US 10976163

I'll verify the patent against external sources and check for any 2026 litigation activity.

Let me run one more targeted check for litigation and the claim set.

I have no litigation hits. Let me try to pin down the exact US claim set.

US Patent 10,976,163 — Summary

Caveat on scope of verification: I worked primarily from the full authoritative patent text you supplied (fetched from Google Patents) and corroborated it against a handful of independent register sources. I did not obtain a verbatim copy of the granted US claim set from USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search, and I found no district-court or CAFC 2026 docket activity for this number. Those two items carry explicit uncertainty flags below.

Bibliographic data

Discrepancies I noticed and am reporting rather than reconciling:

• Filing date: Google Patents and the EP register say 2016-11-09; Unified Patents shows application date 2016-11-08 and priority date 2015-11-09. The PCT filing date on the register (09/11/2016, i.e., 9 Nov 2016) supports 2016-11-09. I treat the Google Patents values as authoritative per your instruction.
• Issue/grant date: Google Patents says 2021-04-13; Unified Patents says grant date 2021-04-12 (and expiration 2038-03-24 rather than -03-25). One-day offset, likely allowance-vs-issue certificate convention.
• Applicant naming: The PCT/EP family records list the applicant as THALES VISIONIX, INC. (Clarksburg, MD) for the international filing, whereas the granted US and later EP records list Thales Defense & Security, Inc. (same Clarksburg, MD address) after a 2020 assignment. These are related but distinct legal entities; the US patent as listed shows Thales Defense & Security, Inc. as both original and current assignee.

Abstract (as granted)

A method, a system, and a computer-readable medium for tracking position and orientation of a pedestrian. The system tracks a head position or head orientation of the pedestrian, and a foot position or foot orientation of the pedestrian. The system determines a first heading or position uncertainty associated with the head position or the head orientation of the pedestrian, and determines a second heading or position uncertainty associated with the foot position or the foot orientation of the pedestrian. Moreover, the system determines which of the first heading or position uncertainty or the second heading or position uncertainty is smaller. The system transfers the first heading or position uncertainty to a device or system portion for foot position, or transfers the second heading or position uncertainty to a device or system portion for head position.

Plain-language overview of the claims

Important uncertainty note: The text you supplied includes the specification, abstract, and "Definitions," but not the enumerated claim set. The claim characterizations below are drawn from (a) the granted abstract, (b) the SUMMARY section, (c) the FIG. 4A/4B flowchart blocks 402–420, and (d) the EP 4194811 A1 divisional claim/clause set for the same family — which is the closest verbatim claim language I could retrieve. I therefore describe the subject matter of the independent claims with high confidence, but I cannot certify the exact wording or claim numbering of the US grant.

Claim 1 — Method (independent). A method of tracking a pedestrian's position and orientation comprising the ordered steps of:

1. tracking, with a head-mounted tracking device, a head position and/or head orientation;
2. tracking, with a foot-mounted tracking device, a foot position and/or foot orientation;
3. determining a first heading or position uncertainty associated with the head position/orientation;
4. determining a second heading or position uncertainty associated with the foot position/orientation;
5. determining which of the two uncertainties is smaller; and
6. transferring the first uncertainty to the foot-mounted device when the first is smaller, or transferring the second uncertainty to the head-mounted device when the second is smaller — the transferred value being used to correct the tracked pose of the receiving device.

The point of novelty is the bidirectional, uncertainty-arbitrated handoff: the better-informed sensor (e.g., the camera/VIO head tracker when landmarks are visible; the ZUPT foot tracker when visual features fail) pushes its heading/position estimate to the weaker one, resolving drift and yaw misalignment automatically.

Independent system claim. A system comprising a memory and at least one processor configured to perform the same tracking/determining/comparing/transferring operations. The family also recites a "means-for" style system variant in the EP clause set (Clause 13), though in the US case that format is only proper if expressly recited as "means for" — the specification's closing sentence states no claim element is to be construed as means-plus-function unless expressly so recited.

Independent computer-readable-medium claim. A non-transitory CRM storing control logic that causes a computer to perform the method steps above.

Representative dependent-claim subject matter

• Auto-alignment trigger: transferring the uncertainty automatically when the head-mounted device recognizes at least a portion of the foot-mounted device (e.g., the HMD visually recognizes the shoe).
• Correction steps: correcting foot position/orientation using the transferred first uncertainty; correcting head position/orientation using the transferred second uncertainty.
• Landmark recognition: tracking the head pose by attempting to recognize one or more visual landmarks.
• Map registration: providing absolute map registration based on the recognized landmarks (SLAM).
• GPS-denied operation: tracking foot position/orientation in a GPS-denied environment.
• Yaw/heading linkage: first uncertainty related to first yaw information; second uncertainty related to second yaw information.
• Sensor specifics: monochrome visible-light camera or digital night-vision image sensor; applying visual-inertial odometry to those images using a Kalman filter.

Litigation / CAFC 2026 check

I searched for district-court complaints and Federal Circuit 2026 dockets naming this patent and found nothing. There is no evidence of any asserted litigation or appeal involving US 10,976,163 as of the date of my searches. I cannot rule out activity that is not indexed by the sources I can reach (e.g., very recent filings, ITC Section 337 actions, or sealed dockets), and my search tools do not query PACER or the CAFC docket directly — so this should be read as "no hits found," not "definitively none exists."

Family context (for completeness): PCT/US2016/061184 → WO 2017/083420 A1; EP 3374737 B1 (granted 2022-11-23; Thales Defense & Security, Inc. as proprietor) and EP 4194811 A1 (divisional, filed 2022-11-22). The EP national registrations for LU and NL show a lapse in late 2023, while the UK record shows the patent still in force with a next renewal due 2026-11-09 — i.e., the European coverage is fragmenting geographically, but the US patent remains active with an adjusted expiration of 2038-03-25.

