US 10830572

I'll search for this specific patent number across USPTO and litigation sources.

Let me run a few more targeted searches for litigation and docket activity.

US Patent 10,830,572 — Analyst Summary

Search caveat on the identifier. The bare string 10830572 is not globally unique. My search also surfaced EP application 10830572.3 (Deere & Company, "Coordination of vehicle movement in a field," granted as EP 2499546) — a completely unrelated filing. Everything below is restricted to US 10,830,572 B2, per your instruction not to auto-correct or conflate identifiers.

Bibliographic data (from the authoritative full text)

Abstract (verbatim)

"A method of receiving EM field magnitude values indicative of a first pose of a mobile unit in relation to a base unit, receiving sensor data from a second sensor associated with the mobile unit, where the sensor data is indicative of a direction of movement of the mobile unit, calculating a set of candidate pose solutions based on the EM field magnitude values, selecting a pose from the set of candidate pose solutions based on the sensor data from the second sensor, and sending the pose to the processor."

Independent claims in plain language

Claim 1 — method. Receive EM field magnitude values indicating a first pose of a mobile unit relative to a base unit. Use one or more processors to compute a set of candidate pose solutions from those magnitudes (the "hemisphere ambiguity" — two mathematically valid solutions on opposite points of a sphere). Detect movement of the base unit, the mobile unit, or both. Receive sensor data from a second sensor (e.g., an IMU/accelerometer/gyroscope/SLAM/GPS) on either unit indicating the direction of that movement. Then select the final pose by (a) calculating expected positions for each candidate pose given the detected movement, and (b) selecting whichever candidate's position most closely matches its corresponding expected position.

Claim 13 — system. A base unit and a mobile unit inside an EM field; an EM transmitter on one of them and an EM receiver on the other; a second sensor on one of them producing a direction-of-movement value; and at least one processor that (i) computes the candidate pose set from the EM magnitudes, (ii) computes expected positions for the candidates in response to detecting movement, and (iii) selects the final pose based on the sensor data and on differences between the expected positions and the candidates' positions.

Notable dependent-claim coverage: first vs. second movement vectors and closest-match selection (cl. 2); movement vector as distance/velocity/acceleration (cl. 3); base unit as EM transmitter or receiver and mobile unit as the complement (cl. 4, 5); base unit = head-mounted display (cl. 6, 15); mobile unit = VR handheld controller (cl. 7, 16); base moving toward the correct candidate → both ranges decrease → pick the candidate whose distance decreased (cl. 8, 17); base moving away → range to both increase → pick the candidate whose distance increased (cl. 9, 18); sensor data referenced to a world frame, with candidates transformed into that frame and matched there (cl. 10, 11, 19, 20); candidate solutions as opposite points of a sphere (cl. 12).

Specification core (FIGS. 5–10): FIG. 5 covers a moving mobile unit disambiguated via IMU-derived direction vs. EM-derived direction; FIGS. 6–8 cover a moving base unit disambiguated by the range-decrease/increase characteristic and by lateral motion that leaves the true pose fixed in the world frame. FIGS. 9–10 are the corresponding flow diagrams. Eq. 1 accounts for the lever-arm acceleration between the IMU and EM receiver (α + ω×(ω×r) + (α×r), i.e., centrifugal + Euler terms).

Litigation / docket check (USPTO + CAFC 2026)

I found no CAFC 2026 docket, no district court action, and no PTAB (IPR/PGR) proceeding naming US 10,830,572. Treat this as "no hits located," not as authoritative proof of non-litigation — my searches are not a substitute for the Docket Navigator / PACER / PTAB APIs, and this patent appears to be a defensive/portfolio asset for Google's VR controller tracking, not a litigated one. I will not infer a case that I cannot cite.

Two things bear noting carefully:

• Search results for "10,830,572" + litigation returned unrelated matters — e.g., DDC Technology LLC v. Google LLC (Google Cardboard viewers, asserted patents US 9,420,075 / 9,010,184 family, dockets 3:22-cv-01263, 3:23-cv-01160) and the Taction Technology v. Apple haptic verdict (US 10,659,885 / 10,820,117, Sept. 25, 2026). Those patent numbers are similar strings, not this patent. I flag them only so they are not misread as hits.
• Prosecution-history observation: the pre-grant publication US 2019/0113325 A1 lists 19 claims, with a claim 1 that does not recite "detecting movement" or "calculating corresponding expected positions" (Justia, patents.justia.com/patent/20190113325; FPO y2019/0113325). The granted patent has 20 claims and a materially narrower independent claim 1 reciting the expected-position calculation and closest-match selection. This indicates amendment during prosecution; the specific reasons are not established by my sources.

Downstream / citing art (useful for FTO context)

• US 11,675,030 B2 (Alken Inc., "Auto-hemisphere detection in a magnetic tracker," granted 2023-06-13) cites the '572 patent.
• Magic Leap cites/uses the same problem space: WO 2020/159827 A1 and CN 112513711 B ("Method and system for resolving hemisphere ambiguity in six degree of freedom pose measurements" / "using position vectors") — note this is a different disambiguation approach (normal-vector · position-vector dot-product sign), not the movement-vector approach claimed here.
• Cited prior art of record includes US 8,180,430 B2 (Biosense Webster, "Resolution of magnetic dipole ambiguity in position tracking measurements") and US 2014/0051983 A1 (Schroeder, "…unlimited hemisphere operation") — the closest conceptual antecedents for hemisphere disambiguation.

Uncertainty statement

Bibliographic data, claims, and the abstract are taken from the authoritative granted text and are high-confidence. The absence of litigation is a negative search result at moderate confidence only. The prosecution-history narrowing between the published application and the granted claims is supported by the secondary sources cited but is not confirmed against the USPTO file wrapper, which I could not retrieve.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10830572 across litigation-tracking sources.

Summary finding: No litigation identified

Based on my searches, I found no litigation known to involve U.S. Patent No. 10,830,572 — neither as an asserted patent in a district court or ITC action, nor as the subject of an IPR/PGR at the PTAB, nor in any CAFC appeal.

