US 8086364

I'll verify the patent details against current sources before summarizing.

Let me retrieve the full claim set to confirm the independent claims.

One more check to confirm total claim count and the third independent claim.

US Patent 8,086,364 — Verified Summary

Sources: Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US8086364](/patent/US8086364)/en), Justia Patents (https://patents.justia.com/patent/8086364), FreePatentsOnline (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/8086364.html), Stanford NPE Litigation Database (https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/[308840](/patent/308840)), RPX Empower and Docket Alarm dockets.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (verbatim)

"A system for operating an electric or hybrid-electric vehicle includes a computer programmed to identify a location of a vehicle, access a map and identify a plurality of links therein, pre-screen the plurality of links to identify if any of the plurality of links is within a given bounds of the current location, and if one or more possible links are identified, then match the current location of the vehicle to one of the identified links, and upload power data for the vehicle corresponding to the matched location into a database."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — "An electric or hybrid-electric vehicle comprising a computer programmed to:"
The vehicle itself (not just a method) carries a programmed computer that:

1. identifies the vehicle's current location;
2. accesses a map database and identifies its links (road segments between nodes);
3. pre-screens those links to see whether any fall within a given bounds of the current location; and
4. if candidate links exist, the computer: (a) calculates the distance from the current location to one identified link; (b) if that distance and a plurality of previously identified current locations are within a given distance of that same link, then it forgoes recalculating the distance to that link when determining a subsequent location (computational shortcut / hysteresis); and (c) uploads the vehicle's power data for the subsequently determined location into the database, tagged to that identified link.

Note the asymmetry in claim 1's wording: the "pre-screen → match" structure is the concept, but the novel recitation reads on the distance-recalculation-skipping + upload combination.

Claim 9 — "A method of energy management of an electric or hybrid-electric vehicle comprising:"

1. identifying a current location of the vehicle;
2. applying a pre-screening algorithm against a map link, where the pre-screening is based on a maximum link length of a historical power-use database (this is the Eqn. 1 test in the spec: max(a,b) ≥ l_max + 2ε);
3. determining whether links fall within a given bounds, and if so, matching the location to the link using a subsequential matching algorithm; and
4. uploading the power information used by the vehicle along that link and location into the historical power-use database.

Third independent claim — a "computer readable storage medium" claim.
The specification's stated third aspect is a CRM storing instructions that cause a computer to measure the current location, execute a pre-screening algorithm to find map links within a predetermined distance, and if so execute a map-matching algorithm to pick the actual link, then upload power information to a historical database. I could not confirm its exact claim number in the granted patent (the pre-grant publication carries the parallel CRM claim as claim 13); treat the claim number and total claim count as unverified. Dependent claims I did confirm include: pre-screening using maximum link length (cl. 2); subsequential matching (cl. 3); off-road determination when no link is found (cl. 4); an off-road hysteresis rule comparing K consecutive off-road locations against a threshold and setting the next M locations as off-road (cl. 5); acquiring historical power data and controlling the vehicle based on it (cl. 6); GPS location (cl. 7); and selecting the nearest link (cl. 8).

Litigation posture (as of April 2026)

The patent is being actively asserted in the Eastern District of Texas (Marshall/Waco) by the current owner, Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, typically alongside a portfolio of other GE-origin patents ('884, '364, '467, etc.):

• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Toyota Motor Corp. et al, No. 2:25-cv-01133 (E.D. Tex., filed Nov. 18, 2025) — asserts US 8,086,364 among eight patents.
• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., Nos. 2:26-cv-00230 and 2:26-cv-00231 (E.D. Tex., filed March 20, 2026).
• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Volvo Car Corporation et al (incl. Polestar Performance AB, Volvo Car USA LLC), No. 2:26-cv-00742 (E.D. Tex., filed April 2026).
• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Ford Motor Company, No. 2:25-cv-01116 (E.D. Tex., filed Nov. 10, 2025) — terminated Feb. 11, 2026 on a joint motion to dismiss after a January 2026 settlement/stay.

Separately, Unified Patents has published an invalidity chart captioned "Edison Innovations LLC – US8086364" (i.e., prepared against the predecessor owner), citing US 6,453,235 B1, US 2005/0228553 A1 and US 2010/0286909 A1.

Uncertainty / limits of what I verified

• CAFC: I found no 2026 Federal Circuit docket or appeal involving US 8,086,364. All identified 2026 activity is district court (E.D. Tex.). I cannot rule out a pending or sealed appeal, but I have no evidence of one — treat "no CAFC 2026 activity found" as an absence of evidence, not a confirmed negative.
• Claim numbering: the text of independent claims 1 and 9 above is from Justia's rendition of the granted patent; the exact number and count of the remaining claims (including the CRM claim) were not confirmed from an authoritative full-claims source.
• Assignee chain: the GE → Edison Innovations → Bunker Hill reassignment entries and dates come from Google Patents' reassignment records; Google explicitly disclaims that its assignee listing is a legal conclusion.
• Damages figure: a third-party aggregator (patentleaderboard.com) lists "$21,385,000" next to this patent; I could not verify what that number represents and would not rely on it.

One note for the record: your prompt sets today's date as April 26, 2026, while the patent-text fetch is timestamped 2026-09-30; I have used the source documents as given and flagged any date-sensitive statements above.

I'll research litigation involving US 8086364. Let me start with the sources you suggested.

Found the Toyota case. Let me dig deeper into both E.D. Tex. cases and the Unified Patents records.

Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 8,086,364

Bottom line: Two active district-court litigations are known, both filed by Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC in the Eastern District of Texas. No CAFC appeals, ITC actions, or earlier (GE-era) enforcement suits were found. Below are the verified details.

Case 1 — Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Motor North America, Inc., and Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.

Asserted patents (nine total, including the '364): U.S. 8,030,884; 8,086,364; 8,326,467; 9,914,365; 10,291,158; 10,374,529; 10,442,296; 10,549,648; 11,374,508.

'364-specific allegation: The complaint asserts the '364 patent against accused Toyota electrified/plug-in hybrid vehicles (e.g., RAV4 Plug-in Hybrid), targeting independent claim 9 (a method of energy management comprising "identifying a current location of a vehicle" and "applying a pre-screening algorithm with respect to a link within a map and the current location"). Accused functionality centers on Toyota's navigation/energy-management systems (GPS location plus battery-state-based charging-station routing).

Sources:

• https://dockets.justia.com/docket/texas/txedce/2:2025cv01133/[241855](/patent/241855)
• https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/[308840](/patent/308840)
• https://ai-lab.exparte.com/case/dct/txed/2:25-cv-01133/doc/1 (complaint analysis, '364 and '884 claim charts)

Case 2 — Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Nissan Motor Co., Ltd.

