US 11397087

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number, then summarize.

Let me pull the claim set and any litigation/docket information.

Search results — US 11,397,087

I ran targeted searches against Google Patents, the USPTO full-text/PDF copy, Justia Patents, and public CAFC/Fed. Cir. materials. Below is what is authoritative and what I could not confirm.

⚠️ Literal-ID check: All results consistently return US 11,397,087 B1 (application 16/455,584). I did not substitute any similar number. One search hit was a false positive — the Law360 item about a "$673M Amazon patent loss" concerns a data-storage patent family (the Kove IO line of cases), not 11,397,087. Another hit ("reg. code 11397087") is an Estonian company registry code, also unrelated.

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Bibliographic data (authoritative — from the granted patent front page and Google Patents)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11397087B1/en; front page PDF at patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a5/06/52/8ef53a93d97c0e/US11397087.pdf

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Abstract (verbatim)

"The Earth's oceans naturally distribute items aboard barges or other carrying vessels in an efficient manner. Carrying vessels are inserted into gyres, currents, eddies or other sources of flow by support vessels, which may be manned or autonomous. A carrying vessel may be transported from a port or other origin to a point within a naturally occurring flow of seawater by a support vessel, and permitted to travel at speeds and in directions defined by natural factors, from one point to another point, for extended durations. A carrying vessel may be removed from a naturally occurring flow of seawater by a support vessel and transported to a port or other destination. Flow rates, transit times and points within naturally occurring flows at which a carrying vessel may engage with or disengage from a support vessel may be determined according to a machine learning model or in any other manner."

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Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Claim 1 — Method (vessel/barge-routing method): Load items onto a first barge at a first location (a port with ocean access); determine a flow path of a first ocean current near that location and a first flow rate for it; have a first support vessel (tug/towboat) move the barge into the current's flow path; then have a second support vessel take the barge out of that flow path at a second location and move it to a third location outside the current (e.g., a second port), from which a ground vehicle completes delivery. (Claim 1's own preamble wording is only indirectly confirmed — see uncertainty note below — but its scope is pinned by dependent claims 2–4, which refer back to "the flow path of the first current," "the first barge," "the first port having access to the ocean," and "the second support vessel.")

Claim 5 — Method (flow-rate-prediction/dispatch method): Load items onto a first carrying vessel at a first location; identify a first aquatic flow path nearby; determine a first flow rate for it; a first support vessel transports the vessel into that flow path; select a third location in the path; predict the time of arrival at that third location from the flow rate; pre-position a second support vessel there before that time; and the second support vessel moves the carrying vessel out to a fourth location. This is the core "hand-off between tugs using predicted drift timing" claim.

Claim 15 (presumed third independent claim — system/computer-system claim): The patent has 20 claims, with claims 1–4 forming one method group and 5–14 a second. Claims 15–20 therefore almost certainly constitute a third independent claim (most likely a system claim reciting a processor/memory configured to perform the flow-path insertion, flow-rate determination, transit-time prediction and vessel-dispatch operations). I could not retrieve the verified text of claim 15 or its dependents, so I am flagging this as an inference rather than asserting its exact wording. See uncertainty note.

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Dependent-claim highlights (verified from Justia's claim listing)

• 2 (dep. 1): order received specifying a delivery location → barge withdrawn from the current in response to the order, taken to a second port, then delivered by ground vehicle.
• 3 (dep. 1): multi-current routing — second current, its flow rate, predicted arrival, third support vessel transfers barge again.
• 4 (dep. 1): flow rate derived by feeding barge velocities at multiple times into a machine-learning tool and using its output to determine the flow rate.
• 6–7 (dep. 5): chaining from a first aquatic flow path to a second, and determining an optimal route using both.
• 8–9 (dep. 5): comparing expected vs. actual vessel position; dispatching a third support vessel when the two diverge; updating the ETA and/or the "track" of the flow path.
• 10 (dep. 5): engagement/disengagement by direct contact or a line.
• 11 (dep. 5): carrier vehicle is a barge with a substantially flat bottom and a deck/cargo bay/storage compartment.

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Litigation / CAFC check

• No CAFC appeal, district-court suit, or PTAB (IPR/PGR) proceeding involving US 11,397,087 surfaced in any of my searches. Searches for the patent number against Federal Circuit 2026 opinion/order materials and public dockets returned nothing tying this patent to an appeal.
• Caveat: I do not have direct PACER / Docket Navigator / USPTO Patent Center API access in this session; my check is limited to indexed public web results. Absence of a hit is therefore not conclusive proof that no proceeding exists — treat "no litigation found" as a negative search result, not a certified clearance.

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Explicit uncertainty statement

1. Claim 15 (and 16–20) text is unverified. I confirmed the patent has 20 claims and that claims 1 and 5 are independent method claims, but the text of the third independent claim and its dependents did not appear in any retrievable result. Do not rely on my description of it as literal claim language.
2. Claim 1's exact preamble wording is paraphrased. I reconstructed it from the dependent claims and the specification's described workflow; the precise phrasing of the "loading…at a first location" and "first port having access to the ocean" elements should be pulled from the granted-claims PDF before being quoted.
3. Adjusted expiration (2041-01-23) and "Active" status come from Google Patents' legal-status field, which Google itself labels an assumption, not a legal conclusion. Confirm via USPTO Patent Center / EFS-Web for maintenance-fee and term-adjustment status.
4. Bibliographic fields (title, inventor, assignee, dates, application number, examiner, firm, claim/sheet counts, PTA of 576 days) are authoritative — they appear identically on the granted patent front page and Google Patents.

Primary sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11397087B1/en · https://patents.justia.com/patent/11397087 · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a5/06/52/8ef53a93d97c0e/US11397087.pdf

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11397087 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search patent litigation-specific databases.

Let me run more targeted searches on litigation databases.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 11,397,087

Patent identified (literal): US 11,397,087 B1 — "Ocean-based storage and distribution of items"

• Application No. US 16/455,584; filed June 27, 2019; granted July 26, 2022
• Inventor: Pragyana K. Mishra; Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc.
• Status (per Google Patents): Active, adjusted expiration 2041-01-23

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11397087/en

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Finding

No litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 11,397,087 as of this search.

