US 11193857

I'll search for the specific patent number and any related litigation.

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

Patent US 11,193,857 — Summary

Source of authority: The full patent text (Google Patents, fetched 2026-09-24) is the controlling record. Google Patents mirrors USPTO bibliographic data for granted US patents.

Abstract (verbatim)

"A tire testing machine is for testing a tire, comprising a free roller section configured to include a plurality of rollers having an endmost roller disposed downstream of a lubricator in a conveying direction and farthest from a predetermined reference position, the endmost roller being disposed such that a horizontal distance from the reference position is equal to or greater than a radius of a largest of a plurality of tires set in advance as objects of application of a lubricant."

Independent claims — plain-language overview

This patent has a single independent claim: claim 1. Claims 2–7 all depend, directly or indirectly, on claim 1 (2→1, 3→1, 4→3, 5→1, 6→5, 7→1).

Claim 1 – the tire testing machine. A tire testing machine (e.g., a uniformity machine) has four cooperating elements:

1. A conveyor belt running horizontally that carries a tire laid flat (axis vertical) in a conveying direction.
2. A lubricator located partway along the conveyor belt, which applies lubricant to the tire's inner circumferential surface (the bead).
3. An adjusting arm that adjusts the tire's horizontal position relative to the lubricator.
4. A free roller section with multiple rollers arranged along the belt that supports the tire so it can slide horizontally. This section can move up and down between a lower position below the belt and an upper position above it.

The inventive limitation: the rollers include an endmost roller downstream of the lubricator and farthest from a predetermined reference position, and the horizontal distance from that endmost roller to the reference position must be at least the radius of the largest tire among the tires the machine is configured to lubricate. The "reference position" is where the tire's center is taken to be when the free roller section lifts the tire, and it lies within the lubricator's footprint in plan view. In effect: the roller bed is long enough that even the biggest supported tire sits fully on the rollers rather than overhanging them, avoiding the tire slipping off when the rollers rise.

Dependent claim highlights:

• Claim 2: largest tire radius in the range of 450–510 mm.
• Claim 3: adds first/second sensors (upstream/downstream of the reference position), a belt control unit, an outer-diameter calculation unit, and a conveying-time calculation unit; belt stops after the computed conveying time from when the tire's leading end is detected by the second sensor.
• Claim 4: the two-point distance (reference position to second sensor) is smaller than the smallest tire's radius — enabling positioning without a backward/reverse conveying operation.
• Claim 5: adds belt control and lubrication height adjustment units; the reference position is set so the lubricator does not contact the bead of the smallest tire when raised.
• Claim 6: smallest tire radius in the range of 205–250 mm.
• Claim 7: defines the reference position as coinciding with the tire center when the tire is at a "set position" where the adjusting-arm operation begins, downstream of the lubrication position.

Litigation / CAFC check

I searched for the patent number and for Kobe Steel litigation/appeals. I found no CAFC 2026 docket activity and no US district-court assertion of US 11,193,857. The only Kobe Steel litigation surfaced concerns the unrelated Kobe Steel metals certification class actions (Canadian/US), which do not involve this patent. I cannot confirm any patent-specific litigation exists — treat this as "none found," not as an affirmative negative.

Two cautions on identifier handling

1. Do not conflate identifiers. A search for the bare string "11193857" returns a PlainSite hit for "Patent Application No. 11193857: Oncofetal fibronectin as a marker for pregnancy-related indications," and a NGK Spark Plug inventor page. The PlainSite entry refers to application 11/193,857 — a different, unrelated identifier that is not this patent. Likewise, one reference in the search results renders this patent as "JP6027464" — the actual period-correct citation in the patent's own text is Japanese Patent No. 6027464 ("Patent Literature 1"), which also happens to appear in the family-citations list as "JPS6027464B2"; the Google Patents "Family Cites Families" entry for JPS6027464B2 is a mis-attribution to NEC for a "High pixel density conversion device," so treat that family-citation mapping as unreliable.
2. Family/publication note: This is Kobe Steel's own family, with counterpart EP3627136A4, JP2019015724A, KR102295814B1, CN110770564B, TWI692626B. The text I relied on (the full patent document) is internally consistent; the discrepancies above arise only from third-party search aggregators, not from the patent record itself.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11193857 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases and Docket Alarm for this specific patent.

Litigation Search Results for US Patent No. 11193857

Bottom line: I found no evidence of any litigation involving US Patent No. 11193857.

What the patent is

For context, the patent you're asking about is:

• Title: "Tire tester machine having a lubricator in a conveying direction"
• Patent No.: US 11,193,857 B2
• Assignee: Kobe Steel, Ltd. (Kobe Seiko Sho)
• Inventors: Jumpei Fukuda, Yoshiaki Matsubara, Yu Sumimoto, Takashi Sumitani
• Application No.: US 16/623,294 (national stage of PCT/JP2018/024498)
• Priority date: 2017-07-03; Granted: 2021-12-07
• Status per Google Patents (as fetched): "Expired – Fee Related"

Search coverage and results

I searched litigation-oriented sources, including queries targeting Docket Alarm, Unified Patents, PACER/CAFC-style results, and patent-assertion coverage. The searches returned no district court case, no CAFC appeal, and no PTAB (IPR/PGR) proceeding identifying US 11,193,857.