Sources:

• https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A26-cv-00231
• https://gaeflexstaging-dot-docketupdate.appspot.com/cases/Texas_Eastern_District_Court/2--26-cv-00231/BUNKER_HILL_TECHNOLOGIES_LLC_v._Nissan_Motor_Co._Ltd/
• https://ai-lab.exparte.com/case/dct/txed/2:26-cv-00231/bunker-hill-tech-llc-v-nissan-motor-co-ltd

Note: I did not independently verify from the Nissan complaint text that the '364 patent is among the asserted patents; the case is linked on the patent's Google Patents "Family has litigation" record and is documented as related to the Toyota case. Flagging this as a verification gap rather than asserting it as confirmed.

Related PTAB proceeding (not on the '364 patent)

• IPR2026-00333, Toyota Motor Corporation v. Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, filed April 7, 2026. Challenged patent: U.S. 11,374,508 — not the '364 patent. Patent Owner filed a discretionary-denial brief (with a Sotera stipulation of record from Petitioner). Status reporting is conflicting across sources: one tracker shows "Pending," while another shows "Terminated–Settled" with an Aug. 11, 2026 termination date. I could not confirm which is correct, and I note the inconsistency rather than resolving it.
  • https://ai-lab.exparte.com/case/ptab/IPR2026-00333/toyota-motor-corp-v-bunker-hill-technologies-llc
  • https://ipverse.greyb.com/ptab-web/cases/case-details/IPR2026-00333

Indicative but unconfirmed (pre-suit challenge preparation)

• Unified Patents published an invalidity chart titled "Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf," citing U.S. 6,453,235; US 2005/0228553 A1; and US 2010/0286909 A1 as prior art. This indicates invalidity work on the '364 was prepared while Edison Innovations LLC (an intermediate assignee, 2025) held the patent, but I found no filed PTAB petition or court case by Unified Patents or Edison Innovations against the '364 patent.
  • https://www.unifiedpatents.com/s/Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf

What was NOT found

• No GE-era litigation. The patent was owned by General Electric (2010–2025), then GE Intellectual Property Licensing, then Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, then Edison Innovations, then Bunker Hill Technologies (quitclaim, Apr. 9, 2026). No enforcement suits appear during the GE/Dolby period.
• No Federal Circuit appeals (CAFC) involving the '364 patent.
• No ITC Section 337 investigation involving the '364 patent.
• No other district-court cases in PACER/Unified Patents trackers.

Ownership/standing note relevant to the litigation

The '364 patent has changed hands repeatedly: General Electric → GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC → Edison Innovations, LLC → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC (quitclaim assignment recorded Apr. 9, 2026). Because the Toyota suit was filed Nov. 18, 2025 — before the Apr. 9, 2026 quitclaim to Bunker Hill — the chain of title and standing/joinder posture (e.g., any necessary party or real-party-in-interest issues) may warrant examination. Patent term: priority Mar. 11, 2009; anticipated expiration Mar. 11, 2029.

Caveats: Dates in some tracker outputs run later (e.g., June 2026, August 2026) than the April 26, 2026 date given in your prompt; I have reported the docket dates as retrieved. Where secondary aggregators (Ex Parte, Lex Machina/Stanford NPE, GreyB) conflict with the court docket, I have preferred the court docket and flagged the discrepancy. Before filing anything, confirm pleadings, asserted claims, and current status against PACER and the USPTO PTAB docket directly.

I'll verify the structured data's "no proceedings" result against public sources before writing up.

Let me search more specifically for PTAB filings and the related litigation history.

The Unified Patents invalidity chart is notable. Let me determine whether Unified filed anything at the PTAB and check the litigation history.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 8,086,364 — the structured PTAB block (USPTO ODP) returns no IPRs, PGRs, or CBMs, and my independent web sweep (PTAB E2E, CourtListener/CAFC, Unified Patents, NPE litigation trackers) surfaced no petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal naming this patent; the bottom line for a defendant is therefore not "claims are dead" but rather "the patent is completely untested at the PTAB, its validity is undented by any estoppel-generating proceeding, and every prior-art ground is still on the table."

Before the per-proceeding section, one accuracy housekeeping note: the remaining sections are templated for proceedings, and there are none to populate. Rather than pad with invented numbers, I've substituted the actual adversary-activity record that exists for this patent.

No proceedings to report (with a signal flag)

The canonical structured list is empty. Web search corroborates:

• USPTO PTAB E2E / PAIR-style search: nothing for 8,086,364.
• CourtListener / CAFC: no appeal from any PTAB trial involving this patent.
• Unified Patents: no petition; however, Unified Patents has published a claim-chart-style "Edison Innovations LLC – US8086364 invalidity chart" at https://www.unifiedpatents.com/s/Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf. This is a defensive prior-art analysis document, not a filed petition. Its existence is a meaningful signal (see Pattern signals below) but it is not a proceeding and I will not treat it as one.

Why this matters / what I cannot confirm: because the patent is being actively asserted in E.D. Tex. (below), and because the PTAB and ODP feeds can lag recently filed petitions by weeks, I cannot rule out that a petition has been filed and simply is not yet indexed. A defendant should re-run the PTAB E2E docket (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb) themselves rather than relying on this snapshot.

The actual adversary record (district court, not PTAB)

2:25-cv-01133 — Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Toyota Motor Corp. et al. (E.D. Tex.)

• Forum: U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas
• Filed: 2025-11-18
• Asserted patents (9): 8,030,884; 8,086,364; 8,326,467; 9,914,365; 10,291,158; 10,374,529; 10,442,296; 10,549,648; 11,374,508
• Defendants: Toyota Motor Corporation; Toyota Motor North America, Inc.; Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
• Source: https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/[308840](/patent/308840) ; https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A25-cv-01133
• PTAB activity: none identified.

2:26-cv-00231 (E.D. Tex.)

• Filed: 2026 (per the Google Patents family-litigation feed at https://patents.google.com/patent/US8086364/en ; https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Eastern%20District%20Court/case/2%3A26-cv-00231)
• Parties: not confirmable from the sources I retrieved — I am not going to guess the defendant. Flagging it as a second E.D. Tex. assertion in the same family.

Ownership chain (relevant to who you're dealing with)

Per the Google Patents reassignment record: General Electric Co. → GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC (2025-03-26) → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC (2025-03-26) → Edison Innovations, LLC (2025-02-20) → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC (2026-04-09, quitclaim assignment). Current assignee listed: Bunker Hill Technologies LLC.

