US 10996073

I'll search for the specific patent number as instructed, prioritizing search results over my prior assumptions.

Let me dig deeper with targeted queries.

Now let me check litigation/appeal dockets and verify the claim set independently.

US Patent 10,996,073 B2 — Verified Summary

Disambiguation note: I searched the exact number 10996073. Search results did return unrelated noise containing similar strings (e.g., US 996,073 — an early 20th‑century punching-machine patent; US 9,900,723; US 9,960,073‑family numbers). Those are not the patent you asked about. Everything below is tied to US 10,996,073 B2 only.

Bibliographic data (corroborated across Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, and the granted-PDF image)

Abstract (verbatim)

"A method of operation of a navigation system includes: detecting a vehicle abrupt maneuver; scanning a vehicle environment for a road hindrance; identifying a cause of the vehicle abrupt maneuver based on the vehicle environment; determining a classification as a provoked maneuver or an unprovoked maneuver based on the cause; and generating a message based on the classification and the cause for displaying on a device."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent has three independent claims: 1 and 6 (methods) and 11 (system). Claims 2–5 depend from claim 1, claims 7–10 from claim 6, and claims 12–20 from claim 11.

Important caveat: the granted independent claims are materially narrower than the abstract and the original 2010 disclosure. The claim set I retrieved is loaded with limitations that appear to have been added during the unusually long ~10‑year prosecution (the "references cited" list includes 2012–2013 art, well after the 2010 filing).

Claim 1 (method)

1. Detect an "abrupt maneuver" of a vehicle — specifically by using the direction of the vehicle's trajectory returning to its previous course after the maneuver (i.e., a swerve-and-straighten pattern rather than a genuine turn).
2. Analyze the surrounding vehicle environment for a "road hindrance," filtered by adjusting the scan range — where the scan range varies with the severity of the traffic situation, and a heavier-traffic situation uses a shorter/lesser scan range than a lighter one.
3. Identify the cause of the abrupt maneuver from that environment.
4. Using a control unit, classify the maneuver as either a provoked maneuver (the maneuver was made to avoid a road hindrance) or an unprovoked maneuver (no road hindrance present).
5. Operate a plurality of safety cameras — one operated by the navigation system and mounted on the vehicle, and a second operated by a municipal transportation agency and mounted on a tower — after the provoked/unprovoked maneuver, to identify a "hindrance type" (a category of road hindrance that includes an object on the road).
6. Generate a message presenting a safety recommendation specific to the classification and to the hindrance type.

Claim 6 (method) — substantively the same pipeline as claim 1, with two additions: it detects the abrupt maneuver using trajectory-return and a maneuver location (the "detecting a maneuver location" step is recited twice, an apparent drafting redundancy), and it additionally requires generating a report containing the cause and the classification alongside the message.

Claim 11 (system) — apparatus counterpart of claim 1: a storage unit with memory providing access to software, and a control unit with at least one processor that executes software to perform the detect-analyze-identify-classify-operate-cameras-generate-message sequence.

In short: the invention is a driver-safety/navigation monitor that watches for erratic swerving, decides whether the swerve was caused by an obstacle or was self-inflicted (e.g., drowsiness/intoxication), and then warns the driver and/or reports out — with the granted claims pinned to specific detection (trajectory-return), adaptive scan-range filtering, dual on-vehicle + municipal-tower camera operation, and classification-specific recommendations.

Federal Circuit / litigation check — explicit uncertainty

I could not verify any Federal Circuit 2026 docket involving US 10,996,073. My targeted queries for the patent number combined with "Federal Circuit," "appeal," and "patent infringement lawsuit" returned no docket, opinion, or briefing referencing 10,996,073. The Telenav litigation records that did surface (Vehicle IP v. Telenav; EMSAT / Tendler indemnity matters) concern other patents and do not name this number.

I therefore am not able to state that this patent is or was the subject of any 2026 CAFC appeal, IPR, or district-court action. Treat that as unknown rather than negative — I did not have direct access to the CAFC docket system and could not complete a docket-level search before hitting my tool limit. Anyone needing a definitive litigation/PTAB status should run the number through the CAFC PACER docket search, Docket Alarm, and the USPTO PTAB API.

Other flags and uncertainties

• Priority: Google Patents lists a "2011‑10‑26 priority to PCT/US2011/057845," but the PCT was filed after the Dec 2, 2010 US filing, so the legally operative priority date for the granted US patent is the Dec 2, 2010 US filing date. Treat the PCT entry as a family link, not an earlier priority.
• Expiration: The "2034‑03‑31 adjusted expiration" on Google Patents implies substantial patent term adjustment (roughly 1,200+ days) attributable to the very long pendency. Google Patents states this is an assumption; the actual term should be confirmed from the printed patent's PTA notice.
• OCR artifacts: The granted-PDF snippet renders "vehicle abrupt maneuver" as "vehicle array maneuver" in the FIG. 9 flowchart — an OCR error, not claim language. The specification also contains an apparent reference‑numeral typo ("first display interface 630," where 530 is meant).
• Assignee status: "Telenav, Inc." is the listed assignee per Google Patents/Justia; post‑issuance ownership transfers (if any) are not reflected in the sources I retrieved.
• Claim-text sourcing: The independent claim wording above comes from Justia's copy of the granted claims. I did not personally re-verify it against the USPTO PatentCenter full text, so minor transcription differences are possible; the substantive limitations (trajectory-return detection, scan-range filtering, dual safety cameras, hindrance type) are consistent with the patent's specification and figures.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10996073 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search more targeted sources for litigation involving this patent.

Search Results: Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 10,996,073

Bottom line: I found no record of any litigation — district court, Federal Circuit, ITC, or PTAB — involving U.S. Patent No. 10,996,073.

Patent identification (verified against the sources retrieved)

To be certain I was searching the right patent and not a similar number, here is the identifier confirmed by the sources:

Sources: Google Patents (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10996073B2](/patent/US10996073B2)), FreePatentsOnline, Justia company profiles (Telenav patents).

Litigation search findings

I searched patent-litigation-oriented sources (Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP, RPX Insight/insight.rpxcorp.com, Unified Patents portal and filings, Justia, and general web). No case was found in which US 10,996,073 is the asserted patent, a counterclaimed patent, or an IPR/PGR subject.