Critically, the searches also surfaced false-positive matches for the string "11193857" that are not this patent and should not be confused with it:

1. PlainSite – "Patent Application No. 11193857" — this refers to a USPTO application serial number (not the granted patent number) for "Oncofetal fibronectin as a marker for pregnancy-related indications." This is a different document entirely, arising only because the bare 8-digit string collides with an application serial number.
2. UK Companies House – Company No. 11193857 ("ME NOODLES LTD") — a UK company registration number, unrelated to any patent.
3. Spanish BOE administrative records citing "expediente 11193857" (Grey Booking Management Ibiza) — an administrative case number, unrelated.

None of these involve US 11,193,857.

Regarding patent owner

The patent is held by Kobe Steel, Ltd. Citing the Google Patents record, the case status shows "Expired – Fee Related," and the family includes corresponding filings in EP (EP3627136A4), JP (JP2019015724A), KR (KR102295814B1), CN (CN110770564B), TW (TWI692626B), and WO (WO2019009168A1). Several family members are also noted as "not_active / Expired / Ceased / Withdrawn."

Caveats — please read

• Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. I could not directly query PACER, Docket Navigator, or Unified Patents' litigation portal (the specific "caselist" URL you provided returned no usable results in my searches), and some records remain sealed or are not indexed by general web search.
• I recommend confirming via a dedicated litigation database (Docket Navigator, LexisNexis, Westlaw Litigation Analytics, or Unified Patents' litigation caselist) and a PACER full-text search for the exact patent number before relying on a "no litigation" conclusion.
• I am not representing that no litigation exists — only that my searches produced no trace of any.

If you want, I can run additional targeted checks (e.g., searching for Kobe Steel as a plaintiff/defendant in tire-testing-machine disputes, or checking whether any related Kobe Steel tire-machine patents have been asserted) — just say the word.

I'll verify the structured-data conclusion against live sources before writing this up.

Let me run two more targeted checks — one on PTAB E2E/CourtListener and one on the patent owner's litigation posture.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 11,193,857. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal — returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM for this patent, and independent web searches for the patent number, for the assignee (Kobe Steel, Ltd. / Kabushiki Kaisha Kobe Seiko Sho) in a PTAB context, and for the patent's subject matter surfaced no petition, institution decision, Final Written Decision, or CAFC appeal. There is nothing to break down by active / invalidated / sustained / settled / denied because there is nothing on file.

Bottom-line defensive posture: this is the "absent" case, not the "hardened" case. All seven claims (1–7) are untested at the PTAB — none canceled, none sustained, none construed by the Board. A defendant gets no free invalid-unenforceability argument from a prior FWD, but also inherits no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no adverse claim-construction record. The defensive slate is blank, which cuts both ways.

Proceedings

None. No proceeding numbers exist to report, and I will not generate any.

For completeness on what I checked and did not find:

• No IPR/PGR/CBM petition naming US 11,193,857 as the challenged patent.
• No PTAB Final Written Decision citing the patent.
• No Federal Circuit or CourtListener docket treating the patent as the subject of an appeal.
• No CAFC opinion where the patent is the "Patent No." at issue.

Caution on false positives. The bare eight-digit string "11193857" collides with several unrelated identifiers that appear in search results and must not be mistaken for this patent or for a PTAB number:

1. PlainSite — "Patent Application No. 11193857" = a USPTO application serial number for "Oncofetal fibronectin as a marker for pregnancy-related indications" — a different document entirely.
2. UK Companies House No. 11193857 ("ME NOODLES LTD") — a company registration number.
3. Spanish BOE "expediente 11193857" (Grey Booking Management Ibiza) — an administrative case number.

None of these are PTAB identifiers, and none concern US 11,193,857. (This mirrors the false positives already flagged in the litigation section — the same string collision is at work.)

Strategic summary

Claim status. Claims 1–7 are all untested before the PTAB. Nothing has been canceled, nothing has been confirmed, and no claim has been construed in any AIA trial. The claim set is the original granted set: independent claims 1, 3, 5, 7 (3, 5 and 7 being dependent-referencing independent-style claims as printed) in their as-issued form, with dependent claims 2, 4, and 6 covering numeric ranges. There is no narrowing amendment history from a PTAB proceeding to work with, and correspondingly no prosecution-history estoppel created by one.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(1) and § 315(e)(2) estoppel do not exist for anyone on this patent. No petitioner is precluded from raising any § 102/§ 103 ground, and no party is barred from re-litigating any ground in district court. Practically, a defendant's entire prior-art universe remains open — including art that would have been "reasonably could have raised" material had a prior IPR existed. This is the flip side of the absent-proceeding case: maximum freedom to attack, but no road map from a prior Board decision about which references work and how the claims read.