Prosecution footnote with defensive value

The patent claims priority to US 12/401,726 (filed 2009-03-11; issued as US 8,024,082) and carries government rights — the U.S. Government holds a paid-up license and limited march-in rights under Federal Transit Administration Contract No. MA-04-7001 (see the "GOVERNMENT RIGHTS IN THE INVENTION" section of the specification). Anticipated expiration: 2029-03-11.

Strategic summary

Claim status. Because there are no AIA trials, there is no PTAB cancellation record at all. No independent claim has been canceled by the Board; no claim has been confirmed by the Board either. Every claim of 8,086,364 — asserted and unasserted alike — is UNTESTED before the PTAB. (I deliberately do not list claim numbers here: no FWD exists, and the claim set was not reproduced in the materials available to me, so any claim-level enumeration would be fabrication.) The patent's only validity testing, if any, has occurred or will occur in district court under the clear-and-convincing standard with the § 282 presumption intact — a materially harder posture for a challenger than an IPR's preponderance standard.

Estoppel landscape. There is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no § 325(e)(2) estoppel attaching to this patent — those provisions are triggered only by a petitioner's participation in an AIA trial that reaches a final written decision. Consequence for a defendant today: all prior-art grounds remain fully available, including art that a hypothetical petitioner raised or reasonably could have raised. You are not inheriting anyone else's estoppel, and no petitioner has forfeited anything. Conversely, you are also not inheriting a favorable FWD — there is no invalidity road map blessed by the Board, and no claim has been narrowed by amendment.

Pattern signals. Three things stand out. (1) Unified Patents has produced an invalidity chart against this specific patent under the "Edison Innovations LLC" caption — a hallmark of the Patent Quality Initiative's pre-petition/usefulness analysis, though no petition appears on file from Unified for this patent. For comparison, Unified did litigate a PGR (PGR2022-00044) against a different patent owner in this period, so Unified's involvement here is analysis-stage, not litigation-stage. (2) The ownership chain is a classic NPE monetization sequence — GE to Dolby IP Licensing to Edison Innovations to Bunker Hill via quitclaim — and Bunker Hill is now asserting a nine-patent portfolio against Toyota in E.D. Tex., with a second E.D. Tex. case in the family. (3) The patent owner has never had to defend a claim at the PTAB. No appeals, no adverse FWDs, no amendments. That cuts both ways: the claims are unworn, but they are also unproven and have never been stress-tested against a well-funded petitioner.

Timing hazard you should price in. If you are Toyota (or an accused infringer in 2:25-cv-01133), the § 315(b) one-year clock runs from service of the complaint, not filing. With the complaint filed 2025-11-18, the bar date is likely late 2025/early 2026 service plus one year, i.e., roughly late 2026 — meaning the window to file an IPR on the asserted claims may be closing or closed right now (today: 2026-09-30). Confirm the exact service date from the docket before assuming a petition is still available. If the window has closed for Toyota, that materially raises the value of the Board's discretionary-denial practice and of joinder under § 315(c) to any later petitioner.

Recommended next steps

1. The absence of PTAB activity is the headline, and the absence is itself a signal. Well-asserted patents against sophisticated defendants normally attract IPRs; a nine-patent E.D. Tex. portfolio suit with no parallel PTAB filings in the first ~10 months is unusual. Two live hypotheses worth checking, in order: (a) petitions were filed recently and are not yet indexed in ODP/E2E; (b) the § 315(b) window has passed for the named defendants, removing the IPR option. Verify via PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb) and the E.D. Tex. docket's service dates.

2. If you are a defendant and the IPR window is still open, the Unified Patents invalidity chart for this patent is a free, already-built prior-art starting point: https://www.unifiedpatents.com/s/Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf. It maps US-6,453,235, US-2005/0228553, and US-2010/0286909 against an energy-management claim of the general type found in this family. Treat it as a lead, not as a petition — you must independently verify each reference's date, status, and pre-AIA/AIA treatment (priority here is 2009-03-11, so pre-AIA §§ 102/103 govern, which matters for § 102(e) art).

3. Argument hooks unique to this specification. The patent's stated point of novelty is the two-stage map-matching pipeline — the § Eqn. 1 pre-screen (max(a,b) ≥ l_max + 2ε) followed by the FIG. 10 subsequential/trajectory match with boundary δ — combined with the express disclaimer that terrain/elevation/topography data is not stored or used. A § 103 attack using route-optimization art that does rely on elevation data should be paired with an obviousness argument that removing terrain data was a known design choice, and a § 112 attack should target the pre-screen bounds derivation (the triangle-inequality assumption that the link is linear, and the ε = 5 m vs. 100 m alternatives).

4. Do not treat this patent as unassailable just because it survived prosecution in 2011. No PTAB panel has ever construed a term here, so your claim-construction positions in E.D. Tex. are live and unpolluted. There is also no SAS-style all-or-nothing claim carve-out to navigate and no Fintiv record to argue around — the § 314(a) discretionary-denial landscape is a blank slate.

Confidence caveats. (i) The structured PTAB block is authoritative and says zero proceedings; I found nothing contradicting it. (ii) The defendant identities in 2:26-cv-00231 and the exact service date in 2:25-cv-01133 are not confirmed by my sources — say so rather than asserting them. (iii) No FWD exists for this patent, so there is no disposition to quote; any claim-level statement about cancellation or survival of 8,086,364's claims would be fabricated.

I'll research the assignment chain, the entities involved, and any litigation/NPE-directory footprint.

US 8086364 — Assignment Record Reconstruction

Patent: US 8,086,364 B2 — "System and method for operation of electric and hybrid vehicles"
App. No. 12/719,921 · filed 2010-03-09 · granted 2011-12-27 · priority 2009-03-11 (CIP of US 12/401,726, which issued as US 8,024,082)
Google Patents record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8086364/en
Assignment Center search: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 8086364)

Data-provenance caveat up front. The dates, conveyance types, assignor and assignee names below are taken from the Google Patents "Legal Events / Reassignment" tab for US 8,086,364, which mirrors the USPTO assignment records. I could not retrieve the reel/frame numbers or the recorded correspondent for any link in this chain in this session — the Assignment Center record itself is not directly readable in the sources available to me. I have deliberately left reel/frame and correspondent fields marked as not retrieved rather than fabricate them. Verify on Assignment Center before filing anything that depends on them.

Inventors

Basis for employer: the 2010-03-09 assignment of assignors' interest to General Electric Company (per Google Patents legal events) lists exactly these four names as assignors. The subject matter (hybrid locomotive / hybrid transit bus energy management, GE's Government Contract MA-04-7001 with the Federal Transit Administration) is consistent with GE Global Research and GE Transportation work.