Key references cited on the face of the disclosure

• U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,159, Motion Tracking (incorporated by reference).
• Hesch et al., "Camera-IMU-based localization: Observability analysis and consistency improvement," IJRR 2013.
• Foxlin, "Pedestrian tracking with shoe-mounted inertial sensors," IEEE CG&A 25.6 (2005).
• Foxlin, Calloway & Zhang, "Improved registration for vehicular AR using auto-harmonization," ISMAR 2014.
• Zheng et al., "Tour the world: building a web-scale landmark recognition engine," CVPR 2009.

Note that Calloway, the sole named inventor here, is a co-author of the ISMAR 2014 auto-harmonization paper — the closest conceptual ancestor of the claimed "heading auto-alignment" and a likely prosecution focus.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10976163 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more specifically for litigation records and the patent owner's enforcement activity.

Let me check the Unified Patents litigation portal and other litigation dockets directly for this patent.

Litigation Search Results for U.S. Patent No. 10,976,163

Bottom line: I found no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 10,976,163.

What I searched

I ran targeted queries against patent-litigation aggregators and dockets, including:

• Unified Patents patent/litigation portal — the record page for US-10976163-B2 (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10976163-B2)
• Google Patents full text (authoritative copy provided)
• General web/news searches for the patent number, the patent title ("Robust vision-inertial pedestrian tracking with heading auto-alignment"), and the assignee (Thales Defense and Security Inc. / Thales Visionix Inc.)

Findings

1. No district court or CAFC litigation was identified.

• The Unified Patents record for US-10976163-B2 shows only bibliographic and prosecution data (application 15/765,688; inventor Thomas Calloway; original assignee Thales Visionix Inc.; current assignee/parent Thales Defense and Security Inc.; grant 2021-04-13; adjusted expiration 2038-03-25). It reflects no litigation entries for this patent.
• Searches for the patent number returned only unrelated hits — for example, drug-patent cases at drugpatentwatch.com whose case numbers merely contained the string "10976163" (e.g., Esperion Therapeutics v. Alkem Labs, 2:24-cv-06263), which are not this patent and are excluded per your instruction to disregard similar-looking numbers.
• A Google Patents–indexed court document (N.Y.S.D. 1:23-cv-11195) contained "10976163" only as part of a news URL, not a patent-in-suit.

2. Related Thales litigation exists — but it involves DIFFERENT patents. These should not be confused with the '163 patent:

Note that the '163 patent's specification expressly incorporates U.S. 6,474,159 by reference, which explains why searches surface the Thales Visionix "Motion Tracking" litigation — but that case did not assert the '163 patent.

3. No PTAB proceedings identified. My searches did not surface any IPR/PGR or reexamination directed at U.S. 10,976,163.

Caveats on this conclusion

• This is a negative finding, not a certification. I was unable to run exhaustive Docket Navigator / PACER / Docket Alarm / Lex Machina queries within the scope of this session, and those paywalled databases are the definitive sources for a full freedom-to-practice or clearance check.
• The patent issued on 2021-04-13, well after the 2015 priority date, and is held by a defense contractor (Thales Defense and Security Inc.). Patents in this type of portfolio are commonly cross-licensed or covered by government-authorization/consent provisions rather than asserted in district court, which is consistent with the absence of recorded litigation.
• Corresponding foreign family member EP 3,374,737 (granted 23 Nov 2022) exists; the Netherlands and Luxembourg national registers show it as lapsed (NL deemed not granted; LU lapsed 09 Nov 2023). I found no opposition or foreign litigation records for it, though I did not conduct an exhaustive EPO opposition-register search.

Recommended next steps for a definitive answer

1. Query Docket Navigator or Lex Machina by patent number (not just party name) for U.S. district court, ITC, and PTAB coverage.
2. Search PACER Case Locator for the patent number across all districts.
3. Search the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board and USPTO Patent Assignment Search (the latter to trace whether the '163 patent has been assigned to a litigious entity since grant).
4. Check Unified Patents' "Litigation" caselist and RPX Insight for this patent's family.

If you'd like, I can draft the specific query strings for each of those databases so you or a paralegal can run them.

PTAB Proceedings on US 10,976,163 — Analyst Report

Patent: US 10,976,163 B2 — Robust vision-inertial pedestrian tracking with heading auto-alignment
Patent Owner: Thales Defense and Security, Inc. (original and current assignee per the structured record)
Sole named inventor: Thomas Calloway
Priority: 2015-11-10 (provisional 62/253,637, via PCT/US2016/061184 filed 2016-11-09); US national phase application 15/765,688
Grant/publication: 2021-04-13 · Adjusted expiration: 2038-03-25 · Legal status: Active
Analysis date: 2026-09-28

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block from the USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for US 10,976,163 (count = 0; active 0 / claims invalidated 0 / claims sustained 0 / settled 0 / institution denied 0). My independent web sweep (PTAB petition/document dockets, board decisions, Federal Circuit materials, and the Unified Patents patent portal) surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, termination, or CAFC appeal naming this patent. I also found no evidence of district-court assertion of the '163 patent in my searches, so I cannot describe a litigation-driven IPR timeline — that is a limitation of this report, not a finding that no suit exists.

Bottom-line defensive posture: the patent is untested and un-narrowed at the PTAB — all originally granted claims are intact and presumptively valid, and no petitioner has generated a claim-cancellation or estoppel benefit you can borrow. That cuts both ways: you get no free invalidity roadmap and no institution-denial precedent to cite, but you also face no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and can build a first-generation IPR on art the Examiner never saw, in an orderly fashion, without racing another petitioner to the Board.

Proceedings

None. There is no proceeding to report at the required per-proceeding granularity (proceeding number, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, settlement, appeal). I will not manufacture a docket number, APJ panel, or claim-level disposition, because none exists in the record. Everything below is therefore a forward-looking posture assessment built on the patent's own bibliographic and prosecution facts.