I want to be explicit that this is a negative finding subject to the search limitations described below, not a positive confirmation that no case exists.

Why this result is expected

The patent itself shows why no offensive litigation is likely to appear in the public record:

• Assignee: Google LLC (original assignee Google LLC; assignment recorded 2018-01-30, Reel/Frame 044773/0168, naming Chung, Atkinson, Jain, Oganesian, Stein, Patkar, Oliver).
• Title: "Hemisphere ambiguity correction in electromagnetic position tracking systems."
• Prosecution/term data: App. No. 15/814,611; filed 2017-11-16; priority to provisional 62/571,445 (2017-10-12); granted 2020-11-10; status Active, adjusted expiration 2038-11-05.
• A patent held by Google and never asserted by Google of record produces no plaintiff-side docket to find. Confirming that no third party (e.g., a competitor or PAE) has asserted it is the harder part of the negative, and my searches did not surface one.

What the patent's own citation record shows (not litigation)

The Google Patents record for 10,830,572 shows related documents, which are frequently confused with litigation but are not:

• Cited by: US11675030B2 — Alken Inc., "Auto-hemisphere detection in a magnetic tracker" (2023-06-13). This is a later patent citing '572 as prior art; there is no indication Alken sued anyone on '572.
• Family citing this family (forward citations, third-party): WO2020159827A1 (Magic Leap, "Method and system for resolving hemisphere ambiguity in six degree of freedom pose measurements"); CN112513711B (奇跃公司 / Magic Leap, "Method and system for resolving hemispherical ambiguities using position vectors"); US11237649B2 (MediaTek Singapore); US11778160B2 (Microsoft); US11947122B1 (Varjo Technologies); EP4449235A4 (Refract Tech Pte Ltd). These are citation/family relationships in Google's and Espacenet's data, not infringement suits against '572.
• Non-patent citations: the PCT ISR/WO (2018-10-16), the IPRP (2019-12-12) and Written Opinion of the IPEA (2019-09-06) for PCT/US2018/040895, and Traian, A. et al., "Distortion Rejecting Magneto-Inductive Three-Dimensional Localization (MagLoc)," IEEE JSAC, vol. 33, no. 11, Nov. 1, 2015, pp. 2404–2417.
• Family: EP3676962B1, CN111201720B, WO2019074560A1 (PCT/US2018/040895), US20190113325A1. The WO family member is marked "not_active / Ceased" — that is a prosecution status, not litigation.

Search limitation / disclaimer

• I ran the requested searches against general web and litigation-oriented indexed content (Unified Patents, PTAB/PTABCTS, CourtListener/RECAP-derived material, RPX Insight, Justia, CAFC) for the literal string "10830572" and "'572"/"10,830,572" variants. I could not directly query PACER, Docket Navigator, or Unified Patents' caselist in this session, and CourtListener's RECAP mirror is crowd-sourced (coverage gaps exist for cases where no document has been retrieved).
• I did not find any docket, complaint, ITC filing, PTAB petition, or CAFC appeal naming U.S. Patent No. 10,830,572. Per your instruction not to auto-correct identifiers, I reviewed the near-matches and am flagging them so they are not mistaken for the patent:
  • An RPX litigation document referring to "the '872 Patent" in a W.D.N.C. case (plaintiff EFI; defendant Vance) — a different patent number (an '872 patent in the 8,xxx,xxx range), not US 10,830,572.
  • EP application number 10830572.3 (Deere & Company, "Coordination of vehicle movement in a field," PCT/US2010/055898) — a European application number, not the US patent number.
  • Various hits for other Google patents asserted by third parties (e.g., Touchstream, Sonos, Netlist, Blue Spike, Max Sound) — none involve US 10,830,572.

Requested case table

If you need a higher-confidence negative, the next step is a direct query of Docket Navigator or PACER's "patent number" search field for 10,830,572, plus Unified Patents' litigation caselist and the PTAB's Endpoint/P-TACTS for the patent number — none of which I was able to execute directly here.

I'll verify the "no PTAB activity" baseline against live sources before writing the report.

Initial searches surfaced mostly unrelated Google IPRs. Let me target the patent specifically.

Let me check docket aggregators and any litigation-linked challenges.

PTAB Proceedings Report — U.S. Patent No. 10,830,572

Patent: Hemisphere ambiguity correction in electromagnetic position tracking systems
Patent Owner / Current Assignee: Google LLC (Mountain View, CA)
Inventors: Chung, Atkinson, Jain, Oganesian, Stein, Patkar, Oliver
App. No.: 15/814,611 · Priority: 2017-10-12 (prov. 62/571,445) · Filed: 2017-11-16 · Granted: 2020-11-10
Adjusted expiration: 2038-11-05
Source of record: USPTO Open Data Portal structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (canonical); corroborated by web search on 2026-09-29.

Proceedings overview

Zero (0) AIA trial proceedings are on file against US 10,830,572 — no IPRs, no PGRs, no CBM reviews — meaning the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials, and the defensive posture for anyone facing assertion of this patent is that all 20 claims are wholly untested at the Board and enjoy a clean AIA slate: there is no FWD to cite, no cancellation to leverage, and — critically — no § 315(e)(2) estoppel burdening any defendant, so the entire universe of § 102/§ 103 art remains available as a district court defense.

One structural point that reframes the usual "troll" analysis: the patent owner is Google, not an NPE. This patent is defensive portfolio property covering the EM-tracking/controller pose pipeline used in Google's VR hardware line (the specification is expressly framed around an HMD base unit and a handheld controller — FIGS. 2, 5, 9). The absence of PTAB activity here is therefore the expected state, not an anomalous signal: IPRs are filed by accused infringers, and I found no publicly reported assertion campaign in which Google has asserted the '572 against a third party. The usual heuristic ("well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs") does not apply where the patent has not been asserted.

Proceedings

None. There is no proceeding to analyze at claim-level granularity.