Pattern note: No evidence of the "all inventors departed within 12 months" precursor pattern. GE held this asset continuously for roughly 15 years (2010 filing → 2024/2025 divestiture), which is the opposite of a quick inventor-exodus fire sale. I found no data on individual inventor departure dates; treat that as not determined, not as a clean bill of health.

Original assignee

General Electric Company (Schenectady, NY / Boston, MA). Named on the face of the issued patent via the 2010-03-09 assignment of assignors' interest.

• Product embodying the claims: Partly. GE did commercialize hybrid-drive rail and transit products in this era (the GE Evolution Series hybrid locomotive demonstrator and GE hybrid transit bus drive systems), and the patent itself was made under Federal Transit Administration contract MA-04-7001 — i.e., a real, government-funded hybrid transit program, not a paper filing. Whether any shipped GE product read on the issued claims of the '364 specifically is not established by anything I found; do not assert it.
• Primary line of business: Diversified industrial — power, aviation, healthcare, and at the relevant time transportation/rail.
• Current status: Operating, but reorganized. GE completed its three-way split (GE Aerospace, GE Vernova, GE HealthCare) in 2024. Separately, GE Licensing was sold to Dolby Laboratories in 2024, with the licensing portfolio, including this asset, held by Dolby for resale.

Government-rights rider (worth flagging on any assertion analysis): the patent states the U.S. Government has a paid-up license and March-in-type rights under FTA Contract No. MA-04-7001. That encumbrance travelled with the asset.

Assignment timeline

All entries per the Google Patents legal-events record for US 8,086,364. Dates are the dates shown there (presumed execution dates); recordation dates were not independently verified, and that distinction matters at the bottom of this chain.

• 2010-03-09 (executed) / recorded not retrieved — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest
  • Assignor: Xue, Ya; Salasoo, Lembit; Richter, Timothy Gerard; Yan, Weizhong
  • Assignee: General Electric Company
  • Correspondent: not retrieved (not shown in the source I could read)
  • Context: Original employer assignment on filing — the only "normal" link in the chain.

• 2025-02-20 (executed) / recorded not retrieved — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignor's interest
  • Assignor: Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Assignee: Edison Innovations, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Divestiture to a monetization vehicle — Edison Innovations, a Dominion Harbor Group subsidiary, announced the same week (press release 2025-02-19) that it acquired ~2,500 GE Licensing assets from Dolby, which "held them for sale." Edison is a licensing-only entity in Dallas, TX.

• 2025-03-26 (executed) / recorded not retrieved — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignor's interest
  • Assignor: General Electric Company
  • Assignee: GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Internal reorg / chain-of-title cleanup — GE moves the asset into its dedicated IP-holding LLC after the downstream sale to Edison was already executed and announced. This is retroactive tidying of the record, not a new commercial event.

• 2025-03-26 (executed) / recorded not retrieved — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Change of name
  • Assignor: GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Assignee: Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Change of name only — the GE IP holding entity was renamed as a Dolby entity, giving effect to Dolby's 2024 acquisition of GE Licensing. No change in beneficial ownership at this step; it exists to bridge GE's entity to Dolby's name in the record.

• 2026-04-09 (executed) / recorded not retrieved — Reel not retrieved

  • Conveyance: Quitclaim assignment
  • Assignor: Edison Innovations, LLC
  • Assignee: Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Transfer to asserter — Bunker Hill is Dominion Harbor Enterprises' automotive aggregation subsidiary, launched 2025-03-18. Critically, Bunker Hill was already suing on this patent before this date (Ford filed 2025-11-10; Toyota filed 2025-11-18, and the '364 is pleaded in the Toyota case per the Stanford NPE database). A quitclaim executed/recorded mid-litigation is the signature of a standing/chain-of-title perfection rather than the deal that actually moved the asset. Whether this date is execution or recordation is the single most important thing to confirm on Assignment Center.

Litigation overlay (for the transfer-timing signals)

Plaintiff-side litigation counsel of record across these cases: Nelson Bumgardner Conroy PC (Patrick J. Conroy, Ryan P. Griffin, Brandon G. Moore, Nathan L. Levenson, Jonathan H. Rastegar, Thomas W. Kennedy Jr.), Marshall, TX. Note for accuracy: this is litigation counsel, not an assignment correspondent — do not conflate the two roles.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership and assertion of US 8086364
    2009 : Priority application filed
    2010 : CIP filed by General Electric
    2011 : Patent issued to GE
    2024 : GE Licensing sold to Dolby Labs
    2025 : GE IP holding entity created
         : Dolby transfers to Edison Innovations
         : Dominion Harbor launches Bunker Hill
         : Bunker Hill sues Ford
         : Bunker Hill sues Toyota
    2026 : Bunker Hill sues Nissan
         : Quitclaim recorded to Bunker Hill
         : Bunker Hill sues Volvo

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — PRESENT.
Not inferred from naming. The basis: (a) the 2025-02-20 assignment moves the patent to Edison Innovations, LLC, whose own 2025-02-19 press release describes a licensing-only acquisition of 2,500 assets purchased from an intermediary that "held them for sale"; (b) the 2026-04-09 quitclaim moves it to Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC, which Dominion Harbor's own 2025-03-18 launch release describes as a subsidiary "established to serve as a specialized automotive patent aggregator" that will "develop and monetize" its portfolio — i.e., a stated purpose of monetization with no product; (c) Dominion Harbor Enterprises is a Dallas-based patent transaction/licensing firm. This is a documented multi-hop move out of an operating industrial into two successive licensing vehicles.

2. Known asserter in the chain — PRESENT.
Neither "Edison Innovations" nor "Bunker Hill" appears on the fixed list in your brief (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Spangenberg, etc.), but the directory evidence is direct and stronger than a name match:

• Unified Patents describes Bunker Hill as "an NPE and entity of Dominion Harbor Enterprises, LLC" (https://www.unifiedpatents.com/insights/2026/3/29/dominion-harbor-entity-bunker-hill-ev-battery-patent-challenged), and Unified's litigation portal tags case 2:26-cv-00231 as "NPE (Patent Assertion Entity)."
• Stanford NPE Litigation Database lists Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC as a Patent Asserter with category "Acquired patents" and NPE status "Non Practicing Entity" (https://npe.law.stanford.edu/case/[308840](/patent/308840)).
• RPX/GreyB/Sisvel market commentary identifies Bunker Hill as a Dominion Harbor affiliate assembling an auto portfolio for enforcement.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — NOT DETERMINABLE (unclear).
I could not recover the recorded correspondent for any of the five assignments. I want to be explicit: this is the one signal your methodology says is the strongest tell, and it is the one I cannot answer from the material available. Action item — pull reel/frame and correspondent for the 2025-02-20 Dolby→Edison and 2026-04-09 Edison→Bunker Hill recordings and compare; if the same attorney/firm is of record on both, that is a genuine recurrence finding. I will not guess at a name.

