US 11402462

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number, including any litigation or CAFC docket activity.

Let me check for any litigation or PTAB proceedings involving this patent.

US Patent 11,402,462 — Analyst Summary

Search note: I searched for this specific number (plus assignee/litigation/PTAB variants). I found no Federal Circuit docket activity in 2026 and no district-court or PTAB proceeding tied to US 11,402,462 in the results returned. Because I cannot directly query PACER/Docket Navigator or the PTAB API here, treat "no litigation found" as absence of evidence in search results, not a verified negative. Everything below on the patent's bibliographic content is grounded in the full patent text you supplied, which is authoritative.

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Bibliographic data

"C-Priority" note: the 62/582,217 provisional is not itself a US patent (it was a provisional application). One search result characterizes a related Echodyne filing as having a "2017-11-06 priority" date — consistent with the above.

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Abstract (verbatim)

An embodiment of a radar subsystem includes at least one antenna and a control circuit. The at least one antenna is configured to radiate at least one first transmit beam and to form at least one first receive beam. And the control circuit is configured to steer the at least one first transmit beam and the at least one first receive beam over a first field of regard during a first time period, and to steer the at least one first transmit beam and the at least one first receive beam over a second field of regard during a second time period.

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Plain-language overview of the independent claims

The patent's claim set appears in the specification as "Example 1 … Example 21." Three of those are independent; the remainder depend from them. (Note: Examples 5 and 12 are not reproduced in the text supplied to me — the fetched document jumps from Example 4 to Example 6, and Example 11 to Example 13. I cannot state their content; flagging as a gap rather than guessing.)

Example 1 — Independent claim: radar subsystem (apparatus).
A radar subsystem with two elements:

1. At least one antenna that radiates a transmit beam and forms a receive beam; and
2. A control circuit that steers both that transmit beam and that receive beam over a first field of regard in a first time period, and then over a second field of regard in a second time period.

In plain terms: one antenna pair, two different angular coverage zones, used at two different times. The novelty is framed as time-segmented reallocation of the same beam resources across different angular regions, not new antenna hardware.

Example 8 — Independent claim: method.
The same concept expressed as steps: radiating a transmit beam; forming a receive beam; steering both over a first field of regard during a first time period; and steering both over a second field of regard during a second time period.

Example 15 — Independent claim: non-transitory computer-readable medium.
Stored instructions that, when executed by processing circuitry (or another circuit under its control), cause the system to do exactly the Example 8 steps. This is the software/CRM counterpart of the method claim, notably phrased to cover "another circuit under control of" the processing circuit — built to reach a controller that commands separate beam-steering hardware.

Dependent claims (2–7, 9–14, 16–21) — the real scope-defining limitations. The independent claims are broad; the dependencies carry the distinguishing detail:

• Trigger-based transitions (claims 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 18): switching between fields of regard in response to (i) a command, (ii) an occurrence of an event, or (iii) an interrupt signal.
• Time-based transition (claim 19): switching on elapse of an amount of time.
• Beam-characteristic changes (claims 6, 13, 20): the transmit beam having a first characteristic in a third period and a second characteristic in a fourth period, with the matching pair of receive characteristics — i.e., reconfiguring gain-pattern and/or waveform parameters, not just pointing.
• Nested / superset field of regard (claims 7, 14, 21): a second transmit/receive beam pair steered over a third field of regard that includes the first and second fields of regard during those same first and second time periods — i.e., a wide surveillance FOR that contains the narrower sub-FORs, both running concurrently.

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Context from the specification (for claim-construction purposes)

The specification supplies explicit glossary definitions that likely control construction:

• Field of regard (FOR): "the total angular space on which the sensor makes intentional measurements, typically expressed in AZ and EL angles." Critically, "A single field of regard need not be contiguous, nor monotonic."
• Field of view (FOV): the total angular space the sensor is capable of measuring — "the maximum field of regard."
• Beam = an instantaneous gain-pattern combined with an instantaneous RD-manifold (waveform + processing).
• Range-Doppler manifold = the range/Doppler measurement space of one waveform with one processing chain.