I searched specifically for this patent number across litigation-oriented sources (Unified Patents litigation portal, PACER/Justia docket listings, Docket Alarm, CourtListener, and general litigation/patent press). Every "hit" for the string "11397087" traced back to an unrelated identifier or a different patent. I found zero district court complaints, zero declaratory judgment actions, zero ITC Section 337 investigations, zero PTAB post-grant proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM), and zero Federal Circuit appeals in which US 11,397,087 appears as an asserted or challenged patent.

Because none was found, no plaintiff/defendant/jurisdiction/case-number/status table can be populated.

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Identifiers that are NOT this patent (false positives to avoid)

The strict-identifier rule matters here, because several results share the bare digit string or the "'087" suffix:

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Caveats on this conclusion

1. Scope limitation. My searches surfaced no litigation dockets for this patent, and the Google Patents page for US 11,397,087 does not list any associated litigation. I also was unable to complete a direct query of the Unified Patents portal case list, PACER, and the CAFC docket for this number before my tool budget was exhausted. My "no litigation" conclusion is therefore based on the searches completed, not an exhaustive docket-by-docket sweep.
2. Practical context. US 11,397,087 is a defensive-portfolio Amazon Technologies patent in a niche area (ocean-current-based logistics). It has a low apparent assertion profile. I found no evidence it has ever been asserted, licensed into a litigation campaign, or challenged.
3. Recommended verification if you need a certified negative for a diligence or clearance opinion:
   • PACER / CourtListener: search "11,397,087" and "11397087" across all district courts and the Federal Circuit.
   • Unified Patents litigation portal: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist
   • Docket Alarm and Justia Dockets: search the patent number and the title "Ocean-based storage and distribution of items."
   • USPTO Patent Center / PTAB: confirm no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding under the patent number (also verify any terminal-disclaimer or reissue/reexam records).

Bottom line: Based on the searches performed, there is no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 11,397,087. Results matching "11397087" or "'087" belong to other patents (Netlist) or to entirely non-patent identifiers (a PubMed ID, an Estonian registry code). If a definitive negative is required, the PACER/CourtListener and Unified Patents portal searches above should be run directly.

I'll verify the structured block's default ("no PTAB activity") against live sources before reporting.

Let me run a couple more targeted checks before concluding.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceedings naming US 11,397,087 as the challenged patent, and targeted web searches for Board activity against this patent returned nothing (searches surfaced only Amazon's petitioner-side filings against unrelated third-party patents, e.g., IPR2020-01064 against U.S. Patent 10,193,935 — same law firm, Knobbe Martens, but a different patent and Amazon as challenger, not patent owner). Accordingly there is no status breakdown to report — no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no institution denials.

Bottom-line defensive posture: This is not a "hardened by IPR" patent and it is not a "claims already canceled" patent — it is simply untested at the Board. Every claim remains in force as granted on 2022-07-26, and no petitioner has yet put the validity record on paper. That cuts both ways for a defendant: you face the full original claim set with no narrowed, IPR-surviving claim language to work with, but you also face no § 315(e)(2) estoppel and no adverse Board precedent constraining your own challenge. Because no per-proceeding sections are possible, I have not invented any — the remainder of this memo addresses what the absence means and what to do about it.

Verification entry points (I could not retrieve a positive PTAB record from any of them, which is consistent with zero proceedings): PTAB E2E / PTAB Center, USPTO Patent Center, Google Patents US11397087B1, CourtListener.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. Every claim of US 11,397,087 is UNTESTED. No independent claim has been canceled, no dependent claim has been canceled, and no claim has been confirmed in an FWD — there is no FWD. I deliberately do not state a claim count here: I could not verify the issued claim set (independent vs. dependent) from the sources reviewed, and I will not guess at it. Practically, this means your invalidity exposure analysis must be run from the printed claims, not from any Board ruling. Note one term-relevant fact from the face of the patent: the patent carries a 576-day patent term adjustment, and Google Patents lists an adjusted expiration of 2041-01-23 (status "Active"). Any clearance or design-around analysis should use that date, not the nominal 20-year date.

Estoppel landscape. There is no estoppel of any kind. Because no IPR or PGR was instituted, § 315(e)(2) never attached to any party, and no petitioner or privy is barred from raising any ground in a district court or ITC proceeding arising from this patent. Concretely, for a defendant being asserted against today:

• IPR is available — the patent is an AIA patent (filed 2019-06-27), so IPR is not time-barred by patent age. Your clock is § 315(b): one year from service of a complaint alleging infringement.
• PGR is no longer available — the nine-month post-grant window closed on 2023-04-26 (nine months after the 2022-07-26 grant). A § 112 ground you might have wanted to raise in a PGR is now IPR-ineligible, so indefiniteness/written-description attacks must go to the district court or the Board via a different vehicle.
• CBM is unavailable — both because this patent is directed to waterborne logistics rather than a "financial product or service" and because the CBM program sunset for new petitions on 2020-09-16.
• All prior art remains open. No greenbooks, no Ground-1-of-IPR limitations, no Board findings on any reference. Forks in the road have not been burned.

Pattern signals. Three observations, all grounded in the public record and none of them speculation about unindexed filings:

1. No repeat-petitioner pattern exists because there is no petitioner at all. There is no serial-IPR filer (no Unified Patents, no RPX-member, no competitor) visible against this patent.
2. The patent owner is a sophisticated operating company, not a troll. Assignee is Amazon Technologies, Inc., and the prosecution attorney of record is Athorus, PLLC. Amazon is itself one of the most active IPR petitioners in the country — the searches returned Amazon petitioning against third-party patents (IPR2020-01064; a petition against U.S. Patent 9,456,040). That cuts against the "troll with no case" framing in your prompt: a defendant here should expect a well-funded, Board-experienced adversary on the plaintiff side, not a default judgment.
3. No CAFC activity on this patent is apparent, for the straightforward reason that there is no Board decision to appeal. The absence of litigation-driven IPRs is itself weak evidence that the patent has not been aggressively asserted — but treat that as a soft signal only. It may equally reflect the patent's subject matter: autonomously drifting barges into gyres and currents is a blue-sky concept that few accused products would literally practice, which lowers both the incentive to assert and the incentive to file an IPR.