4. Cascading transfers — PRESENT (with a caveat).
Four recorded transfers in roughly 13 months: 2025-02-20 → 2025-03-26 (×2) → 2026-04-09. The caveat is that the two 2025-03-26 entries are housekeeping (internal reorg + change of name), not independent commercial cascades. The substantive cascade is GE → Dolby (held for resale) → Edison Innovations → Bunker Hill, three distinct holders in ~14 months, ending in the litigating entity. The name changes plus quitclaim in the middle are the classic record-tidying that accompanies a cascade.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — PRESENT, and it cuts both ways (worth stating carefully).

• The 2025-02-20 Dolby→Edison transfer is ~9 months before the first Bunker Hill suit naming the '364 family (Ford, 2025-11-10) — outside your strict 6-month window, so not a textbook pre-litigation transfer, but plainly a positioning acquisition.
• The 2026-04-09 quitclaim to Bunker Hill post-dates the Ford and Toyota complaints and coincides with the Nissan/Volvo wave. A quitclaim executed while already asserting is a standing-perfection move — the chain was being cleaned up to survive a Rule 12(b)(1)/standing challenge, not to set up the first suit. That is a distinct and, in my view, more probative pattern than the 6-month rule.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
No Chapter 7/11 of GE is implicated. The GE Licensing divestiture to Dolby (2024) was a strategic portfolio sale, and Dolby's onward sale to Edison was an explicit resale of assets "held for sale." Corporate-separation activity at GE (the 2024 three-way split) is not a bankruptcy proceeding.

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT in the classic sense (unclear on residual interests).
Classic privateering requires the operating company to direct or fund assertions against competitors. Here the asset was sold out of GE's licensing arm through Dolby, an unrelated operating company that acted as an intermediary reseller, and then to a Dominion Harbor vehicle. There is no evidence GE retained an economic interest or coordinated the Bunker Hill campaign. I cannot rule out a retained back-end royalty in the GE Licensing→Dolby deal, but nothing I found supports it — treat as not established.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT (inverse signal active).
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified, or OIN. Quite the opposite: Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination against Bunker Hill's US 9,914,365 on 2026-03-27, and the CRU granted it on 2026-06-01, finding substantial new questions of patentability. Unified's stated posture ("plans to release charted prior art on Bunker Hill patents weekly until its assertion of invalid patents ceases") is the clearest possible confirmation that this portfolio is being asserted, not neutralized.

Verdict

NPE — high confidence.

The chain runs GE → GE Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC (2025-03-26, internal reorg) → Dolby Intellectual Property Licensing, LLC (2025-03-26, change of name, effecting Dolby's 2024 purchase of GE Licensing) → Edison Innovations, LLC (2025-02-20, Dominion Harbor's licensing vehicle, per Dominion Harbor's own 2025-02-19 acquisition announcement) → Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC (2026-04-09, quitclaim, Dominion Harbor's automotive monetization subsidiary launched 2025-03-18). Four transfers to or through licensing-only vehicles in ~14 months, the last by quitclaim recorded during active litigation, satisfies the shell-entity, known-asserter and cascading-transfer signals simultaneously — and the asserter status is independently confirmed by Unified Patents (which labels Bunker Hill "an NPE and entity of Dominion Harbor Enterprises") and the Stanford NPE database, with six active E.D. Tex. suits against Ford, Toyota, Nissan and Volvo/Polestar. The only high-value signal I could not resolve is the recorded correspondent; retrieving reel/frame and correspondent for the 2025-02-20 and 2026-04-09 recordings is the outstanding verification step.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search 8086364) — also indexed at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html

Explicit non-findings / open items

1. Reel and frame numbers: not obtained for any of the five assignments.
2. Recorded correspondent (attorney/firm) for any assignment: not obtained. Do not treat the Nelson Bumgardner litigation attorneys as correspondence of record.
3. Whether the 2026-04-09 date is the quitclaim's execution date or its recordation date: unresolved, and it determines whether the transfer to the plaintiff pre- or post-dates the Toyota complaint (2025-11-18).
4. Inventor departure dates post-filing: not determined.
5. Whether any GE product read on the '364 claims: not established.

I'll research US patent 8086364 and its cited prior art references.

Let me get the complete list of cited references from multiple sources.

I have the citation list from Justia. Let me verify the reference titles and dates across sources.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 8086364 B2

"System and method for operation of electric and hybrid vehicles"

0. Scope, sources, and an important caveat

Patent under review: US 8086364 B2 (application US 12/719,921, filed 2010‑03‑09; priority to US 12/401,726 filed 2009‑03‑11; granted 2011‑12‑27; inventors Ya Xue, Lembit Salasoo, Timothy Gerard Richter, Weizhong Yan; original assignee General Electric Co.; current assignee of record Bunker Hill Technologies LLC).

Two honesty caveats before the analysis:

1. The full text you supplied does not include the claims. It ends mid‑sentence in the detailed description. I therefore cannot quote verbatim claim language or claim numbers. I map the references to the three independent claim categories disclosed in the Abstract/Definitions section (a system claim, a method claim, and a computer‑readable storage medium claim). If you can supply the claim set, I can tighten the element‑by‑element mapping.
2. A granted patent's cited references were, by definition, not held anticipatory of the allowed claims during prosecution. The §102 "potential anticipation" column below is analytical/hypothetical — it identifies which claims each reference bears on, and is not a statement that any reference actually anticipated an issued claim. Several of these references are the examiner's §102/§103 art; some were cited merely for background.

Reference list source: The "Referenced Cited" listing on Justia (patents.justia.com/patent/8086364, retrieved 2026‑04‑26), corroborated where possible against Google Patents. Identifiers are reported exactly as retrieved; I have not normalized them. Note that Justia renders the publications without slashes (e.g., "20050228553"); I have added the conventional slashes for readability but the digits are unchanged.

Core claim concepts (from the Abstract, "Definitions," and Detailed Description of US 8086364):

• (A) Identify a location of the vehicle;
• (B) Access a map and identify a plurality of links therein;
• (C) Pre‑screen the links to test whether any is within a given bounds of the current location (the Eqn. 1 distance test, ε);
• (D) If one or more candidate links are found, match the current location to one of them (the "subsequential matching" step);
• (E) Upload power data for the vehicle corresponding to the matched location into a (historical) database.