What the searches did return, and why each is not a hit for this patent:

1. Secor v. Telenav, Inc. et al., No. 1:21-cv-00083 (S.D.N.Y., filed Jan. 5, 2021) — a securities (Finance/Security/Commodity/Exchange) suit against Telenav and its officers/directors (Miller, Ortiz, Cummins, Chen, Jin, MacFall). Not patent litigation and does not involve the '073 patent. Source: UniCourt case summary.
2. Emsat Advanced Geo-Location Technology LLC / Location Based Services LLC v. wireless carriers — Telenav's 10-Q disclosures show Telenav as an indemnitor of Alltel/AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile, but the patents there are U.S. 5,946,611; 6,324,404; 6,847,822; 7,289,763. Unrelated to '073.
3. A case in which Telenav was a defendant asserting U.S. Patents '220 and '834 against Telenav's GPS/Scout/AT&T Navigator apps — again unrelated to '073.
4. Unified Patents / MemoryWeb / MCOM IP matters — none involve the '073 patent; these surfaced only via keyword noise ("10996073"-like strings in the London Gazette list and unrelated PTAB papers).

Caveats and confidence

• Confidence: moderate-to-high that no litigation exists. The '073 patent granted only on May 4, 2021, and Telenav has historically been a patent defendant/indemnitor rather than a patent assertion plaintiff; it has no evident track record of asserting this abrupt-maneuver patent.
• Important limitation: The '073 patent is a long-pending 2010 application that issued in 2021 — a roughly ten-year prosecution. It is possible (though I found no evidence) that the application or its claims were involved in prosecution-era disputes or that post-grant challenges (IPR/PGR) exist under a caption I could not surface. I was not able to run a complete, exhaustive PACER docket sweep or a full Docket Alarm/RPX "patent-in-suit" report within my search budget.
• Per your instruction, I did not substitute similar numbers (e.g., 10,996,073 is distinct from the many other "…096…" and "…96073…" strings that appeared in unrelated results, including the PTAB reference to U.S. 10,311,073 in Unified Patents v. MasterObjects).

Recommended next steps to confirm definitively

1. FreeLawProject CourtListener / RECAP docket search on the patent number as a party-field free-text query (RECAP full-text search), which indexes complaints.
2. USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) docket search for "10,996,073" at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts — to catch any IPR/PGR not reflected in web indexes.
3. Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) — query the patent number directly in the case list; it tracks NPE assertion campaigns.
4. USPTO Patent Assignment Search — to see whether '073 has been reassigned out of Telenav, which would signal potential future assertion activity.
5. PACER for the Northern District of California and Western District of Texas (common venues for Telenav-adjacent matters).

If you'd like, I can draft the exact search strings for each of those databases.

I'll verify the "no proceedings" default against public sources before finalizing.

No hits yet. Let me run a few more targeted checks, including Telenav's broader PTAB history and the Google Patents litigation tab.

Let me run a couple final targeted checks on the patent's assertion history and any Unified Patents involvement.

PTAB Proceedings on US 10,996,073 — Analyst Report

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) API returned no AIA trial proceedings for US 10,996,073 ("Navigation system with abrupt maneuver monitoring mechanism and method of operation thereof," Telenav, Inc., app. 12/959,305, filed 2010-12-02, granted 2021-05-04). Targeted independent web searches — for the patent number in both "10,996,073" and "10996073" formats, for Telenav as patent owner, for the inventor (Ky Tang), and for a Unified Patents challenge in the navigation/ADAS space — surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM petition, institution decision, or final written decision referencing this patent. There is therefore no breakdown by status: zero active, zero claims invalidated, zero claims sustained, zero settlements, zero institution denials. Defensive posture: neutral-to-unresolved, not hardened. The patent has never been stress-tested at the Board, so it is not "hardened by surviving IPRs" — it is simply untested, and every § 102/§ 103 printed-publication ground remains on the table for a defendant. Conversely, there is no FWD cancelling claims that a plaintiff could be sanctioned for asserting; all claims remain presumptively valid and enforceable until challenged.

⚠️ Scope caveat: a petition filed in the last few weeks may not yet be reflected in ODP ingest, and a petition against a related Telenav family member (e.g., WO2012074629A1 / US20120143493A1) would not appear under this patent number. Verify directly in PTAB E2E before relying on the zero count: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/

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Proceedings

None. The following section is intentionally empty of proceeding entries rather than populated with speculation.

No proceeding block is reproduced because no proceeding number exists to reproduce. I will not manufacture case numbers; per your constraints and the structured-source rule, the canonical list from ODP is empty and no web search contradicted it.

What I checked and did not find (audit trail):

Adjacent Telenav matters that are NOT proceedings on this patent (do not conflate): Vehicle IP, LLC v. AT&T Mobility, LLC, No. 1:09-cv-01007-LPS (D. Del.) (Telenav a co-defendant on U.S. 5,987,377 — different patent); Telenav, Inc. v. Traxcell Technologies, LLC, No. 2:18-cv-00253 (E.D. Tex.) (Telenav as DJ plaintiff); and a WRE reexamination (90/012,198) involving Telenav — none involve U.S. 10,996,073. Searches on the patent number itself returned no district court assertion either, so there is no § 315(b) one-year clock visibly running against any party.

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Strategic summary

Claim status — CANCELED vs. SUSTAINED vs. UNTESTED. There is no PTAB record, so no claim of U.S. 10,996,073 has been canceled, and no claim has been confirmed as patentable by the Board. Every claim is UNTESTED at the PTAB. For the claim set itself: the patent carries at least 20 claims; the only claim text surfaced in my searches is claim 20, which reads "The system as claim in claim 16 wherein the control unit is configured to further execute the software to request information from the first safety camera to monitor the vehicle environment" — i.e., claim 16 is an independent system claim and claim 20 depends from it. I could not verify the full independent-claim map (method/system/CRM) from the materials provided, so I make no claim-level assertions beyond that. Practical upshot: a defendant cannot point to any canceled claim, and equally cannot point to any Board-confirmed claim. The patent's entire 20+ claim set remains live, with an adjusted expiration of 2034-03-31 per Google Patents — a long runway, reflecting the ~10-year pendency between the 2010-12-02 filing and the 2021-05-04 grant.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted and no FWD issued, § 315(e)(2) estoppel has never attached to anyone. No petitioner is barred from re-raising any ground in district court, and no third party inherits a narrowed ground set. That is a pure upside for a defendant today: the full universe of § 102 and § 103 prior-art patents and printed publications is available, unconstrained by anything raised or that "reasonably could have been raised" in a prior trial. Two procedural points drive the strategy: (1) this is a pre-AIA patent (effective filing 2010-12-02), so PGR is unavailable (§ 6(f)(2)(A) limits PGR to post-AIA patents) and CBM is unavailable to new petitioners (the CBM program sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16) — IPR is the only AIA trial vehicle; and (2) the § 315(b) one-year bar from service of an infringement complaint is the only clock to watch, and on current information nothing has started it.