Timing windows that bound your options (as of 2026-09-28)

• PGR: closed. Nine months from issuance ran out on or about 2022-01-13; no PGR is possible now. (Also of limited use here — the § 112-focused grounds PGR uniquely permits are gone.)
• CBM: unavailable. The transitional covered-business-method program sunset on 2020-09-16, and this patent is a pedestrian/AR motion-tracking patent, not a financial-services business method in any event.
• IPR: open and the only live AIA vehicle. Post-grant review under § 311 is available for § 102/§ 103 grounds on patents and printed publications. The nine-month post-grant bar expired in 2022, so a petition can be filed today.
• § 315(b) one-year bar: the clock starts only if and when you are served with a complaint alleging infringement of the '163 patent. Nothing in the record indicates that has happened. If a demand letter has arrived without a complaint, note that a letter alone does not start the bar — but do not burn the window once a complaint is served.
• § 315(a)(1) DJ caveat: if you file a declaratory-judgment action of invalidity first, your own IPR is barred. Sequence the filings deliberately.

Strategic summary

Claim status. I cannot state a claim-by-claim picture, and I will not guess at claim numbering: because no IPR was ever filed, no claim of the '163 patent has been canceled, disclaimed by certificate, or held unpatentable by the Board. Every claim that issued on 2021-04-13 remains in force, with the patent's statutory term running to an adjusted expiration of 2038-03-25 — roughly eleven and a half years of remaining exposure. That long runway is the single most important fact for a defendant: this is not a near-dead patent to be waited out. Note also that the specification expressly incorporates U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,159 ("Motion Tracking"), which issued 2002-11-05 and belongs to the Thales patent family; that incorporated disclosure is part of the '163 written description and is fair game for claim-construction and § 112 arguments.

Estoppel landscape. With no petitioner, no § 315(e)(2) statutory estoppel attaches to anyone, and no petitioner-side prior-art combination has been "locked out." Two consequences follow. First, defensive-side estoppel risk is self-inflicted only: if you file an IPR and lose on a ground, § 315(e)(2) will bar you from re-running that ground (or any ground you reasonably could have raised) in the parallel district-court case, and SAS/no-partial-institution practice means you will get a ruling on every claim you challenge. Second, because the Board has never construed a single term of this patent, you are not bound by any prior PTAB claim construction (which today would be Phillips), and the Patent Owner has no Board-friendly record to point to. Practically: the § 103 art space is wide open, and the classic candidates for this subject matter — shoe-mounted IMU / ZUPT pedestrian dead-reckoning art (Foxlin), camera-IMU VIO and observability work (Hesch), step-detection on mobile phones (Aubeck), and landmark-recognition systems (Zheng) — were cited by the Patent Owner itself in the background section of this very specification. Art that appears on the face of the patent is not automatically disqualified (unlike art already considered on the merits during prosecution), but any ground built on those references must explain what the Examiner missed, not merely re-cite them. See Advanced Bionics and the § 325(d) discretionary-discretion framework, which now runs through the Director's Magnolia Medical Technologies v. Kurin line of reasoning (IPR2026-00097, precedential) — expect a § 325(d) and § 314(a)/Fintiv fight on any first petition.

Pattern signals. The known patterns do not apply here. There is no repeat petitioner (there is no petitioner), no Patent Owner appeal history at the Federal Circuit arising from a PTAB trial on this patent (the Office has never had a '163 trial to appeal), and no defensive aggregator in the chain — although it is worth noting that Unified Patents maintains a public portal entry for this patent, which signals it is on the defensive community's radar but is not evidence of a Unified-filed challenge. Family/assignee context worth knowing: the Thales side has litigated motion-tracking patents before — the incorporated-by-reference '159 patent was the subject of an eligibility fight that reached the Federal Circuit and ended with the claims upheld (Thales Visionix, Inc. v. United States, 877 F.3d 1363 (Fed. Cir. 2017), involving an F-35 helmet-mounted-display dispute). Treat that as assignee-family context only; it is not a proceeding on the '163 patent, and the '163 patent has never been adjudicated anywhere.

Recommended next steps

1. Do not expect to inherit an invalidity win. There is no FWD to cite and no canceled claim to hold up to a demand letter. If a demand letter on the '163 patent arrives, you cannot respond "claims 1–5 are dead" — they are not. Your leverage is prospective: you would be the first challenger.
2. Docket-check before you act. I could not confirm any pending litigation in my sweep; run a fresh CourtListener docket and PACER/EDTX query on the patent number and on "Thales Defense and Security" to establish (a) whether you or a co-defendant has been served, which starts your § 315(b) clock, and (b) whether a parallel case exists that would tee up a Fintiv/Sotera stay argument. Unified's portal entry is a useful secondary triage source.
3. If you file, file once and file full. With no prior Board construction and no estoppel burden yet, a single well-funded petition challenging all asserted claims with § 102/§ 103 grounds on non-cumulative art gives you the cleanest shot. Budget for a § 325(d) argument on the Patent Owner's own background citations and for a Fintiv fight if a co-pending case exists.
4. Watch the one-year date on the calendar, not the demand letter. If a complaint is served, the § 315(b) bar is a hard 12 months; § 315(a)(1) means you cannot file a DJ first and then petition. Sequence: petition (or express agreement with the Patent Owner) before any DJ complaint.
5. Monitor. The absence of PTAB activity is itself a signal: for a patent with an 11-year remaining term and real assertion value in the AR/head-mounted-display space, "first IPR" status is unusual and fragile. Set an alert on PTAB E2E / PTAB Center and the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions feed; a petition in a parallel case would be the single most valuable development for your defense.

Sources and verification notes

• Structured PTAB proceedings list: USPTO Open Data Portal (via the "PTAB proceedings on file" block) — zero AIA trials for US 10,976,163 (most recent ingest).
• Bibliographic and specification record: USPTO/Google Patents full text, https://patents.google.com/patent/US10976163/en (fetched 2026-09-24) — priority, filing, grant 2021-04-13, adjusted expiration 2038-03-25, Active status, incorporation of U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,159.
• Third-party patent database: Unified Patents portal, https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-[10976163](/patent/10976163)-B2 — confirms assignee, sole inventor, no challenge record; lists grant 2021-04-12 and priority 2015-11-09 (one-day UTC/PTO-artifact discrepancies vs. the Google Patents record; the Google Patents/OPD values are used above).
• For claim-level future dispositions, the authoritative sources are PTAB Center (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/), the Board's decisions page (https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/decisions), USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/), and CourtListener (https://www.courtlistener.com/) for any CAFC appeal.
• Confidence flag: I have high confidence that no PTAB proceeding exists as of the ingest (the structured ODP list is empty and independent searching found nothing). I have low confidence that no litigation has ever been filed against this patent, because I did not run a Westlaw/Lex Machina-grade docket pull; treat the "no suits found" statement as unverified rather than as a finding.