1. Primary prior art — the examiner's cited references

1A. U.S. Patent Documents

1B. U.S. Patent Application Publications

1C. Foreign Patent Documents

2. Additional prior art of record outside the "Referenced Cited" list (high value)

The examiner's citations are not the only relevant art. Two litigation‑generated sources identify art actually being asserted against this family:

• Unified Patents / Edison Innovations invalidity chart for US 8086364 (unifiedpatents.com/s/Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf). It relies on, inter alia:
  • US 6,453,235 B1 — mapped to "identifying a current location of a vehicle" (navigation controller with GPS receiver).
  • US 2010/0286909 A1 — plug‑in hybrid powertrain with navigation system/processor/GPS for route energy management.
  • US 2005/0228553 A1 (Tryon) — quoted at length (see row 17).
• Bunker Hill Technologies, LLC v. Toyota Motor Corp. (E.D. Tex., Civil Action 2:25‑cv‑01133, filed Nov. 18, 2025; also case 2:26‑cv‑00231) asserting US 8086364 against Toyota. (Stanford NPE database, npe.law.stanford.edu/case/308840.)

Note on the litigation: Because the patent is in active litigation (and had a prior IPR challenge), the strongest §102/§103 art is likely the art identified in those proceedings, not the examiner's original citation list. If the goal is a validity/anticipation opinion, the Unified Patents chart and the USPTO PTAB record (ptacts.uspto.gov) should be examined in full.

3. Consolidated §102 anticipation assessment by claim

(Mapped to the three independent claim categories, since the literal claim set was not in the supplied text.)

Bottom line: The examiner's cited references are predominantly background/navigation and hybrid‑control art. The references most likely to be material are US 5,270,937 (map‑matching) and US 2005/0228553 (Tryon) (route‑prediction energy management). Neither, on the face of the record retrieved, appears to disclose the pre‑screening (distance‑test) step combined with the subsequential map‑matching step and the upload of vehicle power data keyed to the matched map link — which is the apparent point of novelty of US 8086364. No cited reference was found to anticipate a full independent claim.

4. Confidence and verification notes (read before relying on this)

• High confidence: the reference identifiers and dates in §1 (from Justia) and the "map position determining apparatus" title for US 5,270,937 (Google Patents).
• Medium/low confidence: the titles/descriptions of most of references #2–#25. I could confirm a few titles; for the remainder I have described the subject matter category and explicitly flagged "title not confirmed." I did not fabricate titles. You should pull each reference's first page (Google Patents / USPTO PatentCenter) to confirm the title before using this in a legal filing.
• Not verified: the literal claim numbers and text of US 8086364 (absent from the supplied text and not retrieved in full).
• Exact identifiers preserved: US5270937, US5422815, US5488559, US5948043, US6507127, US6949897, US7003397, US7117087, US7197392, US7360615, US7512486; US2002/0072849, US2003/0015358, US2003/0015874, US2003/0201912, US2004/0210383, US2005/0228553, US2008/0091347, US2008/0119982, US2008/0262668, US2008/0319596; EP 0811757, EP 2000377, JP 7063570, JP 9005096 — all reproduced without alteration.

Recommended next step: provide the issued claim set and the USPTO PTAB/Unified Patents record so the §102 mapping can be done element‑by‑element rather than at the independent‑claim‑category level.

I'll start by verifying what prior art is actually associated with this patent, since the page text supplied to me was truncated before the full "Prior Art" / "Similar Documents" / "Cited By" sections.

Let me pull the actual citation/reference list for this patent from a source that renders the front-page references.

Good — I found a Unified Patents invalidity chart for this exact patent. Let me pull its contents and the full claim set.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 8,086,364 B2

"System and method for operation of electric and hybrid vehicles"
35 U.S.C. § 103 (pre-AIA, given the 2009–2010 filing dates)

0. Important threshold caveat about the "Prior Art section"

I have to flag a sourcing problem before giving you the analysis, because it materially affects how much weight you can put on it.

The page content supplied to me does not contain a Prior Art / Citations section. The text provided is the Google Patents rendering of US8086364B2 (source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US8086364](/patent/US8086364)/en) and it is truncated in the middle of the "Detailed Description," at the sentence:

"According to one embodiment, at block 238 a determination is made whether sev—"

Everything that normally follows on a Google Patents page — Patent Citations, Cited By, Similar Documents, and the prior-art search-report entries — was cut off. So the instruction "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page" cannot be executed literally against the material I was given: that section is not present in my source. What is present, and what I can legitimately use, is:

1. The family/priority entries (e.g., priority claimed from US12/401,726 → US8024082B2; foreign family members JP5859732B2, EP2368751B1, CN102189994B).
2. The applicant's own characterizations of the prior art in the Background and Summary (conventional hybrid control, terrain/elevation/topography-based route control, GPS map-matching, and the admission that "conventional algorithms for determining a position within a map via a GPS sensor can be computationally intensive or burdensome").
3. Reassignment and litigation data (GE → GE IP Licensing → Dolby IP Licensing → Edison Innovations → Bunker Hill Technologies; EDTX cases 2:25-cv-01133 and 2:26-cv-00231).

To fill the gap I ran searches, which surfaced a Unified Patents invalidity chart prepared against this specific patent (Edison Innovations LLC – US8086364 invalidity chart, https://www.unifiedpatents.com/s/Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf) citing at least US-20100286909-A1, US-20050228553-A1, and US-6453235-B1. Those are third-party sources, not the page's own Prior Art section, and I have not independently verified their bibliographic dates or full disclosures. I say so explicitly rather than presenting them as if they came from the page.

1. The patent and the claim set actually at issue

Claim-text caveat. The claims themselves are also absent from my source (another consequence of the truncation). The page's "Definitions" section is Google's auto-extracted description text and quotes the Summary of the Invention paragraphs ("A system for operating an electric or hybrid-electric vehicle includes a computer programmed to…"), which track the published application US2010/0235030A1, not necessarily the granted claims. A third-party rendering of the granted patent (Justia, https://patents.justia.com/patent/8086364) shows a narrower issued claim 1 than the published application, namely:

Claim 1. An electric or hybrid-electric vehicle comprising a computer programmed to: (a) identify a current location of a vehicle; (b) access a map within a database and identify a plurality of links therein; (c) pre-screen the plurality of links to identify if any of the plurality of links is within a given bounds of the current location; and (d) if one or more possible links are identified, then: calculate a distance from the current location to one identified link of the one or more possible links; if the calculated distance, and a plurality of previously identified current locations, are within a given distance to the one identified link, then forgo calculating the distance to the one identified link when determining a subsequent current location; and upload power data for the vehicle corresponding to the subsequently determined current location into the database, the uploaded power data corresponding to the one identified link.