Because fabricated detail is worse than none, I am deliberately not populating the per-proceeding template (panel, grounds, institution reasoning, FWD verdict, appeal docket). Those fields have no content for this patent.

What I checked, and what I found

Two identification traps to avoid

These matter because a careless docket search will produce false positives:

1. "The '572 patent" in IPR2023-00884 and IPR2024-00298 is a different patent. Those proceedings concern U.S. Patent No. 11,253,572 (Regeneron Pharmaceuticals / Celltrion, antibody art), not Google's 10,830,572. If a vendor docket or an AI summary collapses the number to "'572," it will attribute an antibody IPR to this EM-tracking patent. It does not belong here.
2. Google appears in many IPRs as petitioner and defendant, not as patent owner here. Google LLC v. Parus Holdings, IPR2020-00847; Google v. AGIS Software, IPR2018-01084; Google's Longitude Licensing-side petitions (N.D. Cal. 3:23-cv-03046) — all unrelated. In those matters Google is the challenger defending against NPE assertion, the inverse of its posture on the '572.

One adjacent data point worth noting

US 11,675,030 B2 — Alken Inc., "Auto-hemisphere detection in a magnetic tracker" (filed 2021-07-28; granted 2023-06-13) is listed as a third-party citation to the '572. Alken is a direct commercial competitor in electromagnetic tracking hardware, and its patent addresses the same hemisphere-ambiguity problem space. That is evidence of a sophisticated, well-resourced party actively working in the same technology — yet Alken chose to file its own patent rather than an IPR against the '572. That is a weak but real corroborating signal that the '572 was never asserted against a party motivated to challenge it.

Strategic summary

Claim status. All claims are UNTESTED: independent claim 1 (method) and independent claim 13 (system), plus dependent claims 2–12 and 14–20, stand exactly as granted on 2020-11-10. There are no CANCELED claims and no SUSTAINED-by-the-Board claims, because the Board has never passed on any of them. For a defendant, this cuts both ways: nothing is dead, so any demand letter can point to all 20 claims; but nothing is Board-ratified either, so a defendant carries no presumption of validity that has survived adversarial PTAB scrutiny.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(2) estoppel is a function of an instituted IPR that reaches a final written decision. With zero proceedings, no petitioner–privy estoppel exists against anyone, and there is no § 325(e) PGR estoppel either. A defendant today has the full § 282 toolkit: anticipation and obviousness on any art, § 112 written description / enablement / indefiniteness, § 101 subject-matter eligibility, and prior public use or on-sale art under § 102(a)(1) that IPR could never have reached (IPR is limited to patents and printed publications under § 311(b)). Practically, this makes the district court the only and entire venue for validity, and it means prior-art claims that would have been foreclosed by a lost IPR are fully live.

Available AIA vehicles going forward. IPR and PGR windows differ here, and it matters:

• IPR (§ 311): available now and until 2038-11-05.
• PGR (§ 321): available only within 9 months of grant, i.e., by approximately 2021-08-10. That window closed roughly five years ago (2026-09-29 today). PGR is no longer an option, which also removes the AIA-transition § 112 and § 101 grounds that only PGR can reach.
• CBM (§ 18): unavailable — the program sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16, and this is a technological invention (electromagnetic position tracking, CPC G01B 7/004 / G01S 5/16), not a "financial product or service."

Pattern signals. No serial-petitioner pattern (no petitioner at all). No PTAB appeal history by the patent owner on this patent. No defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) in the chain — no evidence found, and given the patent owner's identity such a filing is unlikely absent an assertion campaign. There is also no Google-petitioner activity about this patent to confuse with activity against it.

Runway risk. The patent's adjusted expiration of 2038-11-05 gives it roughly 12 more years of life as of today. Combined with the total absence of any validity challenge, this is a long-dated exposure asset in Google's portfolio. If Google ever shifts from defensive accumulation to assertion in the VR/AR controller space — a strategic pivot that has been speculated about in the industry as the standalone VR market consolidates — there is no existing PTAB record for a target to build on.

Recommended next steps

1. If you received a demand or complaint citing US 10,830,572, do not search for an FWD — there isn't one. Confirm the assertion is real (Google asserting, not a licensee or assignee in disguise; verify current ownership and any recorded assignments on the USPTO Assignment database before responding). This report found no public evidence of an assertion campaign, so an unexpected letter citing this patent warrants ownership scrutiny.
2. If the patent is genuinely being asserted, preserve the § 282 defense in full. Because no estoppel attaches, run simultaneous (a) IPR on printed-publication art under § 102/§ 103 and (b) district court invalidity on system art, public use, and § 112. There is no estoppel penalty to sequencing, and no prior petitioner has consumed the best art.
3. Check the § 315(b) clock yourself if you file. One year from service of the complaint. With a 2038 expiry, a late-filed IPR still has 12 years of runway to justify.
4. Do not rely on an inbound PTAB record when counseling on risk. The clean slate here is a negative finding: it means neither hardened-by-survival nor narrowed-by-cancellation. Price the risk on claim scope and prior art, not on Board history.
5. Re-run the check before filing anything. The ODP ingest lags; a petition filed in the last ~60 days may not yet appear in the structured block. Verify directly at PTAB E2E / PTAB Center and on the patent's Google Patents page before you commit to a "no proceedings exist" representation.

Verification caveats (stated plainly)

• Confidence in the zero-count finding: high, but not absolute. The ODP block is authoritative and my independent searches surfaced no contradicting proceeding. What I did not do is query PTAB E2E, Docket Alarm, Patexia, or Docket Navigator directly — those returned no accessible structured record through web search, and I am not going to assert a negative based on tools I did not successfully run. A party with a litigation stake should confirm through a paid docket service before relying on this.
• I found no Federal Circuit appeal, because there is no Board decision to appeal. Any CAFC docket touching this patent would have to arise from a district court judgment, and I found no evidence of one.
• Nothing in this report is legal advice or a clearance opinion. It is a docket-verification exercise.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent across USPTO assignment sources.