Pattern signals. None. There is no serial petitioner, no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) in the chain, and no evidence the patent owner has been litigating before the Board. The family is prosecution-only: US 16/623,294 (national stage of PCT/JP2018/024498), plus EP3627136A4, JP2019015724A, KR102295814B1, CN110770564B, TWI692626B, and WO2019009168A1. Several of those family members are recorded as not_active / expired / ceased / withdrawn. The US patent's Google Patents legal status reads "Expired – Fee Related," which — if accurate — suggests a maintenance-fee lapse and would be a far more consequential fact for a defendant than the absence of IPRs. I could not verify that through USPTO Patent Center directly, and Google itself disclaims the status as an assumption, so treat it as a lead to confirm rather than a conclusion.

The absence of PTAB activity is itself a signal. Patents that get asserted in earnest — particularly in the tire-test-equipment space, where Kobe Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Machinery Systems both hold portfolios — tend to attract IPR petitions within the one-year § 315(b) window after service. Kobe Steel's 2021 tire-testing-machine applications (e.g., the rim-width-adjustment and drum-reciprocating families) suggest continued R&D investment, which is consistent with a patent that is being enforced commercially rather than litigated. But that is inference, not record.

Recommended next steps

1. If you are a defendant, verify the maintenance-fee status first. A lapsed patent whose fees were not paid and which has not been revived under 35 U.S.C. § 41(c) / 37 C.F.R. § 1.362 cannot support an infringement suit for the lapsed period. Confirm directly via USPTO Patent Center (https://patentcenter.uspto.gov) using application 16/623,294 and patent 11,193,857. Do not rely on the Google Patents "Expired – Fee Related" flag. If the fee lapsed, the petition-for-unintentional-delay revival posture and its timing relative to any notice letter matters a great deal.

2. Because there is no FWD, there is no free kill; build the invalidity case from scratch. The Board has never construed a single term of this patent. The claims are apparatus claims with a numerical-relationship core: "horizontal distance between the endmost roller and the reference position is equal to or greater than a radius of a largest one of a plurality of tires set in advance" across claims 1–7. Expect claim construction to be the battleground, and note that claim 2 (radius 450–510 mm) and claim 6 (radius 205–250 mm) recite numeric ranges that are, on their face, dimensions of commercially known tire classes (PC/ULT/LT as the spec itself concedes) — a § 103 attack framed around a known tire-size distribution and a free-roller deck sized to it is worth scoping.

3. Check the § 315(b) clock before anything else if a complaint has been served. With no IPRs filed to date, the one-year bar for a first petitioner is almost certainly still open — but it runs from service of a complaint alleging infringement of this patent. Diary it.

4. Coordinate with foreign-office outcomes. The counterpart proceedings in EP (EP3627136A4 — recorded as withdrawn), JP (JP2019015724A — recorded as active/pending), KR (KR102295814B1 — expired/ceased), CN (CN110770564B — expired/ceased), and TW (TWI692626B) may contain prior-art citations or examiners' reasoning not present in the US file. Because no US IPR has ever been run, the US prosecution history has never been stress-tested, and foreign search reports are untapped ammunition.

5. If you want, I can run additional checks — e.g., a PTAB API/End-to-End query against application 16/623,294 and against Kobe Steel as patent owner across all proceedings, and an assignee-wide sweep for whether any Kobe Steel tire-testing patent has been IPR'd (which would tell you which references and theories the Board has credited in this technology space).

Limits of this analysis, stated plainly: absence of evidence is not proof of absence. The ODP-derived block is authoritative and returns nothing, and my web searches corroborated it, but I could not run a live, paginated PTAB E2E docket query inside this session. Some recently filed petitions or sealed records may not yet be indexed. Confirm the "no PTAB activity" conclusion against PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/) and the USPTO Open Data Portal before relying on it in a filing or a client opinion.

I'll research the assignment record for US 11,193,857 through the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-reference sources.

Assignment & Ownership Analysis — US 11,193,857 B2

Scope note: I attempted to reconstruct this chain from the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) and cross-referenced Google Patents legal events, uspto.report, Espacenet, and Justia. I was able to confirm one recorded assignment event but could NOT retrieve the reel/frame number or the correspondent of record — the Assignment Center's record images/API are not exposed to general web search, and no indexed mirror (uspto.report, Justia, PlainSite) carries the reel/frame for this number. I have not fabricated reel/frame values to fill the template. Verification links are given at the end.

Inventors

• The Takasago, Hyogo address is Kobe Steel's Takasago Works, the plant that houses the company's industrial-machinery business (tire testing / uniformity machines). Employer attribution is reinforced by the recorded assignment in which all four named inventors convey to Kabushiki Kaisha Kobe Seiko Sho, and by the same four appearing as inventors on Kobe Steel's sibling tire-tester applications (WO2019/188414A1, US2021/0156765A1).
• No unusual departure pattern. All four inventors are listed as assignors on the single recorded assignment (recorded 2019-12-16, i.e. at national-stage entry), which is the boilerplate inventor-to-corporate confirmation. There is no evidence of any inventor leaving Kobe Steel within 12 months of filing, and no other inventor-named assignment appears. The inventors also continue to appear on Kobe Steel tire-tester filings in 2019 (e.g., JP2019-041876; JP2021006800A), i.e. they stayed inside the company and kept filing on the same platform.
• Attribution trap (flagged, not a finding): patentleaderboard.com renders this patent under the heading "Yoshiaki Matsubara — 36 Patents at Ngk Spark Plug Co." That is an aggregator error — the granted assignee is Kobe Steel, not NGK Spark Plug — and should not be treated as evidence of any mobility between companies. (This is a topical repeat of the identifier-conflation caution already logged in the Patent Summary section.)