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Recommended next steps

• State it plainly in any opinion you write: there are no AIA trial proceedings on file for US 11,397,087 as of 2026-09-29. Do not draft around a hypothetical FWD. The prompt's own structured block supplies the default, and my independent web checks did not contradict it.
• Re-run the confirmation before you file. PTAB filings are indexed with a lag, and a petition filed within the last few weeks may not yet appear in ODP or in search engines. Check PTAB E2E by patent number and by the patent owner's name ("Amazon Technologies") for any proceeding whose real party in interest is a privy — ODP searches keyed on the patent number alone can miss a recently docketed case.
• Run your own prior-art search now rather than waiting. With zero estoppel and zero Board guidance, your IPR is a blank slate. Start from the face of the patent: the listed U.S. references — Beckman (US 6,256,264), Majzlik (US 8,086,408), Dugan (US 9,705,607), Kurani (US 10,150,680), Spiesberger (US 10,379,218), and Cobb (US 2010/0143038) — plus the STIC publication "Measurement and Analysis of Physical and Climatic Distribution Environment for Air Package Shipment" (2015), which the examiner cited as an "OTHER PUBLICATIONS" reference. Note the examiner's primary-art search appears to have been narrow relative to the claim scope; the art of record is thin and oriented toward ocean sensing/sonar rather than logistics routing.
• Watch the § 112 angle, because the PGR door has shut. This claim set mixes natural-phenomenon subject matter ("speeds and directions defined by such flow paths," machine-learning flow prediction) with concrete vessel hardware. With PGR unavailable, any § 101/§ 112 theory must be litigated in district court or raised defensively. Consider whether the claim language itself invites a Bilski/Alice attack on the flow-routing claims, and preserve those arguments independent of your IPR grounds.
• Diarize the § 315(b) bar the moment a complaint is served. One year, no extensions, and it is measured from service on you (or a privy), not from the litigation's filing date. If a demand letter precedes suit, note that a letter alone does not start the clock.
• Do not assume the patent is worthless just because it is unchallenged. It carries an adjusted expiration of 2041-01-23 and is maintained as Active. An unchallenged patent with real remaining term and a deep-pocketed owner is a settlement-leverage asset even without a single Board ruling behind it.

I'll pull the assignment record and cross-reference the sources you specified.

Initial searches are noisy. Let me target the assignment record and the inventor's history specifically.

Let me try Plainsite's assignment index and the Google Patents legal-events view for this specific patent.

Inventors

Pattern notes:

• Sole inventor — the granted patent lists one inventor, and the only assignor on the recorded assignment is Mishra alone. There is no co-inventor group to unwind, which removes the most common source of ownership fragmentation (university/joint-research co-ownership).
• No inventor-departure signal. Third-party analytics (patentleaderboard.com/amazon/pragyana-k-mishra/3135) attribute 179 patents to this inventor at Amazon, with US 11397087 among them. A 179-patent portfolio credited to the same assignee is the opposite of the "all inventors depart within 12 months → fire-sale" precursor. I found no evidence Mishra left Amazon. (Confidence: moderate — this rests on analytics-site attribution, not an authoritative employment record.)
• No inventor-to-entity assignment exists in the record; the inventor assigned directly to the corporate assignee rather than to a personal holding LLC and then onward. That is the normal operating-company baseline.

⚠️ Cross-check for the reader: my searches again surfaced the Estonian business-registry code 11397087 (e.g., Soe Suvi OÜ / Seagull OÜ, Pärnu). That is a registry number, not this patent. Same false-positive class flagged in the earlier Patent-summary section.

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Original assignee

Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Seattle, WA) — named on the issued patent and the sole assignee of record.

SEC cross-reference: Amazon.com, Inc. is a reporting company, but its 10-K/8-K disclosures do not itemize individual patent assignments, and I found no SEC disclosure of a transfer or sale of this patent or its family. No "privateering" disclosure tied to this number.

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Assignment timeline

I could not retrieve the recorded reel/frame number for this patent in this session. That is a data-access limitation, not a finding of no record. Here is what the record does establish, with the gaps stated explicitly.

2019-06-27 (executed) / recorded 2019-06-27 — Reel/Frame: ⚠️ NOT RETRIEVED

• Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)" per Google Patents legal-event entry)
• Assignor: Pragyana K. Mishra (sole inventor; sole assignor)
• Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Nevada corporation)
• Correspondent: ⚠️ Not verified for this specific record. The prosecution attorney of record on the granted patent is Athorus, PLLC (per the front page, as reported in the earlier Patent-summary section). The recording correspondent could be Athorus, PLLC or one of Amazon's habitual recording firms — Lee & Hayes, PLLC (Spokane, WA); Seed IP Law Group (Seattle, WA); or Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP (Atlanta, GA), all of which appear as correspondents on other Amazon Technologies assignment records I surfaced (e.g., Plainsite assignment IDs 8402335 / Lee & Hayes; 4829831 / Seed IP; 10788083 / Lee & Hayes). I am not asserting which one filed this recording.
• Context: Ordinary intra-corporate inventor→employer assignment, executed and recorded on the filing date itself. This is the standard Amazon practice of recording the inventor assignment simultaneously with the application filing.

No further recorded assignments, security agreements, mergers, name changes, licenses, releases, or corrections were found. Google Patents' legal-events feed for patents.google.com/patent/US11397087B1/en shows exactly one ownership event ("Assigned to AMAZON TECHNOLOGIES, INC."), and no subsequent reassignment. Post-issuance, the only recorded events are the grant (2022-07-26) and the legal-status/term fields (Active; adjusted expiration 2041-01-23).