Ownership-chain reconstruction — US 10,830,572 B2

Source note. I could not execute a live query against Assignment Center / the legacy Assignment Search in this session (the search interface is JS-driven and not directly callable here), and I did not recover the cover-sheet image for the record below. What I do have is the assignment abstract as carried in the authoritative Google Patents legal-events data for this patent, which reproduces the USPTO reel/frame entry verbatim. I flag the one field I could not retrieve (correspondent of record) rather than guess at it.

Inventors

All seven named inventors appear as assignors on the single recorded assignment to Google LLC (reel 044773/0168), with execution dates between 2017-11-07 and 2017-11-15 — i.e., they signed the assignment before the non-provisional was filed (2017-11-16) and after the provisional (62/571,445, 2017-10-12).

Caveat on employer determination. The assignment record establishes that each named inventor conveyed rights to Google LLC; it does not itself state an employment relationship, job title, or work location. I could not retrieve the cover sheet (which would carry citizenship/residence data — useful corroboration of employment, as seen in other Google recordings such as the "Person Recognition in Video Streams" assignment where each assignor's citizenship and residence is recited). Treat "Google LLC" as a strong inference from the conveyance, not a documented employment fact.

Unusual-pattern check — no signal present. The classic red flag (all inventors departing the original assignee within 12 months of filing, presaging a fire-sale) is not assessable from the assignment record and I found no corroborating evidence of it: the patent issued 2020-11-10 to the same assignee that took the 2017 assignment, and it remains Active with an adjusted expiration of 2038-11-05. There is no downstream transfer, so there is nothing for a departure-and-dump pattern to feed. I do not have employment-tenure data for the seven inventors and will not assert departures I cannot cite.

Original assignee

Google LLC (Delaware limited liability company), 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043. Google LLC is listed both as Original Assignee and Current Assignee on the face of the patent record.

• Line of business: consumer/enterprise software, advertising, and hardware — including the virtual reality / head-mounted-display and handheld-controller products that are the specific commercial context of this patent (the specification is written around an HMD base unit and a VR handheld controller, FIGS. 2, 9–10).
• Did they ship a product embodying the claims? The patent's own specification is directed to the HMD + controller architecture of Google's VR program (title/FIGS. 2 and 9; claim 6 recites a head-mounted display as the base unit, claim 7 a VR handheld controller as the mobile unit). The EM-tracking-plus-IMU hemisphere-disambiguation scheme is exactly the two-sensor (EM + IMU) fusion the spec describes. I did not independently verify a shipping SKU that practices all elements of claim 1; treat "practiced in a shipped product" as supported by the specification's product framing, not proven.
• Corporate status: operating. Google LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of XXVI Holdings Inc., itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG/GOOGL) — this corporate structure is stated on the record in Google's own CAFC filing (Oracle v. Google, No. 17-1118, May 29, 2018). Google Inc. converted to Google LLC under 6 Del. C. § 18-214 with an effective time of 2017-09-30 11:59 p.m. EDT (Delaware Certificate of Conversion; the same conversion was recorded in USPTO assignment records for other Google patents at reel 044277/0001).

Assignment timeline

One recorded assignment. That is the entire chain.

• 2017-11-07 to 2017-11-15 (executed) / recorded 2018-01-30 — Reel 044773/0168
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST; SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS")
  • Assignors: Chung, Sherk; Atkinson, Ian; Jain, Advait; Oganesian, Lucine; Oliver, Robert; Stein, Murphy; Patkar, Saket (seven inventors, individual execution dates spanning 2017-11-07 through 2017-11-15)
  • Assignee: GOOGLE LLC, California (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043), a Delaware LLC
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this session. The abstract carried in the legal-events data does not include the correspondent/attorney of record, and I could not open the reel 044773/0168 cover-sheet image. I am explicitly not filling this field in by inference.
  • Context: Ordinary pre-issuance inventor→employer assignment of the Google VR controller-tracking portfolio. No sale, no securitization, no reorg. Note the sequencing: Google Inc. had already converted to Google LLC (2017-09-30), so the assignee is correctly "Google LLC" and no separate change-of-name record was required for this patent — unlike older Google patents that carry a distinct "CHANGE OF NAME; ASSIGNOR: GOOGLE INC.; REEL/FRAME:044277/0001" entry.

What is absent (and this absence is verified, not assumed): the Google Patents legal-events register for US 10,830,572 shows exactly one assignment-type ("AS") event — 2018-01-30. There is no later assignment, no security interest, no license recordation, no release, and no correction entry on the record. Confirming this against Assignment Center's "patent number" field would be the final step; the base search pages are:

• https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (current system)
• https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (legacy/search index — same underlying records)

Adjacent prosecution events on the same register (not assignments, listed to prevent confusion): fee-payment/entity-status event 2017-11-16; docketed-new-case 2018-01-02; non-final office action mailed 2020-01-22; a further 2020-04-22 prosecution event (entry truncated in the source I retrieved); grant 2020-11-10.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10830572
    2017 : Google Inc converts to Google LLC Sep 30
         : Provisional application filed Oct 12
         : Inventors execute assignment to Google LLC
         : Nonprovisional filed Nov 16
    2018 : Assignment recorded Jan 30 reel 044773 frame 0168
    2019 : Pre-grant publication on Apr 18
    2020 : Patent issued Nov 10
    2023 : Alken auto-hemisphere patent cites this one

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the sense the option is defined (no records, or only the original assignment). This patent has exactly one recorded assignment (inventors → Google LLC, executed 2017-11-07/15, recorded 2018-01-30, reel 044773/0168) and none of the four other verdicts fit: it is not an NPE chain (no shell LLC, no known asserter, no cascade), it is not "operating-company assertion" (Google is not suing anyone on this patent), and it is not a "defensive aggregator" chain (it terminates at an operating company, not RPX/AST/LOT/Unified).

In substance, the correct characterization is: a clean, single-hop inventor-to-operating-company title with no NPE indicators whatsoever. The chain is one link long, ~2.5 months from filing to recordation and executed before the non-provisional was even filed — the textbook employment-assignment pattern. The patent is Active with an adjusted expiration of 2038-11-05, held by Google LLC, and has never been asserted or transferred.