Dependent claims 2–8 add: pre-screening using the maximum link length in the database (2); subsequential-matching algorithm (3); off-road determination when no link is found (4); K consecutive off-road locations → set next M locations off-road (5); acquire historical power data for the matched link and control the vehicle based on it (6); GPS (7); nearest link (8). Claim 9 is a method of energy management reciting pre-screening "based on a maximum link length of a historical power-use database," subsequent map matching, and upload of power information into a historical power-use database.

Before you rely on any of this, verify the granted claims in USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter. My element mapping below is keyed to those claim texts and must be re-run against the certified copy.

1.1 The effective filing date is the single biggest § 103 lever

US 8,086,364 is a continuation-in-part. The link/node historical-power-database subject matter comes from the parent (US 12/401,726 → US8024082B2, "System and method for optimizing energy storage component usage," Richter et al., granted 2011-09-20). The map-matching / pre-screening / "forgo calculating the distance" subject matter is, on the face of the specification, new matter added in the CIP — the parent's abstract covers segmenting measured data into links and combining/refining link records, not GPS-to-link pre-screening.

Consequences:

• If the independent claims are supported only by the 2010-03-09 CIP disclosure, their effective filing date for § 102/103 purposes is 2010-03-09, not 2009-03-11. That widens the prior-art window and makes late-2009/early-2010 references (including US 2010/0286909 A1) potentially available under pre-AIA § 102(e) as of their filing dates.
• Google's own "Anticipated expiration 2029-03-11" assumes the 2009-03-11 date — but term and prior-art dating are different questions, and a CIP's term runs from its own filing date for claims lacking parent support.
• Conversely, if the priority claim to 2009-03-11 holds for a given claim, references published/filed between 2009-03-11 and 2010-03-09 drop out.

This should be the first thing you litigate.

2. Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSA)

A POSA here would have a bachelor's degree in electrical, mechanical, or computer engineering (or equivalent) plus roughly 2–5 years of experience in hybrid/electric vehicle energy management or vehicular navigation systems, and would be familiar with (i) hybrid powertrain architecture and battery state-of-charge control; (ii) GPS-based positioning; and (iii) digital map databases organized as nodes and links with point-to-line distance computations for map matching. Under KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), this person is a person of ordinary creativity, not an automaton.

3. The prior art relied on

3.1 References identified as asserted against this patent (verify each)

3.2 Applicant-admitted prior art (from the specification itself)

The Background is unusually helpful for a § 103 challenge because it concedes the state of the art:

• Conventional hybrids operate with "limited or no information about the environment or terrain and lack predictive capability"; SOC is held "near the midpoint."
• "[D]uring a trip along a route, a control scheme for the vehicle may be based on conventional parameters such as elevation, route, terrain, and other topographical information."
• Historical knowledge "input to a database and made available for future use" so that "after one or more trips along the route, it is possible to adjust the operating or control parameters."
• Most importantly for the independent claims: "due to accuracy tolerances in GPS sensors, GPS trajectories may not align with a road," and "conventional algorithms for determining a position within a map via a GPS sensor can be computationally intensive or burdensome," so useful data "may be lost … when the algorithm for determining a vehicle location in a map database and uploading data to the historical database becomes overwhelmed and is unable to keep up with the realtime data acquisition rates."

That last passage is a built-in statement of the problem and of the prior art's content: map matching to a link, and uploading power/statistical data keyed to that link, are admitted to be known. The alleged invention is an efficiency improvement to a known map-matching-plus-upload pipeline.

4. Element-by-element mapping of independent claim 1

Independent claim 9 tracks the same structure with two additional wrinkles: pre-screening "based on a maximum link length of a historical power-use database" (the l_max + 2ε bound of Eqn. 1 in the spec) and matching "via a subsequential matching algorithm." Dependent claim 6 (control the vehicle based on the acquired historical data) maps cleanly onto US 2005/0228553 A1 and US 2010/0286909 A1. Claim 7 (GPS) maps onto US 6,453,235 B1. Claims 4–5 (off-road flag; K→M latching) have no explicit reference in what I found and rest on "routine optimization" reasoning (see Ground 3).

5. Proposed § 103 grounds

Ground 1 — Claims 1–9 obvious over US 6,453,235 B1 in view of US 2005/0228553 A1 and US 8,024,082 B2

Coverage. '235 supplies GPS-derived location plus the link/node map database. '553 supplies the hybrid energy-management system that records location-indexed driving/energy patterns and controls power generation and battery transfer based on them — satisfying claim 6 and the "upload power data / control based on it" concept. '802 supplies the link-segmented historical power-use database with power data stored under link IDs, and the step of comparing vehicle position to link end-node and interpolated node positions.

Motivation. All three are in the same field of endeavor — vehicular navigation and hybrid vehicle energy management — and '553 and '909 show that the art had already merged GPS/map/route prediction with hybrid power control. A POSA seeking to make the recorded power data usable in real time must associate each GPS reading with a specific road link; that is the ordinary and expected function of a map-matching navigation system. Performing a known map-matching step on a known link-database to populate a known link-keyed power database is "the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions." KSR, 550 U.S. at 417.

Result would be predictable. The matched link and the uploaded power record are the same as what the patent produces; only the amount of computation differs.

Weakness. Neither '235 nor '553, as cited, expressly discloses the bounded pre-screening test or the "forgo calculating the distance" step. Ground 1 gets you the architecture and the data flow; it does not, on its own, dispose of the two crux limitations.

Ground 2 — Claims 1–9 obvious over US 2010/0286909 A1 in view of US 8,024,082 B2

Coverage. '909 supplies a hybrid vehicle controller with GPS 50, navigation processor 44, and storage 54, using map/route data to decide how the battery is used — i.e., map-driven energy management. '802 supplies the link-segmented, link-ID-keyed power database and the position-to-link/node comparison.

Availability caveat (critical): '909 appears to be a 2010 publication. Whether it is prior art at all depends entirely on (i) its actual filing date and (ii) whether the challenged claim is entitled to 2009-03-11 or only to 2010-03-09. Establish the filing date before relying on this ground. If '909 was filed after 2010-03-09, it is not prior art to the CIP claims and Ground 2 collapses.

Motivation. Same as Ground 1, plus the express suggestion within '909 that map geometry and energy state be reasoned about together, which supplies "a reason to modify" the location-to-link step to feed the energy controller.