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed even one IPR against this patent, so there is no serial-filer pattern (and no § 315(e)(1)/§ 325(d) redundancy to exploit or fear). Telenav has not been an aggressive PTAB appellant on this patent — indeed there is no appeal because there is no FWD. No defensive aggregator appears in the chain: Unified Patents monitors Telenav IP (its portal carries a Telenav navigation publication), but I found no Unified petition against the '073 patent. Note the ownership context: Telenav was taken private via merger with V99, Inc., closing 2021-02-17 — roughly ten weeks before this patent granted on 2021-05-04 — so current assertion risk may sit with a successor entity or with Telenav's carrier-customer indemnity chains rather than with a public-company plaintiff.

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Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the null result at the source of truth before building a defense. Pull the patent's AIA-trial tab in PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) and the patent-specific record at https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10996073B2](/patent/US10996073B2)/en. The absence of PTAB activity is presently my conclusion based on ODP plus negative web searches, not a document I can link.
2. Treat the empty PTAB docket as a green light, not a shield. Since no claim has been invalidated, there is no FWD to cite and no claim-cancellation argument to make. There is likewise no estoppel stripping you of grounds. If you receive a demand letter, you cannot say "the troll is asserting dead claims" — you must build validity/eligibility/infringement defenses from scratch.
3. Front-load an IPR merits assessment. The 2010 priority date gives you a deep pre-2010 art window in collision-avoidance, ADAS-warning, and driver-monitoring literature — exactly the printed-publication art IPR permits. The USPTO classification is G01C 21/3697 ("Output of additional, non-guidance related information") under G01C 21/26 and G01C 21/3407, which is a well-populated art unit for prior art.
4. Evaluate the district-court alternative avenues the Board cannot hear. IPR is limited to § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications (§ 311(b)); § 112 written-description/enablement and § 101 eligibility are off-limits in IPR. Given a claim set drafted in 2010 and issued in 2021, § 101 (abstract-idea) and § 112 challenges in district court deserve early analysis; I have not verified any such contention and flag it as a hypothesis only.
5. Watch the § 315(b) clock and litigation timelines. If you are served with a complaint asserting the '073 patent, your IPR petition deadline is one year from service, and the Board's statutory trial deadline is one year from institution (§ 316(a)(11)). With no institution yet, no institution-decision deadline, oral hearing, or FWD due date exists to track.
6. Re-run this search before filing anything. Statistically, well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs; if this patent is being asserted in 2026, a petition could appear at any time, and a contemporaneous, competing IPR by a co-defendant or an aggregator would change your freedom-to-operate and joinder calculus.

Bottom line: the canonical PTAB list for U.S. 10,996,073 is empty, and I could not contradict it from public sources. The patent has never been tested at the Board — which means no claims are canceled, no grounds are estopped, and the defensive burden on a defendant today is full, not reduced.

I'll research this patent's assignment chain. Let me run several searches in parallel.

Let me dig deeper on potential post-issuance transfers and the FleetCor angle.

I hit the search-step limit before I could render the Assignment Center record directly, so I've flagged below exactly which fields I could and could not verify. I have not fabricated any reel/frame numbers or correspondents.

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Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 10,996,073 B2

Patent: Navigation system with abrupt maneuver monitoring mechanism and method of operation thereof
App. No.: 12/959,305 · Filed: 2010-12-02 · Published (pre-grant): US2012/0143493A1, 2012-06-07 · Issued: 2021-05-04
PCT family: PCT/US2011/057845, priority claim 2011-10-26
Adjusted expiration: 2034-03-31 (legal status: Active — maintenance fees being paid)
Verification links: USPTO Assignment Center · USPTO Assignment Search — patent index · Google Patents US10996073B2

Data-provenance caveat (read first). The Google Patents legal-events feed for this patent shows exactly one recorded assignment event and names Telenav, Inc. as both original and current assignee. My live searches did not return a rendered Assignment Center record for this patent, so reel/frame and correspondent-of-record were not retrievable in this session. I am reporting the event as surfaced and explicitly marking the missing fields rather than guessing them.

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Inventors

Pattern notes:

• No departing-inventor / fire-sale precursor. Ky Tang is a repeat Telenav inventor (listed with ~11 Telenav patents on PatentLeaderboard), i.e. a long-tenured engineer rather than a one-off filer. I could find no evidence of a departure within 12 months of filing, and no evidence of any ownership change around the filing date. Treat "no departure" as absence-of-evidence, not affirmative proof — I could not retrieve employment-end dates.
• Unusual pendency, not an ownership event. This application sat for roughly 10.4 years (filed 2010-12-02 → issued 2021-05-04) despite publishing as a pre-grant application in 2012. A decade-long pendency is consistent with continued examination/appeal activity; it is not evidence of any assignment. It does, however, explain why the assignment record stayed thin for so long — there was nothing to record.

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Original assignee

Telenav, Inc. — 1130 Kifer Road, Sunnyvale, CA (later Santa Clara, CA per the grant bibliographic record).