I'll research the assignment record for US 10,976,163 using the available search tools.

Let me dig deeper into the specific assignment records and legal events.

Let me research the corporate relationship between Thales Visionix and Thales Defense & Security, and try to pull the actual assignment record.

Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction — U.S. Patent No. 10,976,163

Patent: US 10,976,163 B2 — "Robust vision-inertial pedestrian tracking with heading auto-alignment"
Application: 15/765,688 (National Phase of PCT/US2016/061184, filed 2016-11-09)
Granted: 2021-04-13 · Adjusted expiration: 2038-03-25
Priority: 2015-11-10 (US provisional 62/253,637)

Retrieval caveat up front: The USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and its legacy mirror (https://assignment.uspto.gov/) render assignment records through a dynamic search application that my session could not query record-by-record. I was therefore able to confirm the existence and substance of recorded assignment activity (via Google Patents legal events and Unified Patents' bibliographic record), but I could not pull the reel/frame number, the recorded correspondent of record, or the assignee's recorded address. I have flagged each place where that data is missing rather than inventing it. Everything below is limited to what I could actually observe.

Inventors

Unusual patterns: None of the classic red flags. There is one inventor (no mass-inventor team), and there is no evidence of any inventor departing the assignee pre- or post-filing. The single-inventor structure is typical of a specialized corporate R&D group rather than a symptom of a fire-sale. Note that the '163 specification expressly incorporates U.S. Patent 6,474,159 ("Motion Tracking") by reference — a Thales Visionix-family patent (and the patent litigated in Thales Visionix, Inc. v. United States, 850 F.3d 1343 (Fed. Cir. 2017)) — confirming the corporate genealogy.

Original assignee

Google Patents (the authoritative text supplied) lists both the Original Assignee and the Current Assignee as: THALES DEFENSE AND SECURITY INC.

• ⚠️ Contradiction flagged: The previously generated Litigation summary section states the "original assignee [was] Thales Visionix Inc." That is inconsistent with the authoritative full patent text provided, which names Thales Defense and Security Inc. as the original assignee. The reconciliation is almost certainly structural rather than factual: "Thales Visionix" is a division of Thales Defense & Security, Inc., not a separate corporate parent in the chain (per TDSI's own corporate pages: "Thales Visionix, a division of Thales Defense & Security, Inc."). If the Assignment Center shows an assignee named "Thales Visionix, Inc.," that is a division/brand name within TDSI, not an independent NPE-style entity. I could not verify from the Assignment Center whether a formal change-of-name conveyance (Visionix → TDSI) was ever recorded, so I mark that specific link unverified.

• Primary line of business: Defense/aerospace electronics — helmet-mounted displays (HMD), helmet-mounted cueing systems, and inertial motion tracking (the InterSense brand). TDSI is a U.S. subsidiary of Thales Group (France).

• Shipped products embodying the technology: Yes — InterSense-branded inertial trackers (e.g., the IC4/IC400 family), the Scorpion® HMD, and HMD/HMCS products. The '163 subject matter (vision-inertial pedestrian/head tracking) maps directly to this product line. Note TDSI's 2024 obsoletion notice for the IC4 references "Sales-Visionix Sales@thalesvisionix.com," evidencing an active, shipping business unit as recently as mid-2024.

• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition-of-the-assignee event identified post-issuance.

Assignment timeline

The Google Patents legal-events record shows a single recorded assignment event for this patent; the Assignment Center's dynamic interface did not return reel/frame or correspondent detail to my session.

• Executed date not shown / recorded 2020-02-19 — Reel not retrievable / Frame not retrievable
  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: CALLOWAY, Thomas (the sole inventor)
  • Assignee: THALES DEFENSE & SECURITY, INC.
  • Correspondent of record: Not retrievable in this session — I cannot name the attorney/firm of record, so I make no recurrence claim. (This is the single most valuable field for the task you set, and it is the one I could not obtain; treat it as an open item to pull directly from the Assignment Center.)
  • Context: Routine inventor-to-employer confirmatory assignment perfecting title to the operating company. The 2020-02-19 recording date falls ~3 months before issuance (2021-04-13), consistent with a title-cleanup recording taken during national-phase prosecution / pre-issuance rather than a commercial transfer — not a sale, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

No additional recorded assignments, security interests, licenses, mergers, change-of-name, or releases were identified. There is no post-issuance transfer of the '163 patent, and the record does not show the patent moving to any licensing-only LLC.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10976163
    2015 : Provisional application filed by Calloway
    2016 : PCT application filed
         : Thales named as applicant
    2020 : Inventor assigns interest to Thales Defense and Security
    2021 : Patent issued

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Verdict

Insufficient data — in the strict sense that the chain consists only of the original inventor-to-employer assignment.

The '163 patent was never transferred out of Thales Defense & Security, Inc. (recorded assignment of Thomas Calloway's interest to TDSI, recorded 2020-02-19; no subsequent conveyance located). The assignee is a shipping operating company in the defense/HMD/motion-tracking business (InterSense, Scorpion® HMD), a U.S. subsidiary of Thales Group — the opposite of the shell-LLC profile, and no NPE signal is present. I stop short of the "Operating-company assertion" verdict only because I found no litigation in which TDSI asserts the '163 patent against competitors; absent assertion and absent a complete reel/frame record, the honest label is "insufficient data — original assignment only, held by a non-asserting operating company."

Open item / recommended verification (the two gaps that would upgrade this to a fully grounded call):

1. Pull the reel/frame and correspondent of record for the 2020-02-19 assignment directly from the Assignment Center.
2. Confirm whether a change-of-name / merger conveyance (Thales Visionix, Inc. → Thales Defense & Security, Inc.) was ever recorded, and run the QS/assignment chain on the parent Thales-family patents (e.g., 6,474,159) to test for a recurring correspondent across the family.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (legacy: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) — search by patent number 10976163.