Real-world anchoring: echo-scanning radar on an autonomous vehicle; a "Schedule A" wide-FOR mode toggling to a "Schedule B" narrow-FOR mode when an object such as a bicyclist is detected (FIGS. 2, 3A–3B), implemented via nested beam lists and link/toggle/interrupt transitions. Also disclosed: suppressing "firewall" regions (known clutter or interference), prioritizing regions, and dynamic focus-centering (FIGS. 6–8, 9A–9F). The disclosure states embodiments extend to "sonic sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and lidar sensors," though the claims as written are radar-centric ("transmit beam" / "receive beam").

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Uncertainty flags

1. Examples 5 and 12 are missing from the text I have. I do not know whether they are independent or dependent claims, or what they recite. If claim-set completeness matters for your analysis, pull the granted claims directly from USPTO PatentCenter or the printed patent.
2. Claim numbering vs. "Example" numbering — the granted patent's official claim 1 corresponds most likely to "Example 1," but I am inferring that mapping. The fetched text presents them as "Examples."
3. No CAFC 2026 docket entry found for this number. My search hit a Federal Circuit Patent Watch digest but it concerned unrelated patents (e.g., a '243 patent, D802,155, 10,755,409). This is not a confirmation that no appeal exists.
4. I did not independently re-verify the 2025-07-29 JPMorgan security interest or the 2040-03-25 adjusted expiration against USPTO Assignment/PatentCenter; those come from the Google Patents record in the supplied text.

Sources: US 11,402,462 B2 on Google Patents; onscope Echodyne portfolio record (app. 16182151, grant 2022-08-02); PatentLeaderboard — Echodyne inventors.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 11402462 across the specified sources.

Let me search the specific litigation databases.

Let me search more targeted sources.

Litigation Search Results for US Patent 11,402,462

Summary: No litigation specifically involving US Patent 11,402,462 was found in the sources searched.

What I searched

I ran targeted queries against litigation-covering sources (Unified Patents litigation coverage as surfaced via portal.unifiedpatents.com, PTAB/PTABCTS documents, CAFC opinions, and general docket references), using the literal identifier 11402462 / 11,402,462, and Echodyne-specific queries. I did not find any PACER or district-court case record asserting this specific patent.

What I did confirm about the patent

• Patent: US 11,402,462 B2 — "Intelligent sensor and intelligent feedback-based dynamic control of a parameter of a field of regard to which the sensor is directed"
• Assignee/Patent Owner: Echodyne Corp (original assignee Echodyne Corp)
• Application: US 16/182,151; filed 2018-11-06; granted 2022-08-02
• Priority date: 2017-11-06 (provisional 62/582,217)
• Inventors: Driscoll, Hunt, Worl, Chatni, Esterberg, Karadayi, Lambrecht, Landy, Martens, Wu
• Related continuation: US 12,455,344 B2 (from US 17/840,402, priority claimed 2022-06-14) — same family/title.
• Post-issuance note: The Google Patents legal-status record shows a security interest assigned to JPMORGAN CHASE BANK, N.A. on 2025-07-29 (assignor Echodyne Corp). This is a financing lien, not litigation.
• Expiration (adjusted): 2040-03-25, per the record.

Caveats and limits on this answer

1. Absence of evidence is not definitive proof of absence. The public sources I could reach returned no hit for this exact number. Litigation can exist that is not indexed in the free databases searched, or that names the patent only in an exhibit rather than in the docket text.
2. No false positives included. Per your instruction, I have excluded results for similar-but-different numbers. The results that surfaced for other patents (e.g., IPRs and litigations concerning unrelated numbers like 7,230,931, 10,621,228, 7,454,002, 9,253,239, and the '844 patent) are not related to US 11,402,462 and I have not attributed them to it.
3. I did not find any PTAB proceeding (IPR/PGR) naming US 11,402,462 either.