Original assignee

• Entity on the issued patent: Kabushiki Kaisha Kobe Seiko Sho (Kobe Steel, Ltd.), 2-4, Wakinohama-Kaigandori 2-chome, Chuo-ku, Kobe-shi, Hyogo 651-8585, Japan.
• Primary line of business: one of Japan's major integrated steelmakers and heavy-industrial machinery manufacturers. Kobe Steel is a publicly listed operating company (Tokyo Stock Exchange, ticker 5406). Its Machinery segment builds and sells tire testing machines / tire uniformity machines and tire-inflator equipment ("Kobelco" brand) to global tire manufacturers.
• Does it ship a product embodying the claims? Yes — highly likely. The patent is a machine-level claim to the tire-handling/bead-lubricating transfer mechanism of a tire uniformity tester, and Kobe Steel's tire-machinery line is a commercial, revenue-generating product family (the specification itself frames the invention as an improvement to a machine in a working tire-manufacturing line, and the sibling family members claim rim replacement, marking, and rim-size management, i.e. a full machine platform). I could not independently confirm the exact commercial model number carrying this mechanism.
• Current status: operating; no bankruptcy, receivership, or insolvency. Note for completeness that Kobe Steel's 2017–2018 quality-data falsification scandal generated regulatory and litigation exposure, but it did not involve this patent and did not affect ownership.
• Important caution on business-unit changes: I could not confirm from the sources available to me whether Kobe Steel has since divested, spun off, or carved out its tire-testing-machinery business unit. No assignment recording reflects any such transfer, so as a matter of record the title sits with Kobe Steel. Treat the divestiture question as unverified, not as a finding.

Assignment timeline

Plainly stated: USPTO records show exactly ONE assignment in this chain — a routine inventor-to-employer assignment — and no post-issuance assignments at all. The reel/frame and correspondent could not be retrieved; I will not invent them.

• Executed date: not available in the indexed record / recorded 2019-12-16 — Reel/Frame: not retrievable from available sources (see caveat)
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (inventor-to-corporate assignment)
  • Assignors: FUKUDA, Jumpei; MATSUBARA, Yoshiaki; SUMIMOTO, Yu; SUMITANI, Takashi
  • Assignee: KABUSHIKI KAISHA KOBE SEIKO SHO (KOBE STEEL, LTD.)
  • Correspondent: not retrievable — I could not reach the correspondent-of-record field. No recurrence test is possible, so this cannot be scored (see Signal 3).
  • Context: ordinary internal title-perfection — the original employee inventors conveying to their employer, recorded on the same day the US nation-stage application (16/623,294) was entered. Not an acquisition, not a fire-sale, not a transfer to an asserter. The underlying application was already filed by Kobe Steel as the PCT applicant on 2018-06-28, so the patent-rights chain runs Kobe Steel → Kobe Steel from filing onward.

No other event exists. Specifically, there is no post-issuance assignment, no security agreement, no merger or change-of-name recording, and no release in the record. Title has never left Kobe Steel.

Two record-keeping cautions

1. Do not lift the reel numbers from the PlainSite "11193857" hit. A search for the bare string returns PlainSite — "Patent Application No. 11193857: Oncofetal fibronectin as a marker for pregnancy-related indications," whose assignment table shows reels 16845/451 (Assignment), 19794/600 (Merger), 20018/529 (Patent Security Agreement), 21301/879, 24892/1 (Termination of Security Agreements). Those reels belong to US application 11/193,857 — a completely different, unrelated application serial number — and must not be attributed to this patent. This is the single most likely way an analyst reconstructing "11193857" could import a fake pre-litigation/securitization chain into this file.
2. Status-field tension: Google Patents lists the patent as "Expired – Fee Related" while simultaneously showing "Adjusted expiration 2039-02-01." These are in tension. The most plausible reading is that the 3.5-year maintenance fee (due ~2025-06-07, i.e. 3.5 years after the 2021-12-07 grant) was not paid, and the patent lapsed in 2025; the "2039" figure appears to be a computed statutory maximum rather than a live expiry. If that reading is right, it is the single most consequential fact in this file — but it requires confirmation against USPTO Patent Center maintenance-fee records, which I could not query. Do not treat the lapse as established.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11193857
    2017 : Priority JP application filed by Kobe Steel
    2018 : PCT filed by Kobe Steel as applicant
    2019 : US national stage entered
         : Inventors assign rights to Kobe Steel
    2021 : US patent issued to Kobe Steel
    2025 : Patent lapses for unpaid maintenance fee

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No LLC, no "IP / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" suffix, and no registered-agent service address appears anywhere in the chain. The only recorded assignee is the original operating manufacturer, Kabushiki Kaisha Kobe Seiko Sho, at its Kobe headquarters address (Wakinohama-Kaigandori, Chuo-ku, Kobe). There is no post-issuance conveyance of any kind (contrast with the reels 20018/529 and 24892/1 security/termination pair that belongs to the unrelated application 11/193,857 — see caution above).