Method note: Findings are drawn from the authoritative Google Patents record supplied (legal events, assignee fields), the Unified Patents bibliographic page for US-10976163-B2 (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10976163-B2), and TDSI corporate pages describing Thales Visionix as a TDSI division. Reel/frame, assignee address, and correspondent of record were not retrievable and are explicitly marked as such rather than estimated.

I'll search the USPTO and related databases for U.S. Patent No. 10,976,163 and its cited references.

Let me pull the front-page citation data from the granted patent record.

Let me try to retrieve the front-page reference list and the PCT/EP search reports for this family.

I hit my tool-call limit before I could pull the verbatim "References Cited" list off the face of the US grant. Here is my report on what I could and could not establish, with the §102 analysis drawn from the references I can identify with confidence.

Prior-Art / Citation Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,976,163

1. What the USPTO-side search actually confirmed

Citation-count data point (important): The Unified Patents record for US-10976163-B2 expressly states "Patent Art (7) … Non-Patent Literature (9) … Referenced By (0)." That is the only authoritative statement about the size of the citation record I was able to retrieve. It tells me the grant carries 7 cited patent documents and 9 cited NPL items, and that as of that record no later patent cites the '163 as prior art.

What I could NOT retrieve: the itemized list of those 7 patent documents (numbers, dates, examiner/category markings) and the itemized list of all 9 NPL entries. The Google Patents "Patent Citations" block and the front-page PDF column did not surface in the search results. I am therefore not going to invent seven patent numbers. I will not do so, because an invented citation list is worse than an admitted gap.

2. References I can identify for this patent, with §102 analysis

The following are the prior-art references that are on the face of the disclosure (specification / incorporated-by-reference list, corroborated via patents-review.com and Justia). Each is analyzed against the claim set as published in the pre-grant publication US 2018/0299271 A1 (claims 1–15+ as reproduced by Justia), which is the closest-to-verbatim claim text available to me.

Critical framing note on §102: Every independent claim (1 method, 13 system/means-for, 14 system/processor) is a combination claim requiring (a) head-mounted tracking, (b) foot-mounted tracking, (c) a first uncertainty, (d) a second uncertainty, (e) a comparison of the two, and (f) bidirectional transfer of whichever is smaller. Anticipation under §102 requires one reference to disclose all of these, arranged as claimed. None of the references below does. They are §103 (obviousness) references, individually or in combination. I state this up front so the table is not misread.

Reference A — U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,159, "Motion Tracking"

• Citation: U.S. Patent No. 6,474,159 B1, titled "Motion Tracking."
• Date: Issued November 5, 2002 (as recited in the '163 specification).
• Status in the '163: expressly incorporated by reference ("This application contains various features that relate to U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,159 … the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference"). It is the only patent I can positively place in the '163's reference set; it is likely one of the 7 "Patent Art" entries.
• Description: hybrid optical/inertial motion-tracking art from the same corporate lineage (Thales Visionix / InterSense). It is the ancestor of the "hybrid optical-based inertial tracker" language the '163 uses at ¶ describing the head-mounted camera/SLAM front end.
• §102 relevance: Potentially relevant to the head-tracking and Kalman-filter/VIO limitations (published pre-grant claims 11 — monochrome/night-vision imaging — and 12 — applying visual-inertial odometry with a Kalman filter), and to the system claim's processor architecture. It does not disclose a foot-mounted device, two uncertainties, comparison, or transfer — so it cannot anticipate claim 1, 13, or 14, and therefore cannot anticipate any dependent claim either.
• Caveat: I did not re-verify the '159's inventor/assignee fields this session; treat that detail as unconfirmed.

Reference B — Foxlin, "Pedestrian tracking with shoe-mounted inertial sensors"

• Citation: Eric Foxlin, "Pedestrian tracking with shoe-mounted inertial sensors," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 25, no. 6 (2005), pp. 38–46.
• Date: 2005 (Nov./Dec. 2005 issue). More than one year before the 2015 priority date → §102(a)(1)/pre-AIA §102(b) prior art either way.
• Description: the seminal foot-mounted IMU + zero-velocity update (ZUPT) pedestrian dead-reckoning paper. This is the direct source of the '163's "zero-velocity updating (ZUPT) algorithm" and its "1% of distance travelled" foot-tracking characterization.
• §102 relevance: maps onto the foot-mounted tracking limitation of claim 1 and onto claim 8 (foot position/orientation tracked in a GPS-denied environment), and to claim 10 (second uncertainty related to foot yaw). It is the single strongest §102-type reference for the foot half of the invention — but it discloses no head-mounted vision-inertial tracker and no uncertainty comparison or transfer, so it cannot anticipate claim 1/13/14.
• Note: Foxlin is also a co-author of Reference D; this reference may have been cited by the examiner under §102 for the foot-tracking sub-elements while being combined under §103 for the rest.

Reference C — Hesch et al., "Camera-IMU-based localization"

• Citation: Joel A. Hesch, Dimitrios G. Kottas, Sean L. Bowman, Stergios I. Roumeliotis, "Camera-IMU-based localization: Observability analysis and consistency improvement," The International Journal of Robotics Research (2013); PII/DOI string recited in the '163 as "02783114913509675."
• Date: 2013 → prior art (>1 yr before priority).
• Description: theoretical/algorithmic treatment of visual-inertial odometry (VIO), filter consistency, and observability — i.e., the mathematics of heading/yaw uncertainty accumulation in camera-IMU systems.
• §102 relevance: the most on-point reference for the "first heading or position uncertainty" determined from the head-mounted vision-inertial tracker, and for how yaw becomes unobservable/drifts. Potentially relevant to claims 1, 9, 12. It does not disclose foot-mounted tracking, the comparison, or the transfer, so no anticipation.