Recommended next steps for a definitive answer (authoritative, complete coverage)

• PACER / CourtListener RECAP — run a full-text query on the exact string 11,402,462 across all district courts (a complaint need not be indexed by free aggregators even when filed).
• Unified Patents Portal — Litigation search and "Patent" lookup — enter the literal number 11402462 in the patent field to retrieve any mapped cases.
• Docket Navigator / Lex Machina / RPX — commercial dockets with complete patent-to-case mapping.
• USPTO Patent Center / PTAB — confirm whether any AIA trial was petitioned on this patent.
• USPTO Assignment records — to confirm the current owner/lienholder (relevant to standing if a suit is later filed).

If you have PACER access or a Lex Machina/Docket Navigator seat, I can help draft the exact queries, but I could not verify any specific case number, jurisdiction, filing date, or outcome from the public sources available here. I should not fabricate case details, so I am reporting only that, on the evidence gathered, no litigation involving US 11,402,462 is known.

I'll verify the structured ODP result against live sources before concluding.

Let me run a couple of targeted checks before finalizing.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 11,402,462: zero. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block — sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal — returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM naming this patent, and my live web searches surfaced no petition, institution decision, final written decision, or appeal tied to this number. My search hits for "462" were all false positives on unrelated patents (see the flag below).

Status breakdown: active — 0; claims invalidated — 0; claims sustained — 0; settled — 0; institution denied — 0.

Bottom-line defensive posture for a defendant: the patent is not "hardened" and not "dead" — it is untested. That is a materially different posture from either of the two caricatures. US 11,402,462 has never been before the Board, so there is (a) no claim-level precedent telling you which of claims 1–21 the Board thinks is patentable, (b) no prosecution-style narrowing that would give you a free amended claim set to attack, and (c) zero § 315(e) estoppel against anyone — the field is wide open for a first-mover IPR. Conversely, you get no free invalidity road map and no petitioner-funded expert work product to borrow.

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No proceedings to report

The output format anticipates one block per proceeding. There are none, so I am recording the null result rather than padding it:

• IPR (35 U.S.C. §§ 311–319): none on file. IPR is your only remaining AIA vehicle (see PGR note below).
• PGR (35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329): none, and none is now possible. The PGR window closes 9 months after grant. Grant date was 2022-08-02, so the PGR window closed 2023-05-02. Any § 112 or non-prior-art-printed-publication theory you have can no longer be run at the Board.
• CBM (AIA § 18): none, and the CBM program sunset under SAS Institute v. Iancu-era transition rules; § 18(d)(1)'s transitional window expired. Unavailable regardless of whether this patent would have qualified. The claims are radar-sensor claims, not financial-services claims, so CBM eligibility was doubtful in any event.
• Ex parte reexamination / reissue: none surfaced. Reexamination is not an AIA trial and is outside the canonical block, but note it is not barred by § 315(b) or § 325(d) the way an IPR is — a live option if you are time-barred from IPR (see below).
• Federal Circuit appeals: none identifiable, consistent with there being no FWD to appeal.

False positives expressly excluded (per your no-misattribution instruction): search returned PTAB and FDA-adjacent material referencing other "462" patents — e.g., US 11,643,462 B2 (Merck Sharp & Dohme v. Johns Hopkins, IPR2024-00648) and an Ozempic-related '462 patent — and also generic IPR practice documents. None of these involve US 11,402,462 or Echodyne. I have not attributed them.

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Strategic summary

Canceled vs. sustained vs. untested. With no proceeding on file, all of claims 1–21 are UNTESTED. Nothing is canceled; nothing has been sustained by the Board. The distinction between "sustained" and "untested" matters enormously here: a patent that has survived an FWD is presumptively strong on that record, whereas US 11,402,462 carries the ordinary statutory presumption of validity (35 U.S.C. § 282) that attaches to any issued patent and nothing more. Note one gap in my own source material that bears on challenge scoping: the claim text supplied to me renders "Example 1" through "Example 21" but omits Examples 5 and 12. If you are drafting a petition, pull the granted claims from USPTO Patent Center rather than relying on the specification's example list — I cannot tell you what claims 5 and 12 recite.

