each follower vehicle; the leader computes inter-vehicle distances (a minimum desirable distance Ds and a maximally fuel-efficient distance Dg), selects a commanded GPS position for each follower, transmits it, and each follower is operated to that commanded position. A control cycle of roughly 20 Hz is mentioned. A companion disclosure, US 2010/0256836 A1 ("Autonomous vehicle management," US 12/749,699), monitors a host-vehicle trajectory against V2V-reported trajectories of target vehicles to derive navigational commands.

§ 102 analysis — does it anticipate any claim of US 11,313,693?
No. Element mapping against independent claim 1 shows the reference is missing the dispositive limitations:

Because every limitation of claim 1 is either absent or contradicted by the reference's architecture, US 2010/0256852 A1 does not anticipate claim 1 (or dependent claims 2–5), nor independent claims 6, 11, or 16, nor their dependents. Its relevance is purely as background/§ 103 art — it establishes that vehicle-following/platooning and inter-vehicle distance control using remote position data were known, but it teaches away from the sensor-based "swarm-quality" gating that is the point of novelty here.

Reference B — US 2019/0088135 A1 ("System and method for relative positioning based safe autonomous driving")

Full citation: US 2019/0088135 A1, "System and method for relative positioning based safe autonomous driving," assignee Qualcomm Incorporated; inventors Gengsheng Zhang, Sai Pradeep Venkatraman, Weihua Gao, Ju-Yong Do, Meghna Agrawal; application US 15/706,422; filed 2017-09-15; published 2019-03-21; granted as US 10,957,201 B2 on 2021-03-23 (adjusted expiration 2038-04-02).

Brief description: Manages the driving plan of an autonomous vehicle by observing a neighboring vehicle with the host's own sensors (RADAR, LIDAR, GPS, radio ranging, cameras). A trained machine-learning model classifies the neighboring vehicle's behavioral driving characteristics (e.g., safe/aggressive/reckless/unpredictable; fully autonomous vs. partially autonomous vs. legacy). Based on the classification and on relative position/motion, the host updates its driving plan — e.g., slowing, increasing following distance, or activating collision warning. V2V-exchanged characteristics can be cross-checked. A server supplies/updates the ML model; risk-pattern classification and "vehicle lacks autonomous driving capability" determinations appear in the granted claims.

§ 102 analysis — does it anticipate any claim of US 11,313,693?
No — but it is the closest of the two. It is conceptually adjacent (it evaluates another vehicle's driving behavior and adjusts the host's own plan accordingly), yet it fails multiple claim-1 limitations:

No claim of US 11,313,693 is anticipated by US 2019/0088135 A1. It is best characterized as § 103 secondary art: it corroborates that "classify the behavior of other vehicles and adapt your own plan" was known, which the applicant may have had to argue around, but it lacks the swarm comparison and the breadcrumbing-path generation that the granted claims require.

3. Summary Table — § 102 Verdict for the Two Cited References

Honest bottom line: Neither reference has a disclosure that maps to every element of any independent claim (1, 6, 11, or 16), and neither is arranged as the claims are arranged. Under the "single reference must disclose all elements arranged as in the claim" standard for anticipation, none of the cited references anticipate any claim of US 11,313,693. Their significance is as § 103 combination/background art, and their presence on the face of the patent is consistent with the claims having been allowed over them.

Caveat (per your instructions): I am treating the two references as the complete examiner-cited set because that is what the USPTO/Google Patents record for number 11313693 shows. I did not auto-correct or expand this set; if the USPTO PatentCenter "References Cited" listing differs, that listing controls.

4. Additional Family-Level Citations (also prior art, but distinct from the two above)

The family members DE102021102781B4 and CN113415278B carry their own "citations" that are prior art to the same 2020-03-03 priority date. These are prosecution references, but they are not the two references cited on the US face. Reported as cited of record:

§ 102 note: None of these five, individually, discloses all elements of any claim of US 11,313,693 either. Listed for completeness because they form the full prior-art paper trail associated with this family.

5. Consistency Check Against Previously Generated Sections

• The earlier litigation section reported the face of the patent as citing US20100256852A1 (GM, "Platoon vehicle management") and US20190088135A1 (Qualcomm, "System and method for relative positioning based safe autonomous driving"). That is consistent with the authoritative full text and with this analysis — same two references, same order, same assignees.
• The earlier section's forward-citation items (US12494130B2 (Honda); family-citing DE102021203080B3, JP7592052B2, DE102022125849A1) are later-dated and therefore are not prior art to a 2020-03-03 priority date; I have not treated them as anticipatory. No contradiction found between the sections.
• One minor discrepancy worth flagging: the earlier litigation section described the GM "Platoon vehicle management" priority year, while aggregators differ slightly on the exact priority day (2009-04-05 vs 2009-04-06). Both are far before 2020-03-03, so the § 102 availability conclusion is unchanged.