2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT.
The current and only assignee is Kobe Steel, Ltd. It appears on none of the lists cited (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation Corp, Spangenberg entities), and is not surfaced as a high-frequency plaintiff by Unified Patents or RPX. It is a roughly US$4B-revenue, TSE-listed steel and machinery manufacturer, not a licensing vehicle.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR (not assessable).
This signal is by construction an analysis of recurrence, and I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for the one assignment in this chain — the Assignment Center's correspondent field was not reachable through the sources available to me. With a single link in the chain, recurrence is impossible to demonstrate regardless. Not scored. For completeness, the only agent name I encountered anywhere in the family is a foreign agent on a different Kobe Steel PCT (VCCI-IP Co., Ltd., Vietnam, on PCT/JP2019/010846), which says nothing about the US correspondent and is not evidence.

4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT.
One assignment, zero chained LLCs, zero re-recordings. There is no <24-month cascade and no shared-document question to test.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT.
No infringement suit naming this patent was found (consistent with the earlier Litigation section), and the sole assignment is dated to national-stage entry in 2019 — roughly two years before the 2021-12-07 grant and with no suit anywhere near it. There is no assignment within six months of any suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT.
Kobe Steel has not filed Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 and is not in insolvency proceedings. No patent-sale order or §363 sale touches this asset. (Note: Kobe Steel is a Japanese company, so the Kodak/Nortel/Polaroid domestic-sale template would not apply even in distress.)

7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT.
There is no transfer from Kobe Steel to any third party, so there is no entity to assert on Kobe Steel's behalf, and no SEC disclosure of such an arrangement has surfaced. Kobe Steel retains title and has not sued anyone on this patent.

8. Defensive aggregator — NOT PRESENT.
The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN. However, note a functional near-equivalent: if the "Expired – Fee Related" status is accurate, the patent has been neutralized by abandonment rather than by defensive aggregation — the effect on assertion risk is similar, the mechanism is entirely different, and it should be recorded as a lapse, not as a defensive purchase.

Additional observation — commercial disengagement (not one of the eight, but material).
Everything about this file points to the patent being a low-priority asset for its owner: the family's EP member (EP3627136A4) is Withdrawn, WO2019009168A1 is Ceased, and the US patent appears lapsed for non-payment. Meanwhile the JP member JP2019015724A remains active/pending and Kobe Steel filed a later improvement application in the same space (JP2021006800A, filed 2019-06-28), which cites this family. That is the profile of a company keeping its home-market coverage and letting foreign counterparts die — the opposite of an assertion program.

Verdict

Insufficient data — per the rubric's own definition: "no records, or only the original assignment." The chain consists of exactly one recorded assignment, the 2019-12-16 inventor-to-Kobe Steel conveyance, executed by Jumpei Fukuda, Yoshiaki Matsubara, Yu Sumimoto, and Takashi Sumitani in favor of Kabushiki Kaisha Kobe Seiko Sho (reel/frame not retrievable; see caveat). There is no post-issuance assignment, no LLC, no security interest, no aggregator, and no suit.

Substantively, every one of the eight NPE signals scores not present (with Signal 3 unassessable for lack of the correspondent field). What this file affirmatively shows is the inverse of an NPE pattern: a single operating manufacturer, Kobe Steel, retained title from filing in 2018 through grant in 2021 and has never asserted the patent — and on the face of the Google Patents record has let it lapse for unpaid maintenance fees. If you want a one-line characterization beyond the rubric: non-asserting operating-company ownership, with probable abandonment.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center (search by patent number 11193857): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Legacy USPTO Assignment Search (search "11193857" or "16/623,294"): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events for this patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11193857/en
• USPTO Patent Center (maintenance-fee / lapse confirmation, application 16/623,294): https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/

Two things I could not verify and will not assert: (a) the reel/frame and correspondent of record for the 2019-12-16 assignment; and (b) whether the "Expired – Fee Related" status reflects a missed 3.5-year maintenance fee in 2025 or is a data artifact, given the conflicting "adjusted expiration 2039-02-01" field. Both should be checked directly in Patent Center before being relied on.

I'll search for the patent and verify its citation list against authoritative sources.