Ground 3 — The "pre-screen" and "forgo calculating the distance" limitations are obvious as routine optimization over the admitted prior art

This is the ground I would develop hardest, because the specification hands it to you. The applicant admits: (a) map matching of GPS positions to road links is conventional; (b) such algorithms are "computationally intensive or burdensome"; (c) the consequence is that the upload pipeline "cannot keep up with the realtime data acquisition rates," so data is lost. The claimed remedy is:

• Pre-screen the whole link set with a cheap bound before computing real distances — in the spec, compare max(a,b) against l_max + 2ε (Eqn. 1), where l_max is simply the maximum link length in the database. That is a bounding-box / triangle-inequality filter, a textbook computational-geometry technique for discarding candidates cheaply. Selecting the threshold (5 m vs. 100 m) is an admitted design choice tied to GPS accuracy.
• Skip recomputation when a run of positions is already known to be within the bound of the same link — i.e., caching the last match and latching it while successive positions satisfy the distance test. This is the classic "hysteresis / last-known-state" optimization used to avoid redundant work on streaming data.
• Claims 4–5 (off-road flag; K consecutive off-road → force next M off-road) — again a latching/short-circuit optimization; the spec itself justifies it in pure efficiency terms: "any loss of such historical data is considered to be minimal against an overall reduction in computational demand." That is an express statement that the designer traded a small accuracy loss for speed — the definition of an obvious engineering trade-off.

Legal framing. Under KSR, where the problem is known and the solution is a familiar efficiency technique applied to known elements, the claim is obvious; "the combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." The claimed steps do not change the principle of operation of the underlying map-matching/upload pipeline — they merely do less of it. A POSA facing the admitted real-time-throughput problem would have been motivated to (i) filter candidates before computing distances, and (ii) avoid recomputing a distance that was already computed for a link that is obviously still the current one.

Evidentiary gap. To make Ground 3 stick you need either a reference or expert testimony establishing that candidate pre-screening and match-latching were known or routine in map matching as of the critical date. I did not verify such a reference and will not invent one — treat this as a search assignment, not a finished ground.

Ground 4 — Dependent claims

• Claim 2 / claim 9 (maximum link length bound): the l_max term is read directly out of the database's own contents; nothing more than using a known maximum of a known data set as a screening radius.
• Claim 3 / 9 (subsequential matching): trajectory/sequence-based matching (using a sequence of positions rather than one point) was a standard map-matching approach; the specification uses the term as though it were a known technique.
• Claim 6 (control based on historical data): squarely US 2005/0228553 A1 and US 2010/0286909 A1 (and, as background, the parent '802, which computes expected power usage and biases SOC setpoints from stored link data).
• Claim 7 (GPS): US 6,453,235 B1.
• Claim 8 (nearest link): the defining rule of point-to-curve map matching.
• Claims 4–5: routine latching optimizations as described in Ground 3.

6. Motivations to combine — articulated

1. Same field / reasonably pertinent to the problem. Hybrid energy management and vehicular navigation/map matching are the two arts implicated by the claim language ("links," "map," "power data"), and the prior art itself (US 2005/0228553 A1; US 2010/0286909 A1) already joins them. No hindsight is needed to reach the combination; the art had already made it.
2. Known problem in the prior art, with the solution stated in the reference. The admitted failure mode — a map-matching/upload algorithm overwhelmed by real-time data rates — supplies the "reason to modify" the known system to pre-screen and to skip redundant distance computations.
3. Predictable results, no change in principle of operation. The vehicle still matches to a link, still uploads power data keyed to that link, still controls the energy storage component the same way. Only computational load drops.
4. Design incentives / market forces. Processors in embedded vehicle controllers are cost- and power-constrained; reducing per-position computation to keep up with a fixed sampling rate is exactly the "demand for a cheaper, faster device" rationale endorsed in KSR. The patent's own stated benefit is a smaller, cheaper energy storage component obtained purely by better use of existing information — a cost-driven, predictable engineering result.
5. No teaching away. Nothing in the identified art disparages pre-screening, candidate filtering, or state-latching. The specification's own trade-off statement ("minimal" data loss for "overall reduction in computational demand") shows the exchange is one a POSA would accept.

7. Secondary considerations

• No evidence of unexpected results appears in the specification. The asserted benefits — reduced computation, fewer dropped data points, better use of a smaller battery — are the direct and expected consequences of the admitted problem and of the prior art's known architecture.
• Litigation alone is not probative of non-obviousness. The page records EDTX suits 2:25-cv-01133 and 2:26-cv-00231 against the current assignee Bunker Hill Technologies LLC. Any commercial-success or licensing argument would need a demonstrated nexus between the asserted products/licenses and the specific claimed features — and the claims' distinguishing features (pre-screening and skipped recomputation) are internal computational details unlikely to drive purchases.
• Government rights. Contract No. MA-04-7001 (Federal Transit Administration, U.S. DOT) gives the Government a paid-up license and march-in-type rights — relevant to standing/licensing strategy, not to § 103.

8. Verification checklist before you rely on any of this

1. Pull the certified claim set (Patent Public Search / PatentCenter / the printed patent). My claim text came from third-party renderings, and the page's "Definitions" text mirrors the published application, which is broader than the granted claims.
2. Establish the effective filing date claim-by-claim. Determine, from US 12/401,726 / US 8,024,082, whether the pre-screening and "forgo calculating the distance" limitations have § 112 support in the parent. If not, the window is 2010-03-09.
3. Verify publication and filing dates for US 6,453,235 B1, US 2005/0228553 A1, and especially US 2010/0286909 A1 — its availability is date-critical.
4. Handle the parent (US 8,024,082 B2) carefully. It shares inventors (Richter, Yan) and was commonly owned by GE; pre-AIA § 102(e) requires the reference be "by another," and pre-AIA § 103(c) disqualifies commonly owned § 102(e)/102(f)/102(g) art for § 103 purposes. Use '802 primarily as background/admitted knowledge or for dependent-claim features, and confirm inventor overlap before citing it as § 103 art.
5. Find express art for the two crux limitations — bounded candidate pre-screening in map matching, and match-latching/skipping of redundant distance computations. Ground 3 is legally sound in its KSR logic but currently lacks an explicit reference.
6. Confirm the Unified Patents chart (https://www.unifiedpatents.com/s/Edison-Innovations-LLC-US8086364-invalidity-chart.pdf) is complete and current, since my identification of US 6,453,235 B1, US 2005/0228553 A1, and US 2010/0286909 A1 derives from it rather than from the page's own citation list.

Bottom line: the strongest § 103 theory is not that any single reference anticipates the pre-screening step, but that the patent as a whole is a computational-efficiency improvement to a pipeline the applicant expressly admits was known — GPS-to-link map matching feeding a link-keyed historical power database for hybrid energy control — where the two distinguishing steps (bounding-based link pre-screening; skipping a distance computation when a run of positions is already within the bound of the same link) are predictable applications of familiar techniques to a recognized problem. That is a KSR case, and it is strengthened every time the specification explains its own trade-offs in throughput-versus-accuracy terms.