• Primary line of business: Connected-car and location-based services — turn-by-turn navigation, infotainment software, mapping, and location advertising (product lines: Telenav GPS Navigator, AT&T Navigator, Sprint Navigation, Scout, Thinknear, RoadSense/OpenTerra). Customers included AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Ford, GM, and Toyota.
• Did it ship a product embodying the claims? Telenav is an operating company and a real product shipper. Its navigation software was distributed through carriers and OEMs; in Vehicle IP LLC v. AT&T Mobility et al. (D. Del. No. 09-1007-LPS), the court record states that AT&T's accused "AT&T Navigator" was "a re-branded version of Telenav's GPS Navigator." That is the strongest available confirmation of an operating, product-shipping patent holder at the filing date.
• Current status (2026): Operating, but no longer public. Telenav was taken private in early 2021 via a merger with V99, Inc. (a Delaware corporation led by co-founder H.P. Jin), at $4.80/share; Telenav survived as a wholly owned subsidiary of V99 (SEC merger proxy; Merger Agreement dated 2020-11-02, amended 2020-12-17; HSR early termination granted 2020-12-03). Justia's assignee profile shows Telenav continuing to receive grants in 2025–2026 (e.g., US 12,405,116 on 2025-09-02; US 12,556,886 on 2026-02-17). No bankruptcy, no dissolution, no Chapter 7/11.
• Divestiture precedent (important context): In mid-2013 Telenav sold three geolocation patents to FleetCor Technologies Operating Company, LLC for ~$10 million (M-CAM Patently Obvious report, Jan 2014; FleetCor's 2013-03-14 announcement of the related enterprise-business acquisition). The patents named in that report were US 8,606,458 and US 8,489,330 (plus a third navigation patent). US 10,996,073 is not among them and belongs to a different, later-filed family. The takeaway: Telenav does occasionally divest patents — which makes the complete absence of a recorded sale of this patent meaningful rather than an oversight.
• Posture toward litigation: Telenav has repeatedly been a defendant in NPE suits (Vehicle IP, EMSAT Advanced Geo-Location, Tendler Cellular, Traxcell Technologies, Typhoon IP). It is the patent-holder being asserted against, not an asserter.

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Assignment timeline

One recorded assignment. No post-issuance transfers are on record.

• 2010-12-02 (executed, on or about the filing date) / recorded 2010-12-03 — Reel not surfaced / Frame not surfaced
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors Interest (inventor → employer)
  • Assignor: TANG, KY
  • Assignee: TELENAV, INC.
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable in this session — no correspondent of record surfaced in the sources I could reach. No recurrence finding can be made for this chain (there is only one link, so the "single appearance ≠ signal" rule applies a fortiori).
  • Context: Standard employee invention assignment, recorded contemporaneously with filing. Not an acquisition, fire-sale, internal reorg, securitization, or transfer-to-asserter.

Everything after 2010-12-03 is a non-event for ownership:

• 2011-10-26 — PCT/US2011/057845 priority claim (family formation; no assignment).
• 2013 — Telenav's FleetCor patent sale (three other patents; this patent excluded).
• 2021 — Telenav take-private via V99 merger (a stock merger, not a patent assignment; the patents stayed inside the Telenav entity).
• 2021–2026 — continued Telenav prosecution and grants under the Telenav name.

If the Assignment Center index differs from the above on a live pull, the Google Patents feed is what I am relying on; the reel/frame and correspondent fields remain unverified.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10996073
    2010 : Ky Tang files application 12 959 305
         : Assignment to Telenav recorded
    2011 : PCT filing US2011 057845
    2012 : Pre grant publication US20120143493A1
    2013 : Telenav sells other nav patents to FleetCor
    2021 : Patent issues as US 10996073 B2
         : Telenav taken private via V99 merger
    2025 : Telenav still active as patent assignee

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data (one recorded assignment only — the original inventor-to-company conveyance).

Justification. The record contains a single assignment — Ky Tang → Telenav, Inc., recorded 2010-12-03 — with no post-issuance transfers, no shell LLC, no listed asserter, no correspondent recurrence, and no bankruptcy or aggregator endpoint. Google Patents names Telenav, Inc. as both the original and current assignee, and Telenav remains an operating connected-car software company (taken private by V99 in 2021, still receiving patents in 2025–26), so this is not an NPE chain and not a defensive-aggregator termination — it is simply a patent that has never left its operating-company owner. The verdict is "insufficient data" rather than "operating-company assertion" only because there is no evidence of Telenav asserting this patent against competitors (it appears solely as a defendant elsewhere in the sector).

Confidence boundary: the "no downstream assignments" finding rests on the Google Patents legal-events feed plus SEC/court records. Because I could not render the Assignment Center page in this session, reel/frame and correspondent remain unverified — a manual pull at assignmentcenter.uspto.gov or assignment.uspto.gov/patent searching patent number 10996073 is the recommended confirmation step before relying on this as a prosecution opinion.

I'll research prior art cited for US 10,996,073. Let me run several searches.

Let me get the complete cited-references list, including foreign references, and details on the key references.

Let me get the complete cited-references list (including foreign documents) and details on the most pertinent references.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,996,073 B2

Literal identifier as requested: 10996073 → verified as US 10,996,073 B2 ("Navigation system with abrupt maneuver monitoring mechanism and method of operation thereof," Telenav, Inc.; App. 12/959,305; filed Dec. 2, 2010; granted May 4, 2021; inventor Ky Tang; pre-grant pub. US 2012/0143493 A1; PCT/US2011/057845 → WO 2012074629 A1; adjusted expiration Mar. 31, 2034). I did not substitute any similar number.

Governing law for §102: Because the application was filed Dec. 2, 2010 — before the March 16, 2013 AIA change — the pre-AIA version of 35 U.S.C. §102 controls (§102(a)/(b)/(e)/(g)). This matters below, because several listed references published or issued after the filing date and can only be art under pre-AIA §102(e) (i.e., only if their own effective filing dates precede Dec. 2, 2010).

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1. The claims to be mapped against

From the granted text (via RPX Insight and Google Patents), the independent claims are claim 1 (method), claim 6 (method), and claim 11 (system); claims 2–5 depend from 1, 7–10 from 6, and 12–20 from 11.

The narrow, distinguishing limitations that any anticipatory reference must disclose are concentrated in claim 1:

• detecting a vehicle abrupt maneuver "based on a direction of a vehicle trajectory returning to a previous vehicle's course";
• analyzing a vehicle environment for a road hindrance "based on filtering the road hindrance by adjusting a scanning range … depending on a severity of traffic situations" (range for a heavier traffic situation is shorter/smaller than for a lighter one);
• determining a classification of provoked vs. unprovoked maneuver;
• operating a plurality of safety cameras — a first camera mounted on the vehicle and operated by the navigation system, and a second camera mounted on a tower and operated by a municipal transportation agency — after the maneuver, to identify a hindrance type; and
• generating a message including a safety recommendation specific to the classification and hindrance type.

Claim 6 adds: detecting the abrupt maneuver based on trajectory-return and a maneuver location; identifying the cause based on maneuver location and road hindrance; and generating a report containing the cause and classification.

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2. References cited on the face of US 10,996,073

These are the U.S. patent documents in the "References Cited" section (source: USPTO grant record as mirrored by the CNU edsprgr record edspgr.10996073, Justia patents.justia.com/patent/10996073, and the granted front page reproduced at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US10996073.pdf). Dates are the face-of-patent dates; descriptions are my identification — confidence is flagged where I could not retrieve the reference's own text.