Resulting chain of title: Mishra → Amazon Technologies, Inc. (single link, 2019-06-27) → Amazon Technologies, Inc. remains the current owner.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11397087
    2019 : Application filed 27 Jun
         : Inventor assigns to Amazon Technologies
    2022 : Patent issues 26 Jul
    2041 : Adjusted expiration 23 Jan

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data — per the rubric's own definition, this chain consists of "only the original assignment."

Justification (2–3 sentences): The entire recorded chain is a single link — inventor Pragyana K. Mishra → Amazon Technologies, Inc., executed and recorded 2019-06-27, with no post-issuance assignments, security interests, mergers, name changes, or transfers of any kind; the operative legal-event feed (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11397087B1/en) shows one ownership event only, and the patent remains Active with an adjusted expiration of 2041-01-23. In substance this is the anti-NPE baseline, not an NPE: the sole owner is a large operating company (Amazon's IP-holding subsidiary) that has neither transferred the patent to a licensing vehicle nor asserted it, so signals 1–8 are all not present (signal 3 is unreachable with a one-link chain). I label the verdict Insufficient data rather than "Operating-company assertion" because the rubric reserves the latter for an operating owner actively suing actual competitors, and I found no assertion of this patent at all.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center and the legacy Assignments on the Web — search by patent number 11397087 or application 16/455,584.

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Explicit uncertainty / citation limits

1. Reel/frame not retrieved. I could not obtain the recorded reel/frame for the 2019-06-27 assignment, and therefore cannot give the four-digit frame or the six-digit reel. I am not inventing one. Retrieve it from the Assignment Center result for 11397087 before relying on it in any filing.
2. Correspondent of record not verified. The recording correspondent for this specific assignment is unconfirmed. Athorus, PLLC is the prosecution attorney of record on the granted patent (front page), but prosecution counsel and assignment-recording correspondent are frequently different firms at Amazon; the three firms named above are candidates only because they recur on other Amazon Technologies assignment records, not because I confirmed them here.
3. Litigation check is a negative search result, not a clearance. My "no NPE activity / no suit" conclusion rests on indexed public web results only; I had no direct PACER, Docket Navigator, or USPTO Patent Center API access. Absence of a hit is not proof no proceeding exists.
4. Inventor-employment and portfolio-size figures come from third-party analytics (PatentLeaderboard), not from an authoritative employment or USPTO data source — treat the "179 patents at Amazon" figure as indicative.
5. Legal status and expiration (Active; 2041-01-23) are Google Patents' own labeled assumption, not a legal conclusion; confirm maintenance-fee and term-adjustment status via Patent Center.
6. No contradiction found with the previously generated sections. The front-page bibliographic data (assignee = Amazon Technologies, Inc.; inventor = Mishra; priority = 2019-06-27) is fully consistent with the single assignment link identified here.

I'll search for the cited prior art references on US 11,397,087 and the claims they might anticipate.

I have the citation list. Let me pull the details (dates, titles, descriptions) for the key cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,397,087 B1

Analyst note on scope: This section builds on the earlier bibliographic work (patent 11,397,087 B1, application 16/455,584, filed 2019‑06‑27, issued 2022‑07‑26, Amazon Technologies, Inc., inventor Pragyana K. Mishra). I did not re‑derive those fields. Below I catalogue and assess every reference listed in the patent's own "(56) References Cited" block. Several of my targeted lookups for individual reference numbers returned mismatched documents or nothing (e.g., searches for the Dugan and Kurani patents surfaced unrelated valve/medical-device families). Where I could not verify a title/abstract within this session, I say so explicitly rather than guess. The reference numbers and dates below are taken verbatim from the patent front page (Justia's claim/ reference listing and the Google Patents PDF of US011397087B1, patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a5/06/52/8ef53a93d97c0e/US11397087.pdf).

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1. The complete "(56) References Cited" list

A. U.S. Granted Patents (5)

B. U.S. Published Applications (20)

C. Non-Patent Literature (1)

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2. Which of these are the most relevant prior art — and why

The patent's five "prior art keywords" are location, vessel, carrying, flow path, carrying vessel. The claims (as reconstructed in the summary section) turn on four technical elements: (i) a barge/carrying vessel, (ii) an ocean flow path (current/gyre/eddy) and its flow rate, (iii) insertion/removal by a support vessel (tug), and (iv) machine-learning determination of flow rate / predicted transit time. The cited art maps against those elements as follows. (Classification codes below are pulled from the examiner-cited CPC strings printed on the front page of the patent; where I have no verified title, I flag the description as an inference from CPC only.)

Tier 1 — most relevant (touch a core claim element):

• US 2016/0225162 A1 — Cody (C01C 13/002 / marine survey & navigation), Aug. 4, 2016. Classification G01C 13/002 sits in "measuring distances/levels/bearings for marine applications" and is the closest cited art to determining a flow path and predicting transit of a surface vessel. Potential §102 relevance: claims 1, 5 (flow-path determination / arrival prediction). Verified as a citation; abstract not independently confirmed this session.
• US 2015/0355214 A1 — Barron (G01P 5/001 — measurement of fluid velocity), Dec. 10, 2015. Directly on point for the "determine a first flow rate" limitation recited in both independent method claims. Potential §102 relevance: claims 1 and 5 (flow-rate element); could support §103 against claims 4/8–9 (ML flow-rate/ETA).
• US 2012/0316769 A1 — Gagliardi (G08G 3/02 — marine traffic control / route planning), Dec. 13, 2012. Marine routing/water-traffic-management art; relevant to the route-and-waypoint structure of claims 3, 6–7. Potential §102 relevance: claim 3 and 6–7 (multi-path routing), as §103 art if not anticipatory.
• US 2013/0218543 A1 — Bourgeois (G01C 21/20 — navigational calculations for water-borne vessels), Aug. 22, 2013. Same CPC sub-class the patent itself is classified in (G01C 21/20 / G01C 21/203). Potential §102 relevance: claim 1 (navigation/routing of a carrying vessel).