6. Methodology and Limits

• I searched for the specific number 11313693 and its application 16/807,749; I did not substitute or auto-correct any identifier.
• Citation data is taken from the authoritative full text you supplied (the Google Patents record for US 11,313,693), which mirrors the USPTO front-page "References Cited." I cannot open USPTO PatentCenter's authenticated "References Cited" pane from this session, so if there is any examiner citation not reflected on the public record, it is not captured here.
• Anticipation is a rigorous standard. I have declined to label either cited reference as anticipating, because neither discloses, in one reference, the combination of (a) defining a swarm of sensed vehicles, (b) adopting a closest-in-path vehicle as the path source, (c) gating that adoption on heading- and curvature-error agreement with the swarm, and (d) generating a breadcrumbing navigation path — which is the substance of every independent claim. If you want, I can do an element-by-element § 103 obviousness matrix combining Reference B (Qualcomm) with a secondary path-following reference, which is the more realistic invalidity theory.

I'll ground this obviousness analysis in the actual prior-art references listed on the patent's page. Let me pull details on each of them.

Let me pull the remaining references — the ACC, following-cruise, autonomous-towing, lane-occupancy, and the sibling "closest in path vehicle following" application.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,313,693 B2

System and process for closest in path vehicle following using surrounding vehicles motion flow

Analyst note on inputs. This analysis relies on the prior-art set appearing on the patent's own Google Patents page — the two examiner citations of record, the five "Family Cites Families" references, and the "Similar Documents" cluster — as instructed. I pulled and verified the text of the four most probative references via live search; three references (Ford US 2018/0237012 A1, KR 102286007 B1, US 10,553,117 B1) I could not retrieve full text for before hitting the tool limit, and I flag every statement depending on them as unverified. I also note the previously-generated sections' date discrepancy (prompt says 2026-04-26; search environment reported 2026-09-29). Nothing below turns on that.

1. Governing legal standard and the critical date

• Effective filing/priority date: 2020-03-03 (no earlier priority claimed; DE/CN are later counterparts). Any §102/§103 art must predate this.
• Standard: Graham v. John Deere; KSR Int'l v. Teleflex. Obviousness may rest on (i) combining prior-art elements, (ii) modifying a reference, or (iii) using a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way. MPEP 2143's rationales (predictable result, design incentive, "obvious to try," known work in one field applied to an analogous field, same-assignee/design-hierarchy) all apply here.

Threshold observation. All 20 granted claims are system claims; claim 11 is the broadest in practice because it requires only "weighting the CIPV as a high-quality candidate" — a purely functional limitation. The specification itself concedes the problem ("Breadcrumbing navigation strategies may not differentiate good CIPV behavior versus bad CIPV behavior") and disclaims algorithmic specificity ("A number of alternative algorithms are envisioned, and the disclosure is not intended to be limited to the examples provided herein"; "Other descriptors may be substituted for good or bad"). Those concessions materially weaken any non-obviousness position resting on terminology.

2. The prior-art set actually available (§102-qualified)

3. Claim 1 — element-by-element mapping to the primary combination

Primary combination: Mudalige '852 (primary) + Qualcomm '135 + GM '833.

Anticipation vs. obviousness. Mudalige '852 alone does not anticipate claim 1 (no "curvature error," no "breadcrumbing" label, coordinated platoon rather than ad-hoc swarm), and neither citation of record was applied on the merits during prosecution. That is an examination artifact, not evidence of non-obviousness.

4. Motivation to combine (KSR rationales)

1. Same field, same problem. All five primary references are autonomous/semi-autonomous host-vehicle control addressing following or reacting to other vehicles. '852 and '833 are the same assignee (GM) — KSR treats common ownership/design hierarchy as strong evidence of predictability.
2. The patent admits the problem. "[B]readcrumbing navigation strategies may not differentiate good CIPV behavior versus bad CIPV behavior." '833 solved exactly that problem for ACC target vehicles (behavior score → calibration/timing-gap), and '135 solved it via behavioral classification + risk levels. Combining them is a design incentive, not hindsight.
3. Predictable result. Adding a behavior-qualification gate to an existing follow-the-lead-vehicle scheme ('852's path-history commands) yields the expected benefit (fewer bad follows) with no new hardware — a point the patent itself makes ("better… without new hardware").
4. Known technique applied to analogous structure. '852 already reports per-vehicle heading error terms and already computes group speed differentials/relative positions; comparing a designated follower's metrics to the group's is the known technique of outlier/consistency testing applied to a new data field.
5. No teaching away in any reference, and no criticality or unexpected result is disclosed (the specification calls the scoring function merely "exemplary").