U.S. Patents

U.S. Patent Application Publications

Foreign patent documents: Neither the CNU edspgr.10996073 record nor the Justia "Referenced Cited" table returned any foreign patent documents for this patent, and I could not retrieve the front-page PDF's foreign section in full. I cannot confirm whether any foreign references were cited. Flagging this explicitly rather than assuming none.

⚠️ Cross-check note: The earlier litigation section in this dossier is consistent with these sources (same patent, same dates, no litigation found). No contradiction found. Separately, the "US10996073B2 (en) *" hits in the WO2004048141A1, US7965224, and JP2006350567 result lists are forward ("cited by") citations — i.e., later documents citing '073 — not prior art to '073, and should not be treated as anticipatory references.

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3. §102 analysis — which reference could potentially anticipate which claim

Bottom line up front: On the present record, no listed reference appears to anticipate claims 1, 6, or 11 (and therefore none anticipates their dependents). None of the retrieved references is described as disclosing the two most distinctive limitations — (a) the severity-based adjustment/filtering of the scanning range and (b) the two-camera arrangement with a first camera on the vehicle and a second municipal tower camera operated after the maneuver to identify a hindrance type. These references were cited as background/support art, not as anticipatory art. The mapping below is therefore a §102 "closest-candidate" screen; where the record does not support anticipation, I say so.

A. Driver-state / "unprovoked maneuver" concepts (most thematically on-point for the classification step):

• US 7,982,620 B2 — Prokhorov (issued Jul. 19, 2011; B60K 28/066 / 340/576). Drowsiness/impairment detection ⇒ relevant to the unprovoked maneuver concept of claim 1 ("made without a presence of the road hindrance"). Potential §102 status: only pre-AIA §102(e) if its effective filing date precedes Dec. 2, 2010 (its 2011 issue date alone is insufficient). Even so, it does not disclose trajectory-return detection, scan-range filtering, or the dual-camera limitation. Cannot anticipate claim 1/6/11 as issued.
• US 7,292,152 B2 — Torkkola (Nov. 6, 2007). Driver behavior evaluation — again supports the "driver condition caused the maneuver" theory, not the full claim. No anticipation.

B. Vehicle event monitoring / reporting concepts (relevant to claim 6's "report"):

• US 8,188,887 B2 — Catten (May 29, 2012) and its publication US 2010/0207787 A1 (Aug. 2010). Event data capture and reporting. The 2010 publication is pre-filing, so it is available under pre-AIA §102(a)/(b) as art, but it does not disclose the provoked/unprovoked classification, trajectory-return detection, or dual-camera hindrance typing. No anticipation of claims 6 or 1.
• US 2007/0032929 A1 (Yoshioka) and US 2006/0092043 A1 (Lagassey) — event recording/response. Same gap. No anticipation.

C. Collision-warning / obstacle-detection radar & sensor references (background for "road hindrance" and "vehicle environment"):

• US 5,430,432 (Camhi), 6,771,176 (Wilkerson), 6,813,561 (MacNeille), 6,587,074 (Winter), 2008/0285010 (Shoji), 2009/0135049 (Kikuchi), 2007/0233353 (Kade), 4,740,045 (Goodson). These disclose detecting objects/obstacles relative to a vehicle — at most they touch the "scan a vehicle environment for a road hindrance" element in isolation, under §102(a)/(b). None discloses filtering the hindrance by adjusting the scanning range according to a severity of traffic situations, nor the classification or dual-camera elements. No anticipation.

D. Speed/location monitoring:

• US 7,859,392 — McClellan (Dec. 28, 2010). Location-linked vehicle data. Background only. No anticipation.

E. Adaptive navigation:

• US 2010/0174479 A1 — Golding et al. (Jul. 2010). Adaptive navigation/attribute models — cited because Google Patents links '073's family here. It concerns navigation personalization, not abrupt-maneuver cause classification. No anticipation.

F. The 2012 references (2012/0050093 Heilmann; 2012/0265391): These published after the Dec. 2, 2010 filing. They are art, if at all, only under pre-AIA §102(e) (or as examiner citations surfaced during the unusually long ~10-year prosecution). On the record retrieved, they disclose peripheral vehicle/driver-assistance subject matter and cannot anticipate the issued claims.

G. References with no retrieved text: For 3,947,815, 5,594,432, 5,798,695, 5,872,526, 6,275,773, 6,470,272, 6,862,527, 6,909,947, 6,982,635, 7,188,014, 7,584,047, 2003/0095140, 2005/0055150, 2005/0192746, 2005/0278118, 2006/0111841, 2007/0025596, 2007/0100521, 2008/0105482, 2009/0207046, 2009/0312889, 2010/0066587, 2010/0076621, 2010/0182164, 2010/0235035 I could not retrieve the specification/claims, so I cannot responsibly assign an anticipatory claim mapping. Their dates alone place most of them in §102(b) (pre-Dec. 2, 2009 publication) or §102(a) territory, but date alone is not a §102 mapping. These should be individually pulled and mapped before any invalidity position is taken.

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4. Confidence, caveats, and recommended verification

• High confidence in the citation list, dates, and patent identifiers (multiple independent mirrors: USPTO grant record, Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, RPX Insight).
• Moderate confidence in my one-line subject descriptions; I have explicitly flagged low-confidence identifications and refused to map references I could not read. Treat those as placeholders, not findings.
• High confidence in the negative conclusion that none of the cited references, as described, anticipates issued claims 1/6/11 — chiefly because the issued claims are unusually narrow (the scan-range-filtering and twin-safety-camera limitations) and reflect a decade of prosecution.
• Unverified: any foreign cited documents; and the complete prosecution history (the ~10-year pendency strongly suggests claim-narrowing amendments that would identify the actual distinguishing art far better than the front-page list). I could not retrieve the USPTO PatentCenter IFW or the examiner's Form-892 with examiner citations/highlighting within this search budget.
• Method note: The "References Cited" (backward) list analyzed above is distinct from the "Cited By" (forward) list; forward citations (e.g., the WO/US7965224/JP hits) are not prior art to '073.

Recommended next steps for a defensible §102 mapping:

1. Pull each reference's own claims/spec via USPTO PatentCenter or Google Patents and map element-by-element to claims 1, 6, 11.
2. Retrieve the prosecution history (PatentCenter IFW) for App. 12/959,305 — the examiner's cited art and applicant amendments will define the real §102/§103 boundaries.
3. Confirm the §102(e) effective filing date of the post-filing references (7,982,620; 8,188,887; 2012/0050093; 2012/0265391) before relying on them.
4. Verify whether the front page contains a Foreign Patent Documents subsection (I could not confirm).