Estoppel landscape. § 315(e)(1) (Office) and § 315(e)(2) (district court) estoppel attach only after an FWD, and only to the petitioner, its real parties in interest, and privies. No FWD exists → no estoppel exists. Every prior-art ground — § 102 and § 103, on patents and printed publications — is fully available to a first petitioner. There is also no § 325(d) "substantially the same art or arguments" problem to overcome, because nothing has been presented to the Office beyond original prosecution. The principal procedural risk is § 315(b): if your client was served with a complaint alleging infringement of this patent more than one year ago (i.e., before 2025-09-29), that client is time-barred from petitioning. Confirm service dates before budgeting a petition.

Pattern signals. No petitioner pattern (no petitioner at all). No patent-owner appeal pattern (nothing to appeal). No defensive aggregator in the chain — nothing indicates Unified Patents, RPX, or a similar entity has ever challenged this patent. Echodyne appears as a patent owner with no PTAB track record on this patent in either direction, and as of the 2025-07-29 recordation it has encumbered the patent with a security interest in favor of JPMORGAN CHASE BANK, N.A. — a financing lien, not a litigation development, but one that tells you a lender has an interest in the asset's enforcement value.

A timing caveat worth pricing in. The USPTO's 2025-10-15 Director memorandum and accompanying proposed rules would, if finalized, bar IPRs against patents that have already survived a validity challenge and would require petitioners to stipulate away parallel §§ 102/103 district-court arguments. Those proposals are directed at repeat challengers and parallel proceedings; because US 11,402,462 has never been challenged anywhere I can find, a first IPR against it should not be caught by the "already survived a challenge" bar. But institution practice is currently Director-directed and volatile, so confirm the operative rules as of your filing date rather than assuming today's framework holds. (Sourced from a law-firm analysis of the October 2025 proposals, not from a primary Federal Register read — verify before relying on it.)

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant and want to invalidate:

• You have no FWD to lean on — you must generate your own. Pull the certified claim set (all 21 claims, including the two I could not see) from USPTO Patent Center and the file history, then run your own § 102/§ 103 search. There is no Board claim construction to inherit.
• Check § 315(b) service dates immediately. This is the single gating factual question. One year from service of a complaint alleging infringement.
• Consider the family. The record shows a continuation — application 17/840,402, which issued as US 12,455,344 B2, claiming priority back to the 2022-06-14 filing and sharing the title of the '462 patent. If you intend to litigate or license-negotiate the family, scope your freedom-to-operate and IPR budget across both patents, and decide whether a single petition or coordinated petitions make sense. Pre-grant publication US 2019/0137601 A1 is the same disclosure.
• Weigh reexamination as a § 315(b) escape hatch. If your client is time-barred from IPR, ex parte reexamination under 35 U.S.C. § 302 remains available on patents-and-printed-publications prior art and is not subject to the one-year bar.

If you simply need a definitive negative on PTAB activity:

• Run the literal number in PTAB E2E / PTAB Center and the USPTO PTAB Decisions search, plus the USPTO Patent Center "Proceedings" tab, which shows AIA trials, reexaminations, and reissues together for the patent.
• Cross-check CourtListener for any Federal Circuit appeal of an FWD (there should be none) and for district-court complaints naming the patent.
• Confirm the assignment/lien record at USPTO Assignment if standing or ownership matters.

Confidence statement. I am confident in the negative here: the ODP structured block is empty and live search produced no proceeding. I did not independently query paid dockets (Docket Navigator, Lex Machina) or PACER full-text in this exercise, so treat "no PTAB activity" as high-confidence but not absolutely verified. I flag explicitly that I have not seen the granted claim text for claims 5 and 12, and that the October 2025 institution-policy discussion above comes from secondary commentary rather than a primary source read.

I'll research the assignment record for US 11,402,462 across the sources specified.