Let me pull details on several of the cited references to characterize them accurately.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,193,857 B2 ("Tire tester machine having a lubricator in a conveying direction")

0. Record verification (USPTO / Google Patents mirror)

I searched specifically for 11,193,857 and confirmed the record at the exact number:

• US 11,193,857 B2, App. No. 16/623,294 (US national stage of PCT/JP2018/024498 → WO2019009168A1), published as US 2020/0217755 A1 (2020-07-09), granted 2021-12-07, priority JP2017-130449 (2017-07-03), filed 2018-06-28, assignee Kobe Steel, Ltd. Sources: Google Patents, Justia, uspto.report.
• Identifier discipline: I did not substitute similar numbers. The bare string "11193857" also matches (i) PlainSite's application 11/193,857 ("Oncofetal fibronectin…") and (ii) a UK company number — neither is this patent. Likewise, a PatentLeaderboard page files this patent under the inventor page for "Yoshiaki Matsubara — NGK Spark Plug Co."; that is an aggregator artifact, not the assignee record (assignee is Kobe Steel).

Timing/legal frame: effective filing 2017-07-03, so AIA 35 U.S.C. § 102 governs. Each reference below is assessed for whether it alone discloses every limitation of a claim, arranged as in the claim (§ 102 anticipation). Reservations are noted in §4.

1. Full citation list appearing on US 11,193,857

The patent's own citation tables (as mirrored on Google Patents / Justia) list 13 references, plus a 3-item "Family Cites Families" table. Dates are given as priority/filing → publication or grant.

* = flagged as examiner-cited in the Google Patents "Citations" table (the two tables on that page are not perfectly consistent about the asterisks — see §4).

Additionally, the specification itself relies on "Patent Literature 1: Japanese Patent No. 6027464" (JP6027464B2), the conveyor/tire-testing-machine patent discussed in the Background. This is the single most substantive piece of art discussed in the patent, and it is the document over which the patent distinguishes.

2. Reference-by-reference description and § 102 assessment

The controlling limitation. Claim 1's point of novelty is purely geometric: the free roller section's endmost roller, downstream of the lubricator and farthest from the reference position, must sit at a horizontal distance from that reference position ≥ the radius of the largest tire in the pre-set group; and the reference position must lie within the lubricator's plan-view footprint. A reference cannot anticipate claim 1 (or dependents 2–7, which all incorporate it) unless it discloses this arrangement. On the record I retrieved, none does.

3. The "JP S6027464" anomaly (do not auto-correct)

Two distinct identifiers must not be merged:

1. JPS6027464B2 — listed in the Google Patents "Family Cites Families" table with priority 1976-09-28, publication 1985-06-28, assignee "日本電気株式会社 / NEC," title "High pixel density conversion device."
2. JP6027464B2 — the Japanese grant whose Google Patents page displays title "Conveyor for tire testing machine" / "Tire conveyor for a tire testing machine", priority JP2013-044957 (2013-03-07), assignee Kobe Steel, whose family explicitly lists US 14/173,055 → US 9,126,759 B2 ("Tire conveyor for a tire testing machine") — i.e., the same document as citation #7 above.

The specification's citation "Patent Literature 1: Japanese Patent No. 6027464" matches identifier (2). The "Family Cites Families" row is therefore internally inconsistent (a Showa-era publication number merged with a Heisei-era registration number, plus a mismatched NEC title). I am flagging this rather than correcting it — but note the consequence: the art over which the patent actually distinguishes is the Kobe Steel conveyor/roller-elevation document, which is already present on the list as US 2014/0251757 A1.

4. Bottom line for § 102

• No cited reference anticipates any of claims 1–7. Every reference is missing the claim-1 limitation that the downstream endmost roller of the free roller section be at a horizontal distance from the reference position ≥ the radius of the largest tire in the pre-set application group, with the reference position inside the lubricator's plan-view area. Several references (US 6,082,191; US 2014/0251757; US 2015/0007644) come close on the combination of components but not on geometry, and indeed the patent's own "reference example" (FIGS. 15–20) is a machine of exactly this type that the patent says fails to support large-diameter tires.
• Closest prior art / § 103 material: (a) US 2014/0251757 A1 / US 9,126,759 B2 = JP 6027464 = Patent Literature 1; (b) US 6,082,191 A (elevatable belt conveyor, free-roller support surface, tire lubricator with raise/lower applicator, centering arms); (c) US 2015/0007644 A1 and US 2014/0353088 A1 / US 9,643,205 B2 for the sensor-based outer-diameter and stop-position teachings that map to claim 3.
• Dependent-claim notes: claim 3's sensor/OD/stop-time logic finds its closest support in US 2014/0353088 A1 / US 9,643,205 B2; claim 5's raised-lubricator height logic is broadly conventional in this family (US 2015/0007644 A1; US 6,082,191 A). Because claims 3–7 incorporate all of claim 1, they are not anticipated even where an added feature is known.
• Family citation of interest (not prior art): the patent is cited by JP 2021-006800 A (Kobe Steel, priority 2019-06-28), "Tire testing machine and tire conveying method in tire testing machine" — a later family continuation.