5. Claims 6, 16, 17 — swarm construction and gating

• Claim 6 (evaluate only when CIPV-to-swarm speed difference < threshold and CIPV relative position < threshold distance). Mudalige '852 discloses precisely these two variables: speed differential V as the stability criterion ([0146]) and relative position/distance (Ds, inter-vehicle distance) as the grouping criterion ([0134]–[0145]). Applying a threshold to V and a distance threshold to relative position is expressly contemplated by '852 ("Small values… smaller allowable Ds"; "Larger values… larger values of Ds are advisable based upon the instability"). Obvious.
• Claim 16 (define the swarm from first/second-vehicle speed comparison and relative-position comparison). Directly met by '852's pairwise relative position vectors and V2V-reported speeds, combined with the speed-differential/distance criteria above; '135's multi-vehicle aggregation supports it.
• Claim 17 (iterate to a third vehicle against the swarm's average speed). Mudalige '852 computes "real-time relative platoon position vectors and speeds for each follower vehicle in the group," and '135 expressly claims "a weighted average of the driving risk pattern of the neighboring vehicle and the second driving risk pattern." Averaging to extend group membership is ordinary.

6. Claim 11 — "weighting the CIPV as a high-quality candidate"

This is the easiest claim to invalidate. GM '833 discloses a per-target following score where "100 reflects the best possible driving behavior and 0 reflects the worst possible driving behavior in terms of the desirability of following that target vehicle," with thresholds triggering remedial actions. That is, in substance, weighting a followed vehicle as a high- vs. low-quality candidate. Combined with '852's "follow at a smaller distance" for well-behaved participants and "open additional space" around poorly behaved ones ([0109]), claim 11 reads on the combination.

7. Dependent claims 2–5, 7–10, 12–15, 18–20

These add nothing patentable; each is a known, motivation-supported extension.

8. Secondary / alternative combinations

• Combination B (avoiding Mudalige as primary): Qualcomm '135 (host AV, behavior classification, plan update, weighted multi-vehicle risk) + GM '833 (following score, distance adaptation) + GM '421 (lateral path-tracking controller). This covers claims 1 (without the curvature error) and 11/4/5 strongest, but is weakest on "swarm" and "breadcrumbing."
• Combination C (adding the lead-follow mechanic): as above + Ford '012 (autonomous towing / lead-vehicle path following; unverified) or US 10,553,117 (in-path/lane-occupancy determination). Use only after verifying disclosure.
• Combination D (potential knockout): US 2021/024360 A1 (GM, "System and process for closest in path vehicle following"), if §102(a)(2)-qualified. Given the near-identical title and assignee, I would treat this as the first thing to check; if it discloses CIPV selection plus breadcrumbing, it may anticipate or render obvious most of the independent claims by itself.

9. Where the non-obviousness argument would have to live

A patentee resisting §103 would be pushed onto three narrow points, and each is weak:

1. "Swarm" ≠ "platoon." Arguable — Mudalige's coordinated platoon requires V2V command/control, whereas the claimed swarm is an uncoordinated grouping judged by mutual consistency. But Mudalige's FIG. 12 (three unrelated vehicles using radar/ultrasonic ranging) and its object-tracking disclosure undercut this, and the patent's own claim 16 defines the swarm purely by speed-difference and distance thresholds — which '852 discloses.
2. "Curvature error" of CIPV vs. swarm. Genuinely the best argument, because no reference of record expressly pairs "CIPV curvature" with "swarm curvature." Rebuttal: curvature is derived from the same heading/position series '852 already collects; '852 discusses roadway curvature and turn-dependent formation spacing; and US 8,605,947 / '421 establish that trajectory-curvature extraction is routine. Expect this to be contested but resolved for the challenger.
3. "Breadcrumbing" as a term of art. Not defensible — it is a label. '852's path-history-as-state-commands and Ford '012's lead-vehicle path following are the same function; the specification treats the term as descriptive.

No secondary consideration on the current record supports patentability: there is no identified commercial-success nexus, no unexpected-result showing, and the only forward citation (Honda US 12,494,130 B2, 2025) is later art, not evidence of non-obviousness. Per the earlier sections, no litigation or PTAB proceeding was found (confidence low on that negative).

10. Bottom line

Caveats. (a) I could not retrieve full text for Ford '012, KR '007, or US 10,553,117; statements depending on them are flagged. (b) The element-level mappings for heading/curvature are my own claim-charting from the retrieved disclosures, not from an examiner's action or a court record — no rejection on these grounds has been located. (c) Per your standing rule I have not auto-corrected any identifier, and I note that the KR reference's only listed date (B1 grant 2021-08-05) postdates the critical date, so it should not be relied upon; only its earlier application publication would count. (d) "No litigation/PTAB" reflects search-result absence, not a certified docket check.