Two residual, explicitly-flagged gaps (not findings): (i) the correspondent of record on reel 044773/0168 — unretrieved, so signal 3 cannot be scored; and (ii) confirmation against Assignment Center's patent-number search that no post-2020 recordation exists. Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (patent-number search for 10830572); legacy mirror at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

Identifier hygiene (carried over from the summary section). Per operating rules I did not auto-correct strings. 10830572 also collides with EP application 10830572.3 (Deere & Company, "Coordination of vehicle movement in a field"); PCT/US2015/044773 and PCT/US2016/044773 are unrelated international filings that surfaced during searches for the reel number; and EA patent 044773 (Artisan Vehicle Systems → Sandvik) is an unrelated Eurasian patent sharing only the digits "044773." None of these are this patent or its assignment.

I'll verify the patent record and each cited reference against live sources before building the § 102 mapping.

Confirmed the '572 record. Now let me examine the cited references individually.

I've hit the session's search-step ceiling, so the below is built from the authoritative granted text plus the live results already retrieved.

Prior-art analysis — US 10,830,572 B2

A. USPTO record confirmation (literal ID match only)

Per your rule, I did not merge the near-string 10830572 matches. The only other literal hit remains the unrelated EP application 10830572.3 (Deere & Company) flagged in the earlier summary — that is a European application number, not this US patent, and it is excluded.

Legal framework used: because the effective filing date is after March 16, 2013, AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 governs. A reference is prior art if it is a printed publication/patent public before Oct. 12, 2017 (§ 102(a)(1)) or a US patent/application publication effectively filed before Oct. 12, 2017 (§ 102(a)(2)). Anticipation under § 102 requires a single reference disclosing every limitation, arranged as claimed — and because claims 2–12 and 14–20 depend from claims 1 and 13, a reference cannot anticipate any dependent claim unless it first anticipates the independent claim. That structural point drives the conclusions below.

B. The eleven patent citations of record, element-by-element

1. US 4,737,794 A — Jones (McDonnell Douglas Corp.)

• Citation: US 4,737,794 A, "Method and apparatus for determining remote object orientation and position." Filed Dec. 9, 1985; granted Apr. 12, 1988 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Foundational 6-DOF EM tracker. Triad source coils → triad sensor coils; 3×3 signal matrix S; closed-form, non-iterative solution via SᵀS normalization for the position unit vector r, quaternion orientation, and range. Includes aperture compensation and blending of prior solutions.
• What it discloses relevant to '572: the express statement of the ambiguity — "There will always be a hemispherical ambiguity that cannot be resolved without further information because a sensor displaced about the origin 180° will produce the same signal set." Also the EM-magnitude→candidate-position computation, and EM TX-in-base / EM RX-in-mobile architecture.
• § 102 mapping: Discloses elements of claim 1 (a)–(b), claims 4–5 (base = EM TX or RX; mobile = complement), and the concept underlying claim 12 ("opposite points of a sphere" — literally the 180° displacement). It does not disclose detecting movement, a second sensor, or expected-position/closest-match selection. Anticipates no claim in full because it lacks the movement-limitation that claim 12 inherits from claim 1.

2. US 8,180,430 B2 — Biosense Webster, Inc.

• Citation: "Resolution of magnetic dipole ambiguity in position tracking measurements." App. 11/368,243 filed Mar. 3, 2006; priority Feb. 22, 2005; granted May 15, 2012 (§ 102(a)(1)). Family: EP 1829477 A2/B1, JP 5265122 B2, CA 2579542.
• Description: Two co-axially offset field generators produce two magnetic fields; the sensor measures both; the processor computes ambiguous position coordinates from ≥8 vectors and invalidates the coordinates not consistently measured, yielding unambiguous coordinates using the known offset.
• § 102 mapping: Discloses claim 1(b) (computing a set of ambiguous/candidate pose solutions from EM magnitudes) and an a-priori-information selection analogue for claim 1(e). It anticipates nothing in full — its disambiguation is geometric (known coil offset), not motion-based.

3. US 8,264,419 B2 — Merlin Technology, Inc.

• Citation: "Locating technique and apparatus using an approximated dipole signal." Priority Nov. 15, 2001; granted Sept. 11, 2012 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Subsurface/underground magnetic dipole locating using an approximated dipole model to derive position from sensed field vectors.
• § 102 mapping: General EM-field-magnitude locating art bearing on the claim 1(a) environment (and the claim 13 TX/RX arrangement). No candidate-set, no motion sensor, no closest-match selection. Anticipates no claim. Cite as § 103 background only.

4. US 8,018,382 B2 — Raytheon UTD Inc.

• Citation: "Positioning system and method." Priority Dec. 16, 2005; granted Sept. 13, 2011 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Magnetic-field positioning system and method for locating a mobile object relative to a base.
• § 102 mapping: Environment-level art for claim 1(a)/claim 13 (base unit, mobile unit, EM transmitter/receiver within a field). Anticipates no claim.

5. US 2014/0051983 A1 — Schroeder, Tobias

• Citation: "Electromagnetic instrument tracking system with metal distortion detection and unlimited hemisphere operation." Priority Aug. 15, 2012; published Feb. 20, 2014 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Surgical EM tracker. Expressly explains the ambiguity — "when the receiver … is at (1 cm,1 cm,1 cm) and … (−1 cm,−1 cm,−1 cm) … identical mutual inductances and magnetic fields [are] measured … This ambiguity … results in the potential for the wrong coordinates to be calculated … since the desired hemisphere is unknown" — and solves it by coil geometry (a 4th non-orthogonal coil on the receiver) plus metal-distortion detection.
• § 102 mapping: The best express evidentiary statement of the problem recited in claim 1(b)/claim 12 (two candidate positions on opposite hemispheres). It is a different solution (extra coil axis) from the claimed movement-based selection, so it anticipates no claim. High-value § 103/background reference.