Reference D — Foxlin, Calloway & Zhang, "Improved registration for vehicular AR using auto-harmonization"

• Citation: Eric Foxlin, Thomas Calloway, Hongsheng Zhang, "Improved registration for vehicular AR using auto-harmonization," 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR). (The '163 recites it as "ISMAR, 2015 IEEE International Symposium on. IEEE, 2014.")
• Date: 2014.
• Description: This is the closest conceptual ancestor of the claimed invention. "Auto-harmonization" is the transfer/re-alignment of heading reference between a vision-based tracker and an inertial tracker to resolve yaw misalignment — the vehicular analogue of the '163's pedestrian heading auto-alignment.
• §102 relevance: directly relevant to the transfer / re-alignment core of claim 1 step (f), and to the Kalman/global-pose-alignment architecture. Highest-value reference for the point of novelty.
• ⚠️ §102(b)(1)(A) exception — flag this: the named inventor of the '163, Thomas Calloway, is a co-author. ISMAR 2014 (held Sept. 2014) is within one year of the 2015-11-10 priority date, so under AIA §102(b)(1)(A) this inventor's own disclosure is excepted from prior art. It was also affirmatively incorporated by reference in the specification. It should therefore be treated as background/ancestry, not as §102 anticipatory art against the '163 itself. (This also means it is not a §102(b) statutory-bar problem for the applicant.)

Reference E — Zheng et al., "Tour the world: building a web-scale landmark recognition engine"

• Citation: Yan-Tao Zheng, Ming Zhao, Yang Song, Hartwig Adam, Ulrich Buddemeier, Alessandro Bissacco, Fernando Brucher, Tatiana Chua, Hartmut Neven, "Tour the world: building a web-scale landmark recognition engine," IEEE CVPR 2009.
• Date: 2009 → prior art.
• Description: large-scale visual landmark recognition / map registration. This is the source for the '163's "known landmarks … absolute map registration" and the landmark-recognition branch of the head tracker.
• §102 relevance: relevant to claims 6 (head tracking includes performing a recognition operation for one or more visual landmarks) and 7 (providing map registration based on the recognized landmarks). No disclosure of foot tracking, comparison, or transfer → no anticipation.

Reference F — Aubeck, Isert & Gusenbauer, "Camera based step detection on mobile phones"

• Citation: Ferenc Aubeck, Carsten Isert, Dominik Gusenbauer, "Camera based step detection on mobile phones," International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), IEEE.
• Date: the '163 text renders the year as "206," which is an OCR/publication corruption and is not a date I can rely on. The IPIN conference ran annually 2010–present; the paper is most plausibly IPIN 2011 (with 2010/2012 as fallbacks). Flagging this as unresolved rather than auto-correcting it, per the literal-identifier rule.
• Description: step detection from a hand/body-carried camera — i.e., pedestrian dead-reckoning displacement estimation.
• §102 relevance: potentially relevant to the foot/pedestrian displacement tracking limitation (claim 1, claim 8).

Gap disclosure: the Unified record says 9 NPL items; I have been able to identify only 6 (A–F). Three NPL entries remain unidentified by me, and all 7 patent-art entries remain unenumerated except for the likely inclusion of U.S. 6,474,159 (Reference A).

3. §102 bottom line

1. No known single reference anticipates claims 1, 13, or 14. Each independent claim requires the full chain: head tracking + foot tracking + two quantified uncertainties + a comparison of the two + selective transfer of the smaller. No reference I can identify discloses the comparison-and-transfer step at all except the inventor's own excepted ISMAR 2014 paper (Reference D), which is not §102 art against the '163 and in any event is vehicular, not pedestrian-with-foot-sensor.
2. No dependent claim can be anticipated either — legally, a dependent claim carries every limitation of the claim from which it depends, so the failure to anticipate claim 1 defeats anticipation of claims 2–12 and 15+ as well.
3. Accordingly, the correct §102 characterization of this reference set is negative, and the real exposure is §103. The natural examiner combination would be Reference B (Foxlin 2005, foot IMU/ZUPT) or Reference F against Reference C (Hesch, VIO heading uncertainty), optionally with Reference E for landmark registration and Reference A for hybrid optical-inertial architecture. The novelty placeholders that survive that combination are: (i) framing yaw/position uncertainty as a comparison output, and (ii) the bidirectional, automatic handoff between the head and foot trackers. Reference D (auto-harmonization, vehicular) is the art that most threatens that surviving subject matter on an obviousness theory — which is presumably why it was incorporated into the specification as background.
4. Conflict with a search hit — do not conflate: several search results displayed ISR tables citing US 2016/0051713 A1 (Robert) and US 4,901,194 A (Steinman) with "X" category against claims 1–11. Those come from the international search report of WO 2019/108898 A1 / PCT/US2018/063253, an entirely different application. They are not citations of, or against, US 10,976,163, and I am excluding them.

4. Contradictions / refinements vs. the previously generated sections

• Improvement, not contradiction: the earlier "Patent summary" section stated it could not obtain the claim set and reconstructed claim 1 from the EP divisional. The current search did return the pre-grant publication's claim set (US 2018/0299271 A1, claims 1–15+), which confirms the earlier reconstruction of claim 1 nearly verbatim and confirms claim 13 is a "means for" claim (i.e., it is in means-plus-function form, notwithstanding the specification's boilerplate caution). Remaining caveat: this is the pre-grant claim text; the granted claims may have been amended, and I did not retrieve the grant's claim set from PatentCenter.
• Unchanged conflicts (carried forward, still unresolved): filing date 2016-11-09 (Google/EP/PCT) vs. 2016-11-08 (Unified); grant 2021-04-13 vs. 2021-04-12; expiration 2038-03-25 vs. 2038-03-24.

5. What to run to close the gap (I could not complete these)

1. USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) → retrieve US-10976163-B2 → open the "References Cited" tab. This is the single authoritative source for the 7 patent documents and 9 NPL items with examiner category markings. (I could not reach it through the search interface available to me.)
2. USPTO PatentCenter → application 15/765,688 → "References Cited" / 1449 forms and the Notice of Allowance / Examiner's Reasons for Allowance, which will show exactly which references the examiner relied on and for which claims.
3. EPO Register / Espacenet for EP 3 374 737 B1 → the European search report and the EPO examiner's cited-documents table (the WO 2017/083420 ISR is the closest proxy for the PCT-stage art).
4. Global Dossier for PCT/US2016/061184 → the ISR and Written Opinion, which list the "Category ×/Y/A" markings and claim mapping directly.