I can produce an element-by-element claim chart against any specific reference (e.g., Catten 8,188,887 or Prokhorov 7,982,620) if you supply or permit retrieval of those references' full texts.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent. Let me run several targeted searches in parallel.

Good progress. Let me search for additional references mapped to specific claim limitations.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,996,073 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Note on scope of what follows. I was not able to retrieve the "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" table from the Google Patents page — the fetched text of the patent (provided in the user message) does not include the front-page citation list, and my targeted searches for it returned only tangential "similar document" results. What I did retrieve is a set of field-relevant prior-art references (some surfaced incidentally through Google Patents' citation graphs and PTAB petitions). I therefore treat the analysis below as a candidate-art § 103 case, not as a reproduction of the examiner's actual rejection. Where a reference's priority date could not be verified, I flag it, because for this patent date matters enormously (see §I).

I also flag one internal contradiction with the earlier-generated sections: the Prior Art summary stated that the "'references cited' list includes 2012–2013 art, well after the 2010 filing." If accurate, that is legally anomalous for § 102/§ 103 purposes and needs re-checking (see §VIII).

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I. Threshold: effective filing date and the applicable § 103 regime

• Application 12/959,305 was filed December 2, 2010; the patent issued May 4, 2021.
• Because the application was filed before March 16, 2013, pre‑AIA 35 U.S.C. §§ 102/103 apply, subject to the AIA transition. The critical date for § 103 prior art is therefore December 2, 2010 (with the pre‑AIA § 102(a)/(b) grace-period nuance for the inventor's own work).
• Consequence: any reference published or filed after December 2, 2010 is not available as § 102(a)/(b) art, and (absent a § 102(e) filing date) cannot support a § 103 rejection. This eliminates much of the modern ADAS literature that superficially reads on the claims — e.g., US 10,358,143 B2 (Ford, Aberrant driver classification and reporting, priority 2015), US 9,940,530 (Anomalous-driving reporting, filed ~2015), and US 2012/0143489 A1 (Telenav's sibling application, published the same day as the '073 pre-grant publication on June 7, 2012, evidently filed the same Dec. 2, 2010 day — a same-day filing, not prior art).

This date discipline is important: it means the strongest § 103 case must rest on pre-2010 art, and much of it is in the Japanese vehicle-radar and drowsiness-detection literature.

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II. Level of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA)

A POSITA here would be a person with at least a bachelor's degree in electrical/mechanical engineering (or equivalent) and 2–3 years of experience in vehicle driver-assistance / navigation systems, including sensor-based object detection (radar, sonar, cameras, accelerometers), GPS/navigation integration, and driver-state monitoring. This is a mature, highly incremental art — the specification itself concedes that "radar, sonar, and cameras" and "sensor towers" for detecting vehicles and pedestrians were known (US 10,996,073 col. describing road object 408 detection; safety camera 410 "can be a freeway traffic camera").

KSR's "capable of combining" principle applies with force in a crowded, predictable field of engineered circuits and sensors.

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III. The limitations that actually matter (granted claim 1)

The granted independent claims are much narrower than the 2010 disclosure/abstract. Claim 1 requires, in substance:

Claim 6 adds a maneuver location (recited redundantly) and a report containing the cause and classification. Claim 11 is the apparatus counterpart.

The prosecution history (≈10 years of pendency; the granted claims are freighted with limitations absent from the 2010 disclosure) strongly suggests the original substantive invention — "detect swerve, look around, decide if something caused it, warn the driver" — was found obvious, and the surviving claims are narrowed to the four specific features: trajectory-return detection, severity-based scan-range filtering, the dual vehicle + municipal-tower camera step, and the classification-specific recommendation.

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IV. Candidate prior-art references and what each teaches

(A) Drowsiness / erratic-driving detection (the "unprovoked maneuver" concept and abrupt-maneuver detection).

• US 4,611,199 (Nissan) / EP 0119484 A1 (publ. 1984-09-26) — Alarm system for a drowsy driver and method of detecting driver drowsiness. Teaches setting a stand-by state "in response to a specific sequence of steering wheel maneuvers which may reflect driver drowsiness, for example, a relatively long period during which the steering wheel is not turned followed by an abrupt steering adjustment," then confirming and alarming. This directly discloses (i) detecting an abrupt steering maneuver, and (ii) attributing it to driver condition — i.e., exactly the unprovoked classification. Source: EPO bibliographic record for EP 0119484 A1.

• US 8,593,288 B2 (fatigue-detection + lane-departure-warning fusion; priority to be verified) — discloses a steering-angle module and a lane-departure module feeding a "fatigue detection" module, where "a steering pattern has occurred which corresponds to a sudden steering correction," and a common evaluation module "detect[s] deliberate zigzag driving." This reads on abrupt-maneuver detection via trajectory deviation and return, and on inferring an internal (driver) cause as opposed to an external road cause.

• JP 3036268 B2 (In-vehicle safe driving support device, appl. no. 1996323634) — pattern-matches steering-wheel angle and lateral ground speed to detect "abnormal running" indicative of drowsy driving, and outputs an alarm. Again: abrupt-maneuver detection + driver-cause attribution.

(B) Adaptive / variable sensor scan range (limitation 1b).

• JP H9-292461 (On-vehicle radar device, filed 1996-04-25, publ. 1997-11-11) — expressly changes the radio-beam scanning range based on the vehicle's speed and distance to a detected obstacle (widen scan when slow / no obstacle; narrow and increase sampling frequency when appropriate). Source: J-GLOBAL record.
• JP H10-147197 (Obstacle detection device, filed 1996-11-19, publ. 1998-06-02) — varies the beam swing width / scan range according to vehicle following distance and speed, detecting forward vehicles and surrounding obstacles.
• US 7,724,180 B2 — radar with selectable beam width / scan angle modes, switching modes based on speed, urban vs. highway, etc.
• US 9,116,242 B2 (Map-aware adaptive automotive radar) — GPS/navigation-linked radar that changes the number of horizontal scan positions / field of view according to roadway type (narrow on limited-access highways, wide in urban/neighborhood). Caveat: I could not verify its application filing date; if it post-dates Dec. 2, 2010 it is unavailable as art, though it is corroborative of the state of the art.
• US 5,731,779 (Detection range adjusting system of obstacle detection apparatus for vehicle) — Honda, 1998, detection-range adjustment.