6. US 2015/0308861 A1 — Purdue Research Foundation

• Citation: "Wireless position sensing using magnetic field of two transmitters." Priority Apr. 25, 2014; published Oct. 29, 2015 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Uses two transmitters to remove the position ambiguity that a single magnetic source creates.
• § 102 mapping: Discloses claim 1(b) plus a second, non-motion mechanism for selecting among ambiguous solutions. Anticipates no claim — again a geometry/redundancy solution, not motion-based.

7. US 2016/0011013 A1 — Sixense Entertainment, Inc.

• Citation: "Method And Apparatus For Synchronizing a Transmitter and Receiver in a Magnetic Tracking System." Priority July 11, 2014; published Jan. 14, 2016 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Wireless magnetic tracking sync. Explains that absent a sync signal "the sign of the received signals is ambiguous, which can create an additional uncertainty in the location of the receiver with respect to its direction from the transmitter" — i.e., the phase/sign source of hemisphere ambiguity — and resolves it by startup synchronization against known locations.
• § 102 mapping: Supplies the reason the EM equations yield dual solutions (relevant to claim 1(b)). No motion sensor; no expected-position matching. Anticipates no claim by itself; it is the § 103 companion to reference 8 below (same applicant, same priority, same spec family).

8. US 2016/0377451 A1 — Sixense Entertainment, Inc. ← closest to a § 102 theory

• Citation: "Method And Apparatus For Correcting Magnetic Tracking Error With Inertial Measurement." Priority July 11, 2014; published Dec. 29, 2016 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: Magnetic tracker (explicitly built on the '794 patent) with an IMU in the tracked device. It acknowledges the '794 hemisphere ambiguity and, at ¶ [0079], discloses: "use signals from multiple frames, i.e., separate time intervals t1 and t2, and base the matching criteria on comparing changes in the position and orientation information between PnO(SigMat(t1)) … and PnO(SigMat(t2)) and IMU_PnO values. The change in position and orientation can be used to estimate angular velocity and linear acceleration, which can be directly compared to the output of the IMU."
• § 102 mapping: This is the only cited reference that discloses, in one document: (i) EM magnitudes → candidate pose (1(a),(b)); (ii) a second sensor (IMU) on the tracked device producing motion data (1(d)); (iii) comparing a first (EM-derived) movement/change vector to a second (IMU-derived) movement vector and matching them — i.e. the substance of claims 2 and 3 (movement vector as velocity/acceleration). It expressly references the hemispherical ambiguity.
  • Caveat: its matching is directed to error correction/synchronization, not to choosing between the two hemisphere candidates, and it does not expressly recite "detecting movement" of the base or mobile unit as the trigger, nor "calculating corresponding expected positions for the set of candidate pose solutions" and "selecting the candidate pose solution whose position most closely matches the corresponding expected position." Under In re Schreiber, the reference need not recognize the claimed advantage — but it still must disclose all limitations. On the present record the 1(e) selection step is not disclosed as such, so a § 102 anticipation of claim 1 is arguable but not clean; claims 2–3 are the strongest § 102 targets (subject to the dependency caveat in § D below). Realistically this reference is a primary § 103 reference in view of references 9/12 (below).

9. US 2016/0259404 A1 — Magic Leap, Inc.

• Citation: "Systems and methods for augmented reality." Priority Mar. 5, 2015; published Sept. 8, 2016 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: AR headset + handheld "totem" with EM and/or optical tracking, and IMU-fused pose.
• § 102 mapping: Discloses the claim 6/7/15/16 environment (HMD base unit; handheld controller mobile unit) and processor-computed EM+IMU combined pose. Anticipates no claim. Note this publication is itself the EPO's [A] citation against Magic Leap's later WO 2020/159827 hemisphere work.

10. US 2016/0377688 A1 — iRobot Corporation

• Citation: "Magnetic field localization and navigation." Priority June 5, 2015; published Dec. 29, 2016 (§ 102(a)(1)).
• Description: A mobile robot localizes/navigates by sensing a magnetic field; heading/motion sensing combined with field measurements.
• § 102 mapping: General-art support for claim 1(a)/1(d) (field magnitude values + a second, non-EM motion sensor). Anticipates no claim.

11. US 2019/0086482 A1 — Google Inc. — special status

• Citation: "Correcting field distortion in electromagnetic position tracking systems." Priority Sept. 18, 2017; published Mar. 21, 2019.
• § 102 status: Published after the '572 critical date, so not § 102(a)(1). It is a US application publication effectively filed Sept. 18, 2017 — before the Oct. 12, 2017 priority date — so it is nominally § 102(a)(2) art, but it is commonly owned by Google LLC, which raises the § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception and likely removes it from prior art. Also, its subject matter is field distortion correction, not hemisphere disambiguation.
• § 102 mapping: Anticipates no claim. Treat as commonly-owned background/§ 103 context at most, and flag the § 102(b)(2)(C) disqualification rather than asserting it as art.

C. Summary § 102 map

Bottom line: No cited reference discloses the claimed core of claim 1 — "detecting movement … calculating corresponding expected positions for the set of candidate pose solutions … selecting the candidate pose solution whose position most closely matches the corresponding expected position" — and claim 13 mirrors it. Because claims 2–12 and 14–20 incorporate claims 1 and 13, no cited reference anticipates any of claims 1–20 as a matter of strict § 102 law on this record. Every reference above functions as § 102(a) art for individual limitations and therefore as § 103 material. The single theory worth probing is a § 102 attack using US 2016/0377451 against claims 2 and 3 (multi-frame EM change vector vs. IMU change vector), and even that requires reading ¶ [0079] as performing hemisphere selection.

D. Non-patent citations of record (§ 102(a)(1) printed publications)

E. Forward citation (not prior art)

US 11,675,030 B2 (Alken Inc., "Auto-hemisphere detection in a magnetic tracker," granted June 13, 2023) cites the '572 patent. It is a "Cited By" reference — it post-dates the '572 and cannot be prior art to it. It is useful only as evidence of the field's continuing work on auto-hemisphere detection.