Once you have the 1449 list, send it over and I will do the reference-by-reference full citation → date → description → §102/§103 claim mapping against the granted claim numbers without any reconstruction caveats.

I'll research the prior art references from this patent's disclosure to ground the obviousness analysis.

Let me gather the remaining references and check for additional prior art cited on the patent.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,976,163 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyst note on inputs. This analysis uses the prior-art references identified in the "Background" / prior-art section of the patent as supplied, i.e. the references the applicant itself cited and incorporated, plus the family-register information I gathered earlier. As flagged in the previously generated sections, the granted US claim set was not retrieved verbatim; I therefore map the claim subject matter using (a) the granted abstract, (b) SUMMARY, (c) flowchart blocks 402–420, and (d) the family claim set. Any statement I make about "the claims" should be read against that caveat.

1. Legal framework and governing law

Because the '163 patent's earliest priority date is 2015‑11‑10 (provisional 62/253,637) — after the AIA's March 16, 2013 effective date — the AIA version of §§ 102/103 applies. Obviousness is a question of law resting on the Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966) factual underpinnings (scope/content of prior art; differences; level of ordinary skill; objective indicia), with the additional KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) teaching that a motivation to combine may flow from "design incentives," "market forces," "common sense," or the mere existence of a finite number of identified, predictable solutions. MPEP 2143 sets out the recognized rationales (A)–(G) I rely on below.

A useful, close-to-home data point on how factfinders treat this exact technology family: in Elbit Systems of America, LLC v. Thales Visionix, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2017, affirming IPR2015‑01095), the dispute over the incorporated-by-reference '159 patent turned on whether a POSITA would have been motivated to reach a claimed relative angular-rate computation from McFarlane — i.e., the art is one in which obviousness fights are won or lost on the motivation prong, not on whether the individual building blocks are known.

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

A POSITA here would hold at least a bachelor's degree in electrical/computer engineering, computer science, or a related field, plus 2–4 years' experience (or equivalent) in inertial navigation, vision-aided navigation, Kalman filtering / sensor fusion, and/or AR head-tracking. This is a highly cross-disciplinary but mature art: by 2015, foot-mounted ZUPT pedestrian dead reckoning, VIO/SLAM, complementary and extended Kalman filters, and optical-see-through AR registration were all themselves well-developed, textbook-level disciplines. That sophistication raises the baseline against which obviousness is measured and makes cross-system fusion the natural engineering move rather than an inventive leap.

3. Scope and content of the prior art

Threshold point: every element of the '163 claims is taught somewhere in the field. The entire § 103 question is therefore the motivation to combine and the "determine which uncertainty is smaller and transfer it" arbitration step.

4. Claim-subject-matter → prior-art mapping

Almost the entire claim chart is filled by a single reference (Foxlin 2005) plus the filter architecture the spec admits as prior art ('159). That asymmetry is what makes the obviousness case against this patent strong.

5. Primary obviousness combinations

Combination 1 (strongest) — Foxlin 2005 ⊗ Foxlin/Calloway/Zhang ISMAR 2014 ⊗ Hesch 2013

Rationale = KSR (A) + (C) + (D), motivated by an express suggestion in the art.

• Rationale (A): combining (i) a foot-mounted ZUPT tracker that yields a low-drift relative heading/attitude, (ii) a camera/VIO head tracker that yields absolute heading only when landmarks are seen, and (iii) a filter that fuses them, is a combination of known elements per known methods yielding the predictable result of reduced heading drift.
• Express motivation — this is the key: Foxlin 2005 does not merely make the combination possible; it states the goal. Its abstract ends: "an approach is discussed to use the foot-mounted precision attitude reference as an alignment source for precision 6-DOF trackers of head-mounted and handheld implements such as augmented reality displays." That is the '163 invention's stated purpose ("acquire and maintain yaw alignment") recited in a 2005 reference.
• Rationale (D), "known device ready for improvement": Foxlin 2005 and Hesch 2013 both identify the very defect the claim addresses — Hesch shows VIO yaw is unobservable, and the '163 spec admits "over time, when there are few or no visual landmarks, the HMD system 200 will drift in heading and/or position more rapidly." A POSITA confronted with exactly that failure mode, and holding Foxlin 2005's express suggestion to use the foot tracker as an alignment source, would predictably build the claimed handoff.
• Rationale (C): the ISMAR 2014 auto-harmonization reference teaches automating the frame/heading alignment between an HMD tracker and an external reference — a known technique applied to improve a similar AR device in the same way.

Why the two subsystems are obviously combinable despite different reference frames: the '163 spec asserts the mutual correction only requires the sub-systems to share the pedestrian's global heading; both Foxlin 2005 and the ISMAR 2014 system operate in a common real-world frame, and heading (yaw) — unlike position — is a single shared observable between a head-mounted and a foot-mounted tracker on the same body. Hesch's own analysis confirms yaw is the unobservable mode that needs external (landmark or foot-reference) aiding. The motivation is thus not merely "these are two sensors" but "one supplies precisely the absolute-yaw information the other provably lacks."

Combination 2 — Add U.S. 6,474,159 (Kalman-filter drift-correction architecture)

Rationale = KSR (A): The '163 claims recite "determining a … uncertainty" and "correcting" pose using the transferred quantity — i.e., exactly the complementary/separate-bias Kalman-filter fusion with non-inertial drift correction that '159 discloses and that the '163 specification expressly incorporates by reference and describes as its own filter ("a very simple 6-state Complementary Kalman Filter … to estimate the position/orientation errors and biases"). A reference that the applicant incorporates into the specification is textbook "prior art" for § 103, and its combination with Foxlin 2005's body-worn trackers is a routine architecture choice.

Combination 3 — Add Zheng 2009 (landmark recognition / map registration)

Rationale = KSR (A) + (F): Zheng teaches recognizing known landmarks and registering them to a global map. The claim's "attempting to recognize one or more visual landmarks … [and] providing map registration" is the straightforward application of Zheng's landmark engine to a head-camera, supplying the absolute heading that triggers the "head uncertainty is smaller" branch of the arbitration. This branch is the mechanism by which the claimed system "acquire[s] and maintain[s] yaw alignment in the real world."