Caveat on direction: limitation 1b specifies that a heavier traffic situation uses a shorter/lesser scan range than a lighter one. Several of the above references do the opposite (slower/denser → wider scan). This is the one place where a genuine § 103 gap may exist, and it should be probed (see §VII). It is nonetheless a predictable design choice ("obvious to try") to shorten scan range in dense traffic to reduce false positives and process nearer hazards.

(C) Road-hindrance / obstacle identification and cause attribution (limitations 1c, 1e-type "hindrance type").

• Forward-collision-warning / obstacle-detection radar-camera references (e.g., US 20030164936 A1 optical/radar obstacle system; US 9,116,242 collision-avoidance output) teach detecting and classifying an object on the roadway (vehicle, pedestrian, obstruction) and outputting a warning. The '073 specification's own "hindrance type 404" categories (vehicles, pedestrians, obstruction, emergency vehicles) mirror this established taxonomy.

(D) Vehicle-mounted cameras and municipal/tower cameras.

• US on-vehicle camera / lane-departure systems (including US 8,593,288's image-based "surroundings of the vehicle supplied by connection 110") teach the first safety camera operated by the navigation system and mounted on the vehicle.
• Municipal traffic-camera networks — freeway traffic cameras and red-light/surveillance cameras operated by transportation agencies and mounted on towers/gantries — are notoriously old and well known (and the '073 itself describes safety camera 410 as potentially "a freeway traffic camera … operated by a municipal transportation agency"). A POSITA would readily network such infrastructure cameras to a vehicle/navigation system. Note: I did not retrieve a single specific pre-2010 U.S. patent expressly claiming "municipal transportation agency tower camera feeding a navigation system," and I will not fabricate one — but the component is well established and the combination is a textbook "familiar element, known function" case under KSR.

(E) Reporting to third parties (claim 6; § V-C).

• Wellehan family (e.g., the patent discussed in PTAB petition 1538783, claiming "reporting the vehicle's location to a remote processing facility … receiving an indication … that the vehicle is approaching a first location at which speeds of vehicles are being or likely will be monitored") teaches transmitting vehicle operational/location data to a remote facility and notifying the user.
• Vehicle data-recording / incident-reporting art (event data recorders; driving-incident-report systems such as US 2011/0320492, post-2010, unavailable) shows the concept of reporting driving incidents to parents/insurers/authorities — but for a pre-2010 anchor, rely on EDR-type/telematics reporting art and the Wellehan-type transmission concept.

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V. Combinations that would render the claims obvious

A. Claim 1 (and claims 11, and 2–5), Combination #1 — the "fatigue-detection + road-hindrance cause + adaptive-scan + camera-network" combination

Primary reference: US 4,611,199 (Nissan drowsiness alarm) in view of US 8,593,288 (steering/lane fusion, zigzag/sudden-correction detection).

• 1a — US 4,611,199 detects "an abrupt steering adjustment"; US 8,593,288 detects a "sudden steering correction" and "zigzag driving." A swerve that returns to course (the claim's limitation) is simply the "zigzag"/"abrupt correction followed by resumption of course" pattern already described.
• 1d (unprovoked) — US 4,611,199 attributes the abrupt steering to driver drowsiness: the classic unprovoked maneuver.

In view of an obstacle/collision-warning reference (e.g., US 9,116,242 / US 20030164936 / the FCW art) for the provoked branch and the cause/hindrance-type identification:

• 1c — cause = detected road object.
• 1d (provoked) — maneuver taken to avoid the detected hindrance.
• 1e-partial — hindrance type categories.

The two-category classification (provoked vs. unprovoked) is nothing more than the union of two independently known determinations: (i) "did an external object cause this?" (collision-warning art) and (ii) "is this the driver?" (drowsiness art). Combining two alternative explanations for the same sensor signature into a binary classifier is a predictable, binary selection — quintessentially obvious.

In view of adaptive-scan art (JP H9-292461, JP H10-147197, US 7,724,180) for 1b: adjusting the scanning range of the radar/camera used to search the environment is squarely taught; parameterizing the range to a traffic-situation severity is a routine optimization.

In view of the on-vehicle camera art and municipal tower-camera networks for 1e: mounting a camera on the ego vehicle and using an infrastructure camera are both known; the claim merely requires both be operated "after" the maneuver to determine the hindrance type. Networking a municipal camera to a navigation system to confirm/identify a hazard is a straightforward application of known components with a predictable result (better hindrance identification).

1f — generating a warning message with a recommendation tailored to (classification + hindrance type) is the self-evident purpose of the whole system, and is disclosed in the collision-warning/drowsiness-warning outputs of the primary references.

Motivation to combine: all references are in the same field (vehicle driver assistance/safety), address the same problem ("is a swerve caused by the road or by the driver, and what should we tell the driver?"), and their combination yields only predictable, additive benefits — fewer false alarms, more specific warnings, and better hazard identification. KSR identity-of-field / predictable-result rationale applies directly.

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B. Claim 6 — add maneuver location and report generation

• Maneuver location: GPS/navigation systems routinely timestamp and geo-tag events (the '073's own maneuver-location step uses "the GPS position of the vehicle … at the time of the vehicle abrupt maneuver"). Navigation-integrated radar (US 9,116,242) already couples GPS/navigation to the detection function.
• Report generation: Wellehan-family art teaches reporting vehicle location/operational data to a remote facility; incident-reporting/telematics art teaches routing such reports to third parties (parents, insurers, authorities — precisely the '073 recipient list). Combining "detect the event + classify it + send a report" is a known telematics architecture applied to the new event type.

Motivation: fleet/insurance/parental-supervision telematics was an established commercial driver; a POSITA would send the classification to the interested party to obtain the very benefits the '073 recites (insurance evidence, parental/employer supervision, alerting authorities to roadway dangers).

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C. Claim 11 (system claim)

Claim 11 is the apparatus twin of claim 1 (storage unit + control unit executing software to perform the same steps). The same combination disposes of it; the "control unit including at least one processor" and "storage unit including memory" are generic computing hardware, and the Federal Circuit's Alice/§ 112-adjacent caution aside, for § 103 purposes generic hardware executing the recited algorithm adds nothing patentable.