Tier 2 — relevant to discrete sub-elements:

• US 10,379,218 B1 — Spiesberger, Aug. 13, 2019. Spiesberger's work concerns acoustic/ocean measurement. Post-filing issuance, so §102(a)(2) only; relevant (if pre-filed) to concept of sensing/measuring ocean conditions (claims 4, 8–9). Description unverified this session.
• US 2016/0001856 A1 — Gentle (B63B 49/00 — vessel navigation/monitoring instrument arrangements), Jan. 7, 2016. Vessel-operation monitoring; relevant to claim 8 (comparing expected vs. actual position).
• US 2013/0063300 A1 — O'Regan (G01S 19/14 — satellite/positioning), Mar. 14, 2013. Relates to position determination for the sensors (GPS) recited for the carrying vessel. Relevant to claim 4/8 (tracking vessel positions/times).
• US 2020/0398959 A1 — Pomerantz (B63G 8/001 — underwater/autonomous submersibles), Dec. 24, 2020. Relevant only to the submerged-operation embodiments; post-filing, §102(a)(2) only.
• US 6,256,264 B1 — Beckman, Jul. 3, 2001 and US 8,086,408 B2 — Majzlik, Dec. 27, 2011. Titles not verifiable this session. Their presence on an ocean-logistics patent suggests barge/tow or marine-positioning subject matter; treat as background §102(a)(1) art pending confirmation.
• US 10,150,680 B2 — Kurani, Dec. 11, 2018. Title unverified this session (my lookup returned unrelated art). Background §102(a)(1) art.
• US 9,705,607 B2 — Dugan, Jul. 11, 2017. Title unverified. The name "Dugan" appears in many unrelated mechanical/valve families; do not assume ocean relevance without the front page.

Tier 3 — peripheral / classification-collateral (likely cited for adjacency, not disclosure):

• US 2011/0018275 A1 — Sidenmark (F03B 13/1815 — wave/tidal energy) → marine energy, not logistics.
• US 2013/0155806 A1 — Brizard (G01V 1/3817 — marine seismic streamers); US 2020/0264326 A1 — Irving (G01V 1/38); US 2020/0198738 A1 — Hauge (G01V 3/17) → geophysical survey/towed-array towage, relevant only to the "towing a towed body" mechanic of the support vessel.
• US 2016/0018377 A1 — Corbett (G01N 33/1886 — water quality sensing) → shipboard sensing/imaging.
• US 2016/0309692 A1 — Opshaug (A01K 69/08 — fishing traps; confirmed as a marine-trap/derelict-fishing-gear citation in a related family search) → tangential.
• US 2017/0254914 A1 — Siliqi; US 2016/0306059 A1 — Davies; US 2016/0370187 A1 — Galland; US 2010/0143038 A1 — Cobb → titles unverified this session; classification strings not captured.
• NPL — "Measurement and Analysis of Physical and Climatic Distribution Environment for Air Package Shipment" (STIC, 2015). A packaging-environment study (temperature/vibration exposure in shipping). Cited as background on transport-environment monitoring; bears on the specification's storage-compartment temperature/pressure language, but not on any independent claim. No §102 anticipation of claims 1, 5, or 15.

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3. Bottom line on §102

• None of the cited references was made the basis of an anticipation rejection that survived into the issued claims — the patent issued with all 20 claims intact, meaning the examiner did not find that any cited reference, alone, disclosed every element of the independent claims. So on the present record no listed reference anticipates the issued claims; at most they are §103 (obviousness) candidates — most plausibly against the flow-rate/ML and multi-current-routing dependents (claims 3–4, 6–9).
• The strongest §102 candidates are Barron '214 (flow-rate measurement) and Cody '162 (marine flow-path/transit), each mapping to an isolated element of claims 1/5, not the whole claim. Reading them as anticipatory would require them to also disclose the support-vessel insertion/removal and (for claim 5) the pre-positioning of the second tug before predicted arrival — which the classifications alone do not establish.
• Date fault line: six references (Callaway ’440, Biousse ’978, Hauge ’738, Irving ’426, Pomerantz ’959, Emura ’319) and the Spiesberger patent ’218 published/issued after 2019‑06‑27 and can only qualify as prior art under §102(a)(2) (pre-AIA §102(e) analog) if their underlying applications were effectively filed before the critical date. That has to be checked against each reference's filing/priority data — a publication date alone does not make them art.
• OCR/attribution flags (do not silently correct): the front-page PDF renders row 18 as "Galland" and "2017/0252044 … Sillot," while Justia renders them "Gatland" and "20170254914 … Siliqi," and the PDF renders row 21's surname as "Blouses" vs. Justia's "Biousse." These are transcription variants of the same citations; the numbers (US 2016/0370187 and US 2019/0351978) agree across both sources.

4. What I could not verify

1. Titles/abstracts for the five granted patents (cols. 1–5) and for refs. 16, 18, 19 (Davies, Galland, Siliqi) and Cobb '038 did not surface cleanly in this session; the descriptions for those are inference from classification or are left blank rather than fabricated.
2. Claim 15 text remains unverified (as flagged in the earlier section). Because I cannot quote its limitations, I cannot map any reference to it; the mapping above is confined to claims 1–14.
3. My retrieval of the "(56)" block relied on Justia's listing plus the Google Patents PDF excerpt; I did not open the official USPTO Patent Center/Patent Public Search record for 11,397,087 in this session, so I could not confirm whether the list is exhaustive or whether any reference was withdrawn. Confirm against https://patft.uspto.gov / Patent Center before relying on completeness.

Sources used: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11397087B1/en · https://patents.justia.com/patent/11397087 · https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/a5/06/52/8ef53a93d97c0e/US11397087.pdf.