5. Caveats

1. Source depth. The descriptions above are grounded in abstracts, claims, family listings, and search snippets retrieved from Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline, and patents-review, not on a full-text, figure-by-figure review of all sixteen documents. A defensible anticipation opinion requires complete copies and a limitation-by-limitation claim chart; the "no anticipation" conclusions are provisional.
2. Citation provenance unknown. Without the file wrapper/IDS I cannot reliably separate examiner-cited from applicant-submitted references, nor confirm which were actually applied in rejections. The Google Patents asterisk convention ("* = cited by examiner") is applied inconsistently between the two tables on the page (e.g., US 9,429,498 B2 vs US 2015/0007644 A1).
3. Publication-date edges. US 2019/0359017 A1 (pub. 2019-11-28) is post-priority on its face; it qualifies as potential art only via its earlier effective filing date (2017-06-06) under § 102(a)(2), which I have flagged rather than assumed.
4. JP S6027464 B2 remains an unresolved identifier question (§3). I have not auto-corrected it; treat the NEC attribution as unreliable and verify against the JPO register before relying on it.
5. No litigation involving US 11,193,857 was found in the earlier searches, and nothing in the art review changes that.

I'll ground this § 103 analysis in the actual prior-art references listed on the patent page. Let me pull details on the key references.

Let me pull the remaining cited references that matter for the dependent-claim features (sensors/positioning and size-adaptability).

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,193,857 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Scope note. This builds on the summary and claim construction already produced. It uses the prior art listed in the "Citations / Family Cites Families" section of the Google Patents page for US 11,193,857, plus the applicant's own admitted prior art (Japanese Patent No. 6027464, "Patent Literature 1," and the "reference example" of FIGS. 15–20). I confirm full text for most references; three searches (Ronge US2001/0013396A1, JPS62242525A, US2013/0233066A1) hit a tool-step limit, so those are cited at the level of their title/assignee/date as listed on the patent page and flagged accordingly.

1. The Graham v. John Deere framework

Critical threshold point: No single reference appears to anticipate claim 1 — the specific ≥‑radius dimensional constraint is the only arguably novel feature. So § 103, not § 102, is the correct vehicle, and the whole case turns on whether sizing the roller bed to the largest supported tire was an obvious design choice.

2. The prior art, mapped to the claim elements

3. Ground of rejection for independent claim 1

Primary combination: US 9,126,759 B2 (conveyor + adjacent raise/lower roller portion + lubricator + rotation member) in view of US 6,082,191 A (free-roller "omni-roll" bed sized/arranged to accommodate different tire sizes; centering arms) and the admitted art of JP 6027464 (raise-lower free-roller section under the tire at a lubricator).

Why the combination is the claim: US 9,126,759 supplies the belt, the in-line lubricator, the adjusting/rotation member, and the roller portion beside the belt that is raised and lowered relative to the conveying surface — i.e., the "free roller section movable between a lower position below the belt and an upper position above the belt." US 6,082,191 and JP 6027464 confirm that the free-roller bed is the tire-support surface during lubrication and that the support surface is designed around the range of tire sizes the machine must run.

The sole difference — the ≥‑radius sizing — is an obvious design choice. Under KSR Int'l v. Teleflex and In re Rose, a dimensional limitation is obvious unless it is critical or produces an unexpected result. Here:

1. The problem was known and admitted. The applicant's own background states the free roller section "is designed to conform to tires of standard sizes," and that a large-diameter tire "is not stably supported" and can "slip off" when its circumference "projects radially outward of the free roller sections." A PHOSITA faced with exactly that failure mode would naturally enlarge/position the support footprint. The patent page itself frames the invention as the solution to a recognized need.

2. The solution is mechanically predictable. For a body resting on a roller bed, ensuring the bed's downstream extent is at least the body's radius is the ordinary way to prevent overhang and tipping. There is no unexpected result — the stated benefit ("stably support any selected one of the plurality of tires") is precisely what the geometry is chosen to do.

3. The art supplies the design incentive and the sizing input. US 6,082,191's belts are "adjustable … to accommodate different size tires," and US 2001/0013396A1 is expressly directed to an apparatus "adaptable to different sizes of tires." That is a direct teaching to design the support geometry around the largest tire in the planned set — because the machine must be rated for its maximum tire.

4. The "reference position within the lubricator footprint" is inherent/known. In US 9,126,759 and US 9,643,205 the tire is centered at the lubricator so that the brush reaches the bead's inner circumference; the "reference position" the claim defines is simply that lubrication center, which necessarily lies within the lubricator's plan-view footprint.

Net: combining known tire-tester elements and setting one dimension to the maximum rated tire radius is a predictable use of prior-art elements according to their known functions — the classic KSR rationales of (a) design incentive/known problem, (b) obvious-to-try from a finite number of identified solutions, and (c) design choice without criticality.

4. Dependent claims

Claim 2 (largest-tire radius 450–510 mm). Mere recitation of a numerical range. The specification calls it "for example," i.e., a result-effective variable optimized by routine experimentation for the PC/ULT/LT tire categories named in the spec. Absent evidence the range is critical (unexpected result at the endpoints), it is obvious in view of the multi-size-adaptability teachings (US 6,082,191; US 2001/0013396A1).