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D. Dependent claims 2–5, 7–10

These add routine refinements — proximity of hindrance to maneuver location (2), classify provoked when hindrance is the cause (3), classify unprovoked when the hindrance is not the cause based on hindrance + maneuver location (4), generate a report (5), identify hindrance type and warn to avoid it (7), recommend avoiding the road hindrance (8), recommend slowing/pulling over for an unprovoked maneuver (9), and requesting information from the first safety camera (10). Each is a predictable extension of the base combination and/or is expressly suggested by the drowsiness art (slow down/pull over to rest) and collision-warning art (avoid the obstacle). They rise or fall with the independent claims.

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VI. Why a POSITA would have been motivated (KSR factors)

1. Same field / same problem. All references address vehicle safety and driver/hazard monitoring; the field was under intense commercial pressure (ADAS, telematics, insurance scoring) to distinguish road-caused from driver-caused erratic behavior.
2. Predictable combination of known elements. Each claimed element (accelerometer/GPS trajectory detection, radar/camera scanning with adjustable range, RFID object ID, camera on vehicle, infrastructure camera, message display, remote report) existed; the claim is an arrangement of known elements each performing its known function.
3. Design incentives / market pressure. Reducing false alarms and giving specific warnings (the stated benefits of "hindrance type" and "classification-specific" recommendations) are recognized objectives that would drive a POSITA to combine.
4. Obvious to try. With only two candidate causes for an abrupt maneuver — external object or internal driver state — selecting between them (binary classification) is a finite, predictable set of solutions.
5. The 2010 disclosure itself concedes the building blocks are known (radar, sonar, cameras, sensor towers, RFID, "safety camera … freeway traffic camera … operated by a municipal transportation agency"). Concessions in the specification are usable as admissions of what a POSITA knew.

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VII. Points of resistance / where the § 103 case is weakest

Intellectual honesty requires identifying the limitations most likely to survive:

1. Limitation 1b's direction of scan-range adjustment ("range for a traffic situation covers a distance shorter and an area less than … a lighter situation"). Much of the adaptive-radar art runs the other way (slow/dense → wider scan). A rejection must locate art that shortens range in heavier traffic — or rely on "obvious to try." This is the most vulnerable-independent-claim limitation and should be searched specifically.
2. Limitation 1e's specific dual-source camera architecture — "a first safety camera operated by the navigation system and mounted on the vehicle" and "a second safety camera operated by a municipal transportation agency and mounted on a tower," operated after the maneuver to identify the hindrance type. The two-entity ownership/operation split (private navigation system vs. municipal agency) imposed as a post-detection step is the kind of specific architecture that may not be squarely disclosed in a single pre-2010 reference; a rejection likely needs an explicit municipal-camera + vehicle-camera network reference or a credible "known infrastructure" combination.
3. Limitation 1a's precise "trajectory returning to a previous vehicle's course" framing — the drowsiness art detects "abrupt steering corrections" and "zigzag" patterns, which read on it, but a rejection should map the exact "return to previous course" concept with quotes, not just "zigzag."

If any single conclusion is not obvious, it is the highly specific dual-camera, dual-operator, post-maneuver hindrance-type identification of 1e; everything else is a strong § 103 candidate.

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VIII. Flags, contradictions, and uncertainties

• Contradiction with prior sections: the earlier Prior Art summary reported 2012–2013 references in the cited-art list. For a Dec. 2, 2010 pre‑AIA filing, 2012–2013 references cannot be § 102/§ 103 prior art. Either (a) those dates refer to § 102(e) filing dates of references whose publication was later, (b) they were cited for other purposes (e.g., applicant IDS "of interest," or in a later-dated continuation), or (c) the earlier summary mis-attributed them. Re-verify against the actual front-page "References Cited" table before relying on it.
• I could not retrieve the actual examiner-cited reference list for the '073; the combinations above are constructed from field art, not from the record. This materially limits how predictive the analysis is of the actual patentability outcome.
• Date verification needed for US 8,593,288, US 9,116,242, US 7,724,180, and the Wellehan-family reference; only a verified pre‑Dec. 2, 2010 date makes them § 103 art. The Japanese references (JP H9-292461, JP H10-147197, JP 3036268) and EP 0119484/US 4,611,199 are clearly pre-2010.
• Do not use US 10,358,143, US 9,940,530, or US 2012/0143489 as art — they post-date (or are same-day to) the '073 priority date. US 2012/0143489 is a Telenav sibling filed the same day (Dec. 2, 2010) and is not prior art.
• I did not locate a pre-2010 U.S. patent expressly reciting a "municipal transportation agency tower camera" feeding a navigation system; I have flagged that component as well-known infrastructure rather than citing a specific patent, to avoid fabrication.

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IX. Recommended verification steps

1. Pull the actual "References Cited" and "Non-Patent Citations" lists from the granted PDF / USPTO PatentCenter for 10,996,073 and re-anchor the rejection to the examiner's own art.
2. Retrieve the full prosecution history (file wrapper) — the ~10-year pendency and the limiting amendments will reveal which art the applicant distinguished and why, which is the single most valuable input for a realist § 103 assessment.
3. Verify filing/priority dates of US 8,593,288, US 9,116,242, US 7,724,180 and the Wellehan reference.
4. Targeted search for pre-2010 art teaching reduced/shortened scan range in higher-traffic-density conditions (limitation 1b) and for municipal/infrastructure traffic-camera networks integrated with in-vehicle navigation (limitation 1e) — the two limitations most likely to decide patentability.

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Bottom line

On the art I could verify, claim 1 (and claims 2–5, 6, 7–10, and system claim 11) is a strong candidate for a § 103 rejection using the combination of (i) drowsiness/abrupt-steering detection art (US 4,611,199; US 8,593,288; JP 3036268) for detecting the swerve and the unprovoked classification, (ii) collision/obstacle-detection art for the provoked classification, cause, and hindrance type, (iii) adaptive-radar scan-range art (JP H9-292461; JP H10-147197; US 7,724,180) for the scan-range filtering, and (iv) known on-vehicle + municipal tower-camera infrastructure plus telematics-reporting art (Wellehan family) for the dual-camera and report steps — with the motivation supplied by KSR's same-field/predictable-result/obvious-to-try rationales. The claim's best chance of survival rests on the specific direction of scan-range adjustment (1b) and, especially, the dual-camera-multiplexed-to-a-municipal-agency post-maneuver hindrance-type step (1e), which are the least well-mapped to verified pre-2010 art.