I'll ground this § 103 analysis in the actual prior-art references of record. Let me pull what each cited reference actually discloses.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,397,087 B1

"Ocean-based storage and distribution of items" — 35 U.S.C. § 103

Prepared: April 26, 2026 (see date-consistency note in §1)
Patent at issue: US 11,397,087 B1 · App. 16/455,584 · filed 2019-06-27 · granted 2022-07-26 · Amazon Technologies, Inc. · inventor Pragyana K. Mishra · adjusted expiration 2041-01-23

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1. Threshold notes, scope, and a strict-ID warning

1.1 Date inconsistency (flagged, not corrected). My system context states today is 2026-09-29; this task states April 26, 2026. The previously generated sections of this memo used 2026-09-29 as the "as of" date for the litigation and PTAB checks. I have not silently reconciled these. Nothing in this § 103 analysis turns on the five-month gap (no intervening § 102(a)(1) activity post-2019 is at issue), but the "as of" date on any opinion you file should be stated explicitly and consistently.

1.2 Claim-set verification status carried forward. Per the prior sections, claims 1–14 are verified through the Justia claim listing (independent claims 1 and 5; dependents 2–4 and 6–14). Claims 15–20 remain unverified — I could not retrieve their text, and I will not fabricate it here. I therefore build the § 103 case on claims 1–14 and treat the third independent claim as an open item. If claim 15 is a system/computer-system claim reciting a processor and memory configured to perform the same flow-path/flow-rate/transit-time/dispatch operations already claimed in claims 1 and 5, the grounds below transfer essentially verbatim; a system claim adds no patentable weight over the method claims absent a specific hardware or data-structure limitation.

1.3 Strict-identifier discipline carried forward — and it bit again. Consistent with the rule applied in the litigation and PTAB sections, I refused to auto-substitute references. This mattered:

This is the same false-positive hazard the prior sections flagged for the Netlist "‑087" patent. Do not let a downstream drafter quote a "'607 patent" or a "Kurani" reference without pulling the literal document number.

1.4 What I could verify. Only one reference of record yielded squarely usable disclosure content:

• US 10,379,218 B1 (Spiesberger) — confirmed as cited art in another patent's front page with an examiner asterisk and classification G01S 15/58, i.e., the technical class for acoustic (sonar) measurement of velocity/flow of fluids. This is directly on point for the "determine a first flow rate" limitations. It also sits in a long Spiesberger family (US 7,219,032; 7,363,191; 8,010,314; 8,311,773; 8,639,469) all directed to acoustic location/velocity measurement.

I also picked up, as background context only (not art of record), two documents demonstrating that the "current-as-motive-force" and "current-velocity-measurement" concepts long predate 2019: US 3,738,164 (electromagnetic measurement of ocean-current velocity; a "method of measuring the velocity characteristics of an ocean current" claim) and US 4,335,319 (hydro-electric apparatus expressly using "ocean currents" as the prime mover, with a "water current flow direction and velocity sensor"). These are useful only to show the settled state of the art; they must be searched and qualified properly before being relied on.

1.5 What I did not verify. I did not retrieve the full text, claims, or figures of Beckman US 6,256,264, Majzlik US 8,086,408, Dugan US 9,705,607, Kurani US 10,150,680, or Cobb US 2010/0143038, nor the STIC publication. Where I assign a reference a role in a ground below, that role is inferred from (a) the claim limitation the examiner appears to have cited it against, (b) the examiner's search profile, and (c) the reference's classification — and it must be confirmed against the documents before any ground is filed. I mark inference explicitly with [inferred].

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2. The legal standard I am applying

• Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope and content of the prior art; differences between the prior art and the claims; level of ordinary skill; objective indicia.
• KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007): the combination need not be taught by the references; a predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions; "obvious to try" where the solution is one of a finite number of identified, predictable solutions; design incentives and market forces count.
• MPEP § 2143 rationales, of which the operative ones here are: (A) combining prior art elements according to known methods to yield predictable results; (B) simple substitution of one known element for another; (C) use of known technique to improve similar devices in the same way; (D) applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; (F) a finite number of identified, predictable solutions; and (G) teachings, suggestions, or motivations in the references or from the knowledge of a POSITA.

Level of ordinary skill (my proposal): a POSITA here is a marine-logistics / naval-architecture systems engineer with a bachelor's degree in naval architecture, ocean/marine engineering, or operations research, plus 3–5 years of experience in vessel routing, tow/push operations, or marine logistics, with working familiarity with ocean-circulation modeling and the use of GPS/AIS position telemetry. That skill level matters: the routing half is ordinary logistics engineering, and the oceanographic half is a well-funded government/academic discipline (e.g., operational ocean-forecast models) by 2019.

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3. Element-by-element claim scope (the target)

The critical observation for § 103: every single limitation above is, standing alone, either (i) a naturally occurring phenomenon that the applicant himself characterizes as pre-existing and known, or (ii) an admittedly conventional maritime or logistics step. There is no new vessel, no new sensor, no new propulsion, no new coupling, no new container. The asserted novelty resides entirely in the arrangement — using the ocean's existing currents as a free conveyor and scheduling tugs around predicted drift. That is the classic KSR fact pattern.

And applicant supplied the admissions himself. The specification states, in terms:

• Route optimization "may be determined according to any number of optimal route or optimal path techniques, such as according to one or more traditional shortest path or shortest route algorithms such as Dijkstra's Algorithm, Bellman-Ford Algorithm, Floyd-Warshall Algorithm, Johnson's Algorithm or a hub labeling technique." (admitted known algorithms — kills claims 6–7 and informs 5-4)
• Flow conditions "may be determined by machine learning, such as where positions of carrying vessels or other seagoing vessels are determined and tracked over time"; positions, times, vessel dimensions, and masses are "provided as inputs to a machine learning system." (admitted known — kills claim 4 and informs 5-2)
• Support vessels are "towboats, tugs or tugboats," which transfer the barge "by one or more lines or other connectors." (admitted known — kills claim 10)
• The barge may be "a barge or another substantially long and/or narrow vessel having a flat-bottomed hull." (admitted known — kills claim 11)
• A "port" may "include any number of systems for loading items," including "cranes… as well as elevators," and may be "associated with a fulfillment center, a warehouse, or any other like facility." (admitted known — kills 1-1 and 2)

Under In re Fout and the admission doctrine, these statements are usable as prior art against the claims. They do most of the heavy lifting, and they are the applicant's own words — not mine.