6. The "determine which of the two uncertainties is smaller, and transfer the smaller one" step — the heart of the § 103 case

This is the only limitation not verbatim in a single reference (Foxlin 2005 points in the direction but does not recite the binary comparison). It is nonetheless obvious on at least three independent grounds:

1. Kalman-filter fundamentals (KSR (A)/(B)). In any KF, the optimal estimate weights each measurement inversely to its own covariance — the lower-uncertainty source is automatically favored. The claim's "determine which is smaller and transfer that one" is a coarse, binary form of the standard inverse-covariance weighting that '159's complementary filter and Hesch's EKF both already perform. Reducing continuous covariance-weighting to a two-state comparison is a predictable, one-of-a-finite-number-of-solutions design choice. KSR ("a court must ask whether the improvement is more than the predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions").
2. "Obvious to try" (KSR (F)). The practitioner is choosing between exactly two identified, predictable options (trust the head tracker vs. trust the foot tracker). Where there are "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions … a court may determine the invention was obvious to try." The '163 spec itself confirms the choice is a simple threshold comparison, not a novel estimator.
3. Adaptive/switchable sensor-fusion is old in this art. GPS/INS and VIO/INS frameworks routinely arbitrate between GPS and dead-reckoning according to availability/quality; swapping "GPS" for "foot-mounted IMU" as the complementary source is substitution of one known element for another to obtain the same predictable result (KSR (B)) — and Foxlin 2005 already lists GPS as one aiding source alongside vision and landmarks.

The bidirectional nature of the transfer (head→foot or foot→head) is likewise the natural, symmetrical completion of Foxlin 2005's one-directional suggestion once the two trackers are mutually coupled, and is dictated by the disclosed failure modes (VIO drifts when landmarks vanish → foot corrects head; foot ZUPT drifts over long distance → head corrects foot).

The dependent "auto-transfer when the head-mounted device recognizes at least a portion of the foot-mounted [shoe]" feature is the application of conventional AR fiducial/feature recognition (Zheng 2009; the ORB-SLAM the spec itself names) to a known target — the shoe — that the spec describes learning as a fiducial. That is a predictable use of a known technique.

7. Rebuttal / non-obviousness arguments to anticipate

A rigorous § 103 memo must steelman the patentee:

• "No reference teaches choosing the better subsystem." The patentee will argue Foxlin 2005 teaches a fixed alignment role for the foot tracker (foot → head), not a dynamic, bidirectional arbitration between two uncertainty estimates. This is the most defensible distinction. Counter: KSR and In re KSR-type "predictable variation" reasoning defeat it, because once both sources produce heading estimates with computable covariance, the arbitration is the mechanistically inherent, expected behavior of fusing them; and the claim recites no non-obvious algorithm for computing the uncertainties, only the generic comparison.
• Different sensors, different frames, different failure modes. The patentee may argue the head (optical/VIO) and foot (ZUPT) subsystems are non-analogous and non-trivially integrated. Counter: Foxlin 2005 expressly contemplates the integration; Hesch provides the theoretical justification; and the two are on the same pedestrian, sharing a common heading.
• Objective indicia. I found no evidence of commercial success, licensing, long-felt unmet need, failure of others, or unexpected results tied to the '163 claims. Absent a nexus-backed showing, secondary considerations will not rescue the claims. Note, however, that the incorporated '159 patent survived a § 103 IPR (Elbit v. Thales Visionix), showing Thales/Visionix has litigated and defended related claims — but that decision concerned the different two-step relative-angular-rate limitation, not the '163 arbitration concept, so it does not supply an obviousness presumption here.
• Prior-art caveat: I have not verified a single reference that literally recites "determine which uncertainty is smaller and transfer it." Combination 1–3 render the claims obvious as a combination; a § 102 anticipation theory is not warranted on the record I can see.

8. Conclusion

Confidence: moderate-to-high that independent claims 1 (method), the system claim, and the CRM claim are obvious under § 103, and high that the dependent-claim features (landmark recognition, map registration, GPS-denied foot tracking, yaw-linkage) are obvious, given:

1. Foxlin 2005 — supplies the entire foot tracker/ZUPT and, expressly, the use of the foot attitude reference to align an HMD 6-DOF AR tracker (the invention's stated purpose), plus vision/landmark aiding;
2. Hesch 2013 — supplies VIO and demonstrates that yaw is unobservable, i.e., the precise deficiency the head→foot and foot→head handoff remedies;
3. Foxlin/Calloway/Zhang ISMAR 2014 — supplies automated heading alignment ("auto-harmonization") in an AR HMD system;
4. U.S. 6,474,159 — supplies the Kalman-filter drift-correction architecture the '163 spec itself incorporates and describes; and
5. Zheng 2009 — supplies landmark recognition and absolute map registration.

The motivation is not merely conceivable but documented in the art itself (Foxlin 2005's stated use of the foot reference as an HMD alignment source) and dictated by the known failure modes (VIO yaw unobservability per Hesch; long-distance foot drift). The only arguably novel flourish — the binary "smaller uncertainty → transfer" arbitration — is the predictable, finite-option reduction of standard covariance-weighted fusion, supported by KSR rationales (A), (B), (C), (D) and (F).

Source urls relied upon: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10976163](/patent/US10976163)/en (authoritative text); https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/3a/8f/e0/dea79ddbc30745/US7000469.pdf ; https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4465311/ ; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MCG.2005.140 ; https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1528431/authors ; https://researchr.org/publication/FoxlinCZ14/bibtex ; https://ismar2014.ismar.net/ismar/2014/paper/improved-registration-vehicular-ar-using-auto-harmonization.html ; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0278364913509675 .

Residual uncertainties: (i) the exact granted US claim wording was not retrieved, so the mapping uses the family/flowchart claim subject matter; (ii) the year of the Aubeck IPIN reference is OCR-ambiguous and I treated it as supporting only; (iii) all references predate the 2015‑11‑10 priority date except that Aubeck caveat, which should be verified before relying on it in any filing.