F. Flags against the earlier sections

1. Minor refinement, not a contradiction. The earlier summary stated the pre-grant publication US 2019/0113325 A1 "lists 19 claims." The Justia/Google claim text retrieved now shows the published version's independent claims as claim 1 (method) and claim 8 (system), with dependent claims continuing at least to 14, and published claim 1 lacking both the "detecting movement" and "calculating corresponding expected positions" limitations — which confirms the earlier note that claim 1 was narrowed during prosecution. The exact published claim count (19 vs. another number) is unverified; treat 19 as the earlier figure and the structural point (two independents, narrower claim 1) as confirmed.
2. No contradiction with the earlier "no litigation identified" finding — nothing retrieved here shows any docket, petition, or ITC filing naming US 10,830,572.
3. Identifier discipline maintained: the '572 patent was not conflated with the Deere EP application 10830572.3, the W.D.N.C. "'872 Patent" (EFI v. Vance), or the Google Cardboard patents (US 9,420,075 / 9,010,184).

G. Uncertainty statement

• Bibliographic data, the claim set, and the citation list are taken from the authoritative granted text and the live USPTO/Google Patents record — high confidence.
• Each reference's disclosure characterisation is drawn from the retrieved abstracts/specifications and, for US 4,737,794 and US 2016/0377451, from their full text — high confidence on those two, moderate confidence on US 8,264,419, US 8,018,382, and US 2016/0377688, which I could not open in full before the search-step limit; their mappings are stated at the environment level only, and I have not over-claimed.
• The § 102(a)(2)/§ 102(b)(2)(C) treatment of US 2019/0086482 A1 rests on its 2017-09-18 filing date and shared Google ownership shown in the record; the exception's applicability is a legal conclusion I am flagging, not asserting.
• A definitive anticipation opinion would require the full USPTO file wrapper (IDS dates, examiner citations, applicant remarks) and full-text review of the three references noted above — neither of which I could retrieve in this session.

I'll ground the analysis in the specific prior-art references of record before mapping them to the claims.

Obviousness Analysis — US 10,830,572 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Building on the claim summary and litigation findings already established. This section assumes the earlier analysis of claims 1 and 13 and does not restate it. All prior art below is the "Citations (10)" list of record on the Google Patents page, plus the non-patent citation (Traian et al., MagLoc).

1. Ground rules and the critical date

The effective filing date is 2017-10-12 (provisional 62/571,445). All ten cited references except one published well before that date:

Flag: US 2019/0086482 A1 is the only cited document that post-dates the publication of the others. It was filed 2017-09-18 — before the '572 critical date — so it is "effectively filed" art under § 102(a)(2). But it is a Google application, and the '572 is a Google patent, so the § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception should remove it from prior art entirely. I would not build a ground on it. (I could not retrieve the '482 assignment record in this session to confirm common ownership; the Google Patents record lists the assignee as "Google Inc.," which is consistent but not dispositive.)

Also note the applicant's own admission. The '572 Background states that EM position tracking systems "generally include a transmitter that generates an EM field using a tri-axis coil to induce a current on a second tri-axis coil," and that the resulting "calculations… can have multiple valid solutions… referred to as 'hemisphere ambiguity.'" That is a binding admission that the EM-tracking hardware and the two-candidate ambiguity are prior art. Only the disambiguation mechanism is in issue.

2. Element-by-element mapping of claim 1

Claim 1 (granted) requires five things:

Conclusion on claim 1: No single reference discloses (c) and (d) and (e) together. The claim is not anticipated. But each limitation is squarely disclosed, and the residual gap is one of substitution — the arithmetic core of the selection step (predict-then-closest-match) comes from Schroeder; the "second sensor / direction of movement" input comes from Sixense '451 or iRobot '688.

3. Proposed grounds

Ground 1 — Schroeder '983 + Sixense '451 (primary; renders claims 1–5, 12–14 obvious)

Schroeder supplies the disambiguation algorithm structure: solve for two candidate positions, model-predict the expected observable for each candidate, and pick the candidate whose prediction best agrees with measurement. Schroeder's own claim 1 and [0029] describe exactly this. Schroeder even anticipates the swap of transmitter/receiver roles that the '572 claims in claims 4/5: "the solutions discussed above create valid solutions since the fourth coil provides the same additional data regardless of whether it is positioned in the transmitter or the receiver" ([0032], patentimages PDF).

Sixense '451 supplies (i) the explicit recognition of the same ambiguity ("a hemispherical ambiguity that cannot be resolved without further information"), (ii) the IMU as the resolving sensor, and (iii) the reason the prior approach was unsatisfactory: Sixense's own startup synchronization "derives the phase information by placing the receiver at one of several known locations and orientations."

Motivation to combine (KSR rationales (A), (B), (D)):

1. Same field, same problem. Both are 6-DOF AC magnetic trackers with a three-coil transmitter and three-coil receiver, and both name "hemispherical ambiguity" as the defect. KSR rationales (A) and (C) apply.
2. Sixense expressly identifies the missing piece and names the sensor. '451 identifies the IMU as the solution to the phase/sign ambiguity and already uses it "from one measurement to the next," i.e., across motion.
3. Known drawback of the identified solution. Sixense's own known-location startup synch imposes a setup burden; the '572 touts exactly this benefit ("performs hemisphere disambiguation without user input… thereby improving the user experience"). Where the primary reference criticizes its own constraint, replacing it is a design choice KSR treats as obvious.
4. Simple substitution. A POSITA would recognize Schroeder's fourth coil and Sixense's IMU as two interchangeable "additional sources of independent information" for the same predict-and-compare test. Substituting one for the other yields a predictable result — rationale (B).
5. Only two candidate solutions exist. Because the candidate set is a set of two, the solution space is finite and small; KSR's "obvious to try" applies with unusual force.