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

Let me try to surface the actual USPTO assignment records and correspondent details.

Search-limitation notice (read first): I could not open the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) or its public API from this environment, so I was unable to retrieve the recorded correspondents (attorney/agent of record) or the reel/frame numbers for every event in this chain. The assignment events, dates, conveyance types, and assignor/assignee names below come from the Google Patents "Legal Events" record embedded in the authoritative patent text you supplied. One reel/frame is recoverable from that text (Reel 047802 / Frame 0335); the rest are not. I have not fabricated any reel, frame, or correspondent. Treat the absence of a reel/frame as "not retrieved," not "not recorded."

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Inventors

Ten named inventors, all listed on the issued patent and all appearing as assignors to Echodyne Corp. in the 2018-12-18 assignment — which is affirmative evidence they were Echodyne personnel (or under an obligation to assign to Echodyne) at the time of filing:

Pattern flags:

1. No evidence of inventor departure / fire-sale precursor. I found no data establishing that any of the ten departed Echodyne within 12 months of the 2018-11-06 filing. That signal is unclear / not determinable from the sources I could reach. What I can say: the same inventor set re-appears on the later family member US 12,455,344 B2 (granted 2025-10-28 per PatentLeaderboard), which is inconsistent with an early mass exodus. Note this is a later-filed continuation (US 17/840,402, per the priority link in the patent text), so it is evidence of continued affiliation, not of the original filing date.

2. Pre-Echodyne employer residue (context, not a defect). Third-party inventor-profile aggregators show several of these inventors holding earlier patents at other entities — e.g., Tom Driscoll (~65 patents at "Elwha"), John Desmond Hunt (~42 patents at "The Invention Science Fund I"), and Robert Tilman Worl (~27 patents at "The Boeing"). Elwha LLC and The Invention Science Fund I LLC are well-known Intellectual Ventures patent-holding vehicles. These predate US 11,402,462 and reflect prior employment (Driscoll's metamaterials/IV-era work); they are not assignments of this patent and I do not treat them as chain-of-title events. Flagging only because the recurring IV-vehicle names are the kind of detail worth having in an ownership-chain file.

(Caveat: the employer column is inferred from the recorded assignor identity, which is strong but not the same as a verified employment record.)

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Original assignee

Echodyne Corp. — named as original assignee on the issued patent and current assignee of record. No name-change, merger, or transfer of title away from Echodyne appears anywhere in the record.

• Primary line of business: compact electronically scanned array (ESA) radar built on metamaterial/PCB-array antenna technology — i.e., a radar-sensor operating company, not a licensing vehicle. The patent itself is directed to intelligently tasking that class of sensor (dynamic FOR steering, nested beam-list scheduling), consistent with a product-bearing company.
• Product embodying the claims: Echodyne's commercial ESA radar product line (airspace-security / counter-UAS and automotive-adjacent units) is the natural embodiment, and the patent is drafted around a deployable vehicle radar. I could not independently verify "shipped a product embodying the claims" against a spec sheet in this session, so treat that as likely but unverified.
• Current status: Appears to be a going concern as of the most recent recorded event — a 2025-07-29 security interest to JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. is a routine secured-lender financing lien, which is generally inconsistent with a dissolved or adjudicated-bankrupt entity. However, I did not independently verify Echodyne's corporate status against a Secretary-of-State filing, SEC filing, or bankruptcy docket, and a lender lien is not by itself proof of solvency. Status: operating per the record; not independently confirmed.

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Assignment timeline

Three relevant post-filing events appear in the record. Ownership never left Echodyne Corp. — every entry is either the original inventor→company assignment (and its correction) or a lender's security interest.

• 2018-12-18 (recorded) — Reel 047802 / Frame 0335

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignors' interest ("ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST — SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS")
  • Assignor: Driscoll, Hunt, Worl, Chatni, Esterberg, Karadayi, Lambrecht, Landy, Martens, Wu (all 10 inventors)
  • Assignee: Echodyne Corp.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved (Assignment Center not reachable). Cannot confirm or flag recurrence.
  • Context: Original inventor→company assignment; establishes Echodyne as owner before grant. (Reel/frame derived from the 2020 corrective entry, which expressly identifies "REEL: 047802 FRAME: 0335" as the corrected record.)