Claims 3 and 4 — the strongest § 103 case on the merits. Every element is squarely in the art:

• First/second sensors at positions upstream/downstream of the reference position and outer-diameter calculation from detection times + belt speed → US 9,429,498 B2 and US 9,643,205 B2 (outer-diameter calculating unit with photoelectric sensors recording T1/T2), plus the admitted three-sensor/backward-positioning scheme of JP 6027464.
• Front-end-based positioning and cycle-time reduction → US 2013/0333615 A1 (positions by the tire's front end expressly to shorten conveying distance/cycle time) and US 9,429,498 (cycle-time motivation).
• The conveying-time formula t₂=(R−S₂)/V is routine algebra once the outer diameter, the fixed two-point distance S₂, and the belt speed are known — a predictable application of the known sensors and known conveyor control.
• Claim 4 (S₂ < smallest-tire radius, eliminating the backward operation) is a design choice to avoid reversing the belt; the art already identifies the backward move as the thing to eliminate for cycle time and belt wear (US 2013/0333615; US 9,429,498). Moving the second sensor inside the smallest radius so the center never overshoots the reference position is an obvious parameter selection.

Claim 5. Belt control + lubricator height adjustment to place a lubricator portion radially inside the bead, with the reference position set so the smallest tire's bead is not contacted, is taught by US 9,643,205 (lubricator raised from below to bead height) and JP 6173964 B2 (lubricator to bead). Avoiding premature bead contact for the smallest tire is a routine clearance constraint.

Claim 6 (smallest-tire radius 205–250 mm). Same treatment as claim 2 — a range corresponding to standard passenger-car tire sizes, not shown to be critical.

Claim 7. Defining the reference position as the tire-center location when the adjusting-arm operation begins, downstream of the lubrication position, merely recites the geometric consequence of the known grip-and-push sequence (US 9,126,759 rotation/arm structure; US 6,082,191 centering arms pushing the tire into the lubricator; JP 6173964 B2 arm member gripping the tire). It adds no structural difference over claim 1 in combination with those references.

5. The best nonobviousness counter-arguments (stated honestly)

A skilled practitioner defending the patent would argue:

1. The art solved the overhang problem the other way. The applicant's reference example (FIGS. 15–20) and JP 6027464 address large tires by repositioning the tire (backward conveying to a point upstream of the lubricator), not by lengthening the roller bed. That alternative solution is evidence the art did not recognize "just extend the rollers" as the answer — supporting nonobviousness.
2. A dimensional claim tied to a specified failure mode. One could argue the ≥‑radius relationship is not a mere arbitrary dimension but the solution to a specific stability problem, so it should not be dismissed as "design choice."

Rebuttals that keep the § 103 case alive:

• KSR holds that the existence of a different prior-art solution does not defeat obviousness; the question is whether the claimed modification was within the PHOSITA's grasp and produced a predictable result. Enlarging a support bed to cover the supported body is about as predictable as mechanical design gets.
• Nothing in the cited art teaches away from a longer roller bed; at most it shows a preference for repositioning. Teaching-away requires a contrary teaching, not a mere alternative.
• The patent's own language concedes the prior roller bed was "designed to conform to tires of standard sizes" — i.e., the bed was already understood to be a size-dependent parameter, which supports treating its length as an obvious design variable.

Weakest link for the patentee: claims 3–4. The sensor-based positioning and the cycle-time-driven elimination of the backward move are so thoroughly disclosed (US 9,429,498; US 2013/0333615; US 9,643,205; JP 6027464) that a § 103 rejection there would be difficult to overcome, which in turn strengthens the overall obviousness posture of the family.

6. Conclusion

• Claim 1: Obvious — combination of US 9,126,759 B2 (or US 9,643,205 B2) with US 6,082,191 A and the admitted JP 6027464 art; the only difference (endmost-roller distance ≥ largest-tire radius, reference position within the lubricator footprint) is an obvious, predictable design choice driven by a known problem and by the art's express size-adaptability teachings.
• Claims 2, 6: Obvious — non-critical numerical ranges for standard tire sizes.
• Claims 3, 4: Strongly obvious — sensor-based outer-diameter and conveying-time positioning is squarely disclosed (US 9,429,498; US 9,643,205; US 2013/0333615; admitted JP 6027464).
• Claims 5, 7: Obvious — routine lubricator-height/clearance and arm-geometry features taught by US 9,643,205 and JP 6173964 B2.
• Confidence: Moderate-to-high for claims 3–7; moderate for claim 1, where the outcome could turn on how a tribunal weighs the applicant's "alternative solution" evidence against the KSR design-choice rationale.

Caveats: This is an analytical opinion, not legal advice or an invalidity opinion of record. Three references (US 2001/0013396A1, JPS62242525A, US 2013/0233066A1) were cited only at the bibliographic level because the searches were cut off by a tool-step limit; their full texts should be retrieved before finalizing any rejection. I also flag the identifier cautions from the earlier sections (the "11193857" string collides with an unrelated USPTO application serial number, and the family-citation entry mapping "JPS6027464B2" to NEC for a "High pixel density conversion device" is unreliable), none of which affects the prior-art mapping above.