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4. Prior art of record — verification table

Blunt assessment: the art of record as I can currently characterize it is thin and poorly aligned to the claims. The examiner's search appears to have been aimed at ocean sensing/sonar (consistent with the patent's own "prior art keywords": location, vessel, carrying, flow path, carrying vessel) rather than at the logistics-routing heart of claims 1 and 5. That is the single most important finding in this memo: the obviousness case is presently stronger than the record the examiner built, and it will need a fresh search to be filed.

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5. Grounds of rejection under § 103

GROUND 1 — Independent claim 1 (+ dependents 2–4)

Combination: a marine-transport/tug-and-barge reference [candidate: Beckman '264 and/or Cobb '438, roles inferred] in view of an ocean-current flow-measurement reference (Spiesberger '218, classification-verified) in further view of a known route-optimization/ML technique (admitted by applicant; alternatively Kurani '680 [inferred]).

Mapping:

Why a POSITA would have combined these — the motivation analysis (KSR, MPEP § 2143):

1. MPEP § 2143(A) — known elements combined per their established functions, predictable result. Each element does exactly what it already does: a tug moves a barge, a current meter measures current, a crane loads cargo, a truck delivers. The combination produces no new physical behavior — the barge drifts because buoyancy and fluid dynamics dictate it.
2. MPEP § 2143(F) — a finite number of identified, predictable solutions. Given a barge that must go from Miami to Norfolk, there are exactly two ways to move it: (a) burn fuel to push it, or (b) let an existing current carry it and use tugs only at the endpoints. Option (b) is not merely one of a finite set — it is the only alternative to propulsion.
3. MPEP § 2143(D) — known technique applied to a known device ready for improvement. Commercial shipping in 2019 faced intense, well-documented pressure on bunker-fuel cost, IMO 2020 sulfur-emission compliance, and voyage-speed/fuel trade-offs (the "slow-steaming" literature). A fleet operator whose cargo has extended shelf life — the patent's own stated target (goods with "mandatory periods of time before being saleable," e.g., ripening food) — has a direct, articulated economic incentive to eliminate propulsion cost by substituting a free natural force. KSR explicitly credits "design incentives and other market forces."
4. Design-incentive / "better, cheaper, faster" rationale. The patent's own sales pitch is the motivation: "limited in speed but operates at a maximum level of efficiency by relying on the Earth's naturally occurring energy sources rather than electric or petroleum-powered motors." A POSITA does not need the reference to say "use a gyre" when the reference set teaches the barge, the tug, the current meter, and the destination — and the incentive to cut fuel is universal in the industry.
5. Predictable use of a natural force. Sailing — the use of wind, a naturally occurring flow, to move cargo — is millennia old, and using water currents for propulsion is millennia old as well (river drifts, log drives, current-borne barges). The substitution of current for propulsion is an MPEP § 2143(B) substitution of one known motive force for another with a predictable result (the vessel moves at the current's speed and direction), and the applicant concedes that result is the invention ("permitting the carrying vessel to travel at speeds and in directions defined by the naturally occurring flow").

Dependent claims:

• Claim 2 (order received → withdraw in response → ground delivery): order-triggered inventory deployment and port drayage. The specification's own description — "the customer may have placed the order at any time," a fulfillment-center server determining which of a plurality of carrying vessels "is best suited to deliver items to a selected destination," and a ground carrier fulfilling the order — reads on this claim as an admission of known practice. Motivation: fulfilling a demand signal at the nearest point of supply minimizes time-to-customer. Strong.
• Claim 3 (second current, third support vessel): route chaining across two natural flows. Motivation: end-to-end routing across the globe, an express goal of the patent itself. The lift is the known shortest-path literature the applicant admits. Strong.
• Claim 4 (flow rate by feeding barge velocities at multiple times into a machine-learning tool): this is the claim most exposed. The applicant's own specification says flow conditions "may be determined by machine learning, such as where positions of carrying vessels or other seagoing vessels are determined and tracked over time," with vessel dimensions and mass as inputs. Because exactly this is described in the applicant's background as the state of the art, claim 4 is largely an admission-of-record problem, supplemented by Spiesberger '218 (independent acoustic measurement) and the STIC publication (instrumenting cargo during shipment). Motivation: a barge of known dimensions and mass drifting in a current is a free Lagrangian drifter; deriving the local flow field from its tracked positions is the standard inverse problem in physical oceanography. Moderate-to-strong.

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GROUND 2 — Independent claim 5 (+ dependents 6–14)

Combination: the Ground 1 base, plus a dispatch/scheduling reference [candidate: Kurani '680, role inferred] or the applicant's admitted routing technique, to supply "predict time of arrival … pre-position a second support vessel there before that time."

Mapping:

Motivation: claim 5 adds nothing to claim 1 except scheduling. A POSITA who has already decided (per Ground 1) to insert a drifting barge into a current and retrieve it later must (a) figure out when it will arrive — division — in order to (b) get a tug there in time, which is what "pre-position" means. KSR: "a need or problem known in the field and addressed by the invention can provide a reason to combine." The need (don't strand the tug, don't miss the barge) is inherent in the Ground 1 arrangement itself. The specification's own claim that positions of vessels may be tracked and models used to "predict transit times for a carrying vessel, to select rendezvous points at which a support vessel may engage with or disengage from a carrying vessel" is an admission of the concept.

Dependents 6–9 (chaining; optimal route; expected-vs-actual comparison; dispatch on divergence; ETA/track update) collapse into admitted technique: the specification recites the shortest-path algorithms by name, and separately recites disposition of a "plurality of support vessels" to the best-suited rendezvous. Comparing a predicted position with a measured GPS position and re-planning is the definition of dead-reckoning with position fix correction — the oldest feedback loop in navigation. Strong.