Ground 2 — Ground 1 + iRobot '688 (renders claim 3 and reinforces claims 8/9)

iRobot '688 [0019] discloses a movement detector responsive to distance travelled, speed, and acceleration, generating a movement signal used to determine pose relative to the environment. That directly reads on claim 3's "distance vector, a velocity vector, and an acceleration vector" and on claims 8/9's "movement vector of the base unit… one of a distance vector, a velocity vector, or an acceleration vector." Motivation: iRobot's movement signal is a known, off-the-shelf substitute for IMU-derived motion; predictable result.

Ground 3 — Ground 1 + Magic Leap '404 (renders claims 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20)

Magic Leap '404 discloses an AR system in which the handheld component (totem/controller) houses the EM field emitter, the head-mounted component carries the EM sensors and IMUs, head pose is tracked via IMU+camera SLAM to determine "world coordinates," and the controller determines hand pose "based at least in part on the received magnetic field data and the received sensor data" (US 2016/0259404 A1, Abstract; see also the FIG. 21/22 flow showing "head pose relative to a real-world global coordinate system").

That maps onto:

• claim 6 / 15 (base unit = HMD),
• claim 7 / 16 (mobile unit = VR handheld controller),
• claim 10, 11, 19, 20 (sensor data indicative of position in a world frame; candidate poses converted to and matched in the world frame).

Motivation: Magic Leap and the '572-assignee are direct competitors in the same VR/AR controller-tracking market at the same time; Magic Leap's own flow charts cross-reference an "electromagnetic tracking system and method for augmented reality" provisional (62/128,993). Rationale (C) — improving a similar device in the same way.

Ground 4 — Ground 1 or 3 + Biosense '430 (renders claims 8, 9, 17, 18)

Claims 8/17 (base moves toward the correct candidate → pick the candidate whose distance decreased) and 9/18 (moves away → pick the candidate whose distance increased) are the range-monotonicity variant of disambiguation. Biosense '430 discloses resolving the dipole ambiguity with "a-priori positional information," including an embodiment where the field generator is positioned at different known distances on opposite sides of an axis and the ambiguity is resolved "by comparing the magnitudes of the field strengths," and a further embodiment using a "working volume" to invalidate the out-of-volume mirror solution. A POSITA motivated to generalize Biosense's distance/magnitude comparison to a dynamically measured distance (from the second sensor) arrives at the claimed range-decrease/increase test.

4. Independent claim 13 and the remaining dependents

Claim 13 is claim 1 written as an apparatus and adds nothing structurally new; the same four-reference combination applies, with the EM transmitter/receiver complementation supplied by Schroeder [0032] and Magic Leap '404 (either component may house the emitter). Claim 14's "first movement vectors… second movement vector… final pose selected based on the first and second movement vector" is the Schroeder comparison + Sixense motion-vector pair. Claim 12's "opposite points of a sphere" is expressly disclosed: Schroeder's (1,1,1) / (−1,−1,−1) pair, and Sixense's "displaced 180 degrees about the origin."

Dependent-claim table:

5. The strongest non-obviousness arguments the patent owner would raise

1. "The art taught coil-based, not motion-based, disambiguation." Schroeder '983 and Biosense '430 both resolve the ambiguity by adding coils or static a-priori constraints. An argument that this amounts to teaching away is available but weak: neither reference disparages motion sensors, and KSR requires more than a preference for one of two known techniques.
2. The moving-base limitations (claims 8, 9, 17, 18) are narrow. The base-unit-mounted second sensor plus the specific monotonic range test is the hardest limitation to meet. Biosense '430's "opposite sides of an axis… comparing the magnitudes" is the closest teaching, but it is a static a-priori configuration, not a dynamic one. Expect this ground to be the most contestable.
3. Specification inconsistency to flag (not a § 103 defense). The '572 states "when the range between the correct candidate pose and the base unit 402 decreases, the range to both candidate poses decrease." Given that the two candidates are antipodal about the transmitter origin (as the '572 itself states, and as Schroeder and Sixense confirm), a base moving toward the correct candidate should increase the range to the mirror candidate. If the specification is internally inconsistent here, it bears on written description/enablement of claims 8/17 and 9/18 — and it also weakens the patent owner's ability to claim that the range test produces an unexpected result.
4. No secondary considerations on the record. I found no litigation, no IPR/PGR, and no licensing evidence (per the earlier section), so there is no objective indicia of non-obviousness — no unexpected results, no industry praise, no copied design — to rebut the prima facie case. The '572's stated benefit (disambiguation "without user input") is a recited design goal, and goal-recitation does not rebut obviousness.

6. Bottom line

• Not anticipated by any single reference of record.
• Claim 1 and claims 2–5, 12–14 are likely obvious over US 2014/0051983 A1 (Schroeder) in view of US 2016/0377451 A1 (Sixense) — predict-for-each-candidate + closest-match from Schroeder; IMU-derived motion for the identified hemisphere ambiguity from Sixense.
• Claims 6, 7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20 are likely obvious by adding Magic Leap US 2016/0259404 A1.
• Claims 3 and the movement-vector sub-limitations are reinforced by iRobot US 2016/0377688 A1.
• Claims 8, 9, 17, 18 (range-monotonicity) are obvious but with materially lower confidence, resting on Biosense US 8,180,430 B2 plus the geometric property the '572 itself admits.
• US 2019/0086482 A1 (Google) should be excluded from any ground via the § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception.

Confidence and gaps: Mappings for Schroeder, Sixense '451, Magic Leap '404, iRobot '688, and Biosense '430 are grounded in retrieved abstract/claim/specification text (patentimages PDFs; Google Patents; uspto.report; patents-review.com — e.g., https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/3f/0c/5c/46bfc0088ac3f8/US20140051983A1.pdf, https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/60/d2/cd/3de5e9ce66e94b/US20160377451A1.pdf, https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140051983, https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160377451). I did not obtain the full text of US 4,737,794, US 8,018,382, US 8,264,419, US 2015/0308861, or US 2016/0011013 in this session, so those are cited only as cumulative EM-tracking background — I make no element-specific mapping to them that I cannot cite. The Traian MagLoc paper was returned as a non-patent citation of record but I could not retrieve its content, so I do not rely on it.