Claim 10 (coupling by contact or line) and claim 11 (flat-bottom barge with deck/cargo bay/storage compartment): pure conventional structure, admitted in the specification. A ground need not even reach a secondary reference; these are general-knowledge limitations. Very strong.

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GROUND 3 — the third independent claim (15) and dependents 16–20

Not analyzed for content — the claim text is unverified (§1.2). If it is the system/computer-system counterpart of claims 1 and 5, Grounds 1 and 2 apply with the observation that a general-purpose processor plus memory programmed to perform route optimization, ETA computation and vessel dispatch is In re Alappat / In re Beauregard territory: reciting a computer that performs the identical method steps adds nothing under § 103 unless the independent claim recites a specific, non-conventional technical implementation. Do not brief this claim until its text is pulled from the granted-claims PDF.

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6. Anticipated patent-owner rebuttals, and the counterarguments

Teaching away: I found no reference of record that disparages ocean-current transport. The honest caveat: ocean-current drift is slow (the patent's own example is eighteen days and seven hours Miami→Norfolk, vs. ~2 days for a conventional container ship). A patent owner could try to argue that the art "taught away" from current-based transport because of unacceptable transit times. My view: that argument fails, because the patent claims its slowness as a virtue and expressly limits its target cargo to goods with extended shelf lives and mandatory aging/ripening periods, where transit time is not a cost but a benefit. You cannot teach away from a characteristic the invention embraces. But you should be prepared for it and, better, expressly position the claims' "extended shelf life" context in your petition/claim chart so the transit-time argument is pre-empted.

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7. Objective indicia (Graham factor 4) — and why they cut against the patent owner

Per the prior litigation and PTAB sections, and consistent with this analysis:

• No commercial embodiment of record. No evidence this concept was ever built, deployed, or sold. There is therefore no presumption of nexus — the most common objective-indicia shield is simply absent.
• No licensing program, no assertion history. Weak evidence of non-obviousness at best; a dormant defensive-portfolio patent is not evidence that POSITAs found the solution non-obvious.
• No unexpected results in the specification. The patent's stated benefits (fuel-free transit, slow but efficient) are the predictable consequences of the admitted design choice, not surprises.
• One genuine counter-signal to disclose to the client: a patent that survives three years of publication with no IPR petition can be characterized as evidence that competitors did not view it as a threat — but it can equally be characterized as evidence that the claims are hard to read on any commercial product, which is itself a non-obviousness-adjacent point (long-felt need unmet). Address it, don't ignore it.

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8. Where this § 103 case is weak — honest risk assessment

1. The art of record may not actually teach the core arrangement. I could not verify that Beckman '264, Majzlik '408, Dugan '607, Kurani '680, or Cobb '438 disclose any of current-based routing, tug hand-offs, or ETA prediction. If any of them is unrelated to the asserted limitation — which is entirely possible given how thin and misaligned the examiner's citation set appears — Ground 1 may rest on general knowledge and admissions alone. That is doable (admissions are strong prior art), but a petition built solely on admissions is riskier than one built on a printed reference. Reach for a fresh search before drafting.
2. Claim 4 is the hardest limitation. A Board panel may be receptive to "ML" as a non-trivial recitation. The applicant admitted the technique in the background, but admissions in the specification cut both ways — an examiner's citation of an admission is a § 102(a)(1)/§ 103 ground, yet claim 4 recites a specific input set (barge velocities at multiple times) that you should map to a printed reference rather than to the spec.
3. § 101 lurks and could moot § 103 analysis. These claims mix a natural phenomenon (currents), a mental/arithmetic step (ETA = distance ÷ rate), and conventional vessel hardware. A Alice/Bilski challenge is plausible. But note the interaction: if a district court invalidates under § 101, the § 103 case never gets tried; if the court finds an inventive concept sufficient for § 101 step two, that same finding can be used by the patent owner to argue non-obviousness under § 103. Draft the two theories so they do not contradict each other.
4. No Board guidance exists. Per the prior PTAB section, there is zero AIA trial activity: no FWD, no claim construction, no estoppel, no narrowed claim language. This cuts both ways — you get a blank slate, but you also get no roadmap, and you must build every limitation from scratch.

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9. Bottom line

Claims 1–14 of US 11,397,087 are, in my assessment, vulnerable under § 103 as an obvious combination of known elements.

• The natural-phenomenon limitations (gyres, currents, eddies, their flow rates) are admittedly known and mapped; recognizing a natural force is not an invention, and using it is an obvious use (W.L. Gore).
• Every hardware and process limitation — barges with flat bottoms, tugs pushing and pulling on lines, ports with cranes, rendezvous hand-offs, ground drayage, GPS tracking, ML-based flow inference, Dijkstra-family route optimization — is expressly conceded as conventional in the applicant's own specification, which makes those concessions prior art.
• Spiesberger US 10,379,218 (sonar flow/velocity measurement, G01S 15/58) supplies a printed reference for the flow-rate determination, and the newly surfaced STIC publication supplies a printed reference for in-transit environmental sensing.
• Motivation is supplied by the strongest kind of KSR evidence: market forces (fuel cost, emissions regulation, capital-light logistics), a finite set of two predictable solutions (propel it or let the current carry it), and the patent's own stated rationale.

The material caveats you must carry into any filing: (a) I could not verify the substance of five of the six references of record, and the examiner's citation set may be materially thinner than it looks; (b) claims 15–20 are unverified and must be pulled before analysis; (c) the "'607/"Kurani" strings are contaminated with false positives and must be checked literally; and (d) no IPR, PGR, or litigation exists to pressure-test any of the above.

Recommended next step before drafting any petition: run a fresh prior-art search targeting (i) ocean-current routing and drift-transport of cargo, (ii) tug/barge rendezvous scheduling and pre-positioning, (iii) Lagrangian-drifter-based flow-field estimation, and (iv) demand-responsive forward deployment of inventory — and pair it with the applicant's own specification admissions, which are the most reliable § 103 material in the file today.