• 2020-03-10 (recorded) — Reel/frame not stated in the available record

  • Conveyance: Corrective Assignment — "TO CORRECT THE NAME OF ASSIGNEE PREVIOUSLY RECORDED AT REEL: 047802 FRAME: 0335"
  • Assignor: same 10 inventors
  • Assignee: ECHODYNE CORP. (corrected name — e.g., "Echodyne Corp" → "Echodyne Corp.")
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Change of name / scrivener's correction only — no ownership movement. Purely administrative.

• 2025-07-29 (recorded) — Reel/frame not stated in the available record

  • Conveyance: Security Interest (security agreement / financing lien)
  • Assignor: ECHODYNE CORP.
  • Assignee: JPMORGAN CHASE BANK, N.A.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved
  • Context: Securitization — a collateral lien granted to a lender. This is not a transfer of title; Echodyne retains ownership subject to the bank's security interest. Not an NPE event.

Bottom line on completeness: this patent does not have "no recorded assignments," but neither does it have a chain of title transfers. It has exactly one ownership assignment (inventors → Echodyne) plus a name correction and a lender lien. No assignment to any third-party holder, LLC, or aggregator is recorded.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — search by patent number 11402462 (records indexed also at assignment.uspto.gov). You or I should re-run this query with an authenticated/PACER-adjacent session to pull the correspondents and the two missing reel/frames, which are the key remaining gaps.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11402462
    2017 : Provisional application filed
    2018 : Nonprovisional filed by ten inventors
         : Assigned to Echodyne Reel 047802 Frame 0335
    2019 : Pre-grant publication US 2019 0137601
    2020 : Corrective assignment fixes Echodyne name
    2022 : Patent issued
    2025 : Security interest to JPMorgan Chase

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. Title has never moved to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" entity. The sole owner is Echodyne Corp., an operating radar company, per Reel 047802/0335 and the 2020 correction. No single-purpose LLC appears anywhere.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignment to any publicly listed NPE (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, etc.). Note the one nuance: several inventors previously held patents at IV-affiliated vehicles (Elwha LLC, The Invention Science Fund I LLC) from prior employment. That is an inventor-history observation, not an assignee in this chain, and I explicitly do not treat it as an NPE signal — the patent itself was never assigned to an IV entity.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not assessable. I could not retrieve the correspondent of record for any entry (Assignment Center unreachable). This is the single most important missing field for your analysis; I will not guess an attorney or firm name. Action item.

4. Cascading transfers — not present. There is no sequence of chained assignments. The only repeated "transfer" is a corrective assignment on 2020-03-10 fixing the assignee's name in the 2018 record — the same parties, same ownership, no new entity.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No infringement suit naming this patent is known (consistent with the prior sections of this analysis), so there is no pre-suit assignment window to evaluate. No transfer within 6 months of any asserted suit exists because no suit is on record.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present (no evidence). No bankruptcy docket or court-ordered sale appears. The 2025 JPMorgan lien is a security interest, not a liquidation event, and I found no evidence Echodyne is in Chapter 7/11. (Unverified against a bankruptcy docket — flagged as a gap, not a negative.)

7. Privateering — not present. No operating-company→NPE transfer followed by assertion against competitors. The only outward grant of rights is the bank lien, which does not confer assertion rights.

8. Defensive aggregator — not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It terminates at the original operating company, encumbered by a bank lien.

Contradiction flag vs. prior sections: none material. The earlier "Patent summary" already noted the 2025-07-29 JPMorgan security interest and the 2040-03-25 adjusted expiration; this section refines that by locating the ownership assignment at Reel 047802/Frame 0335 and confirming the 2020-03-10 entry is a corrective (name-only) recording rather than a real transfer.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — construed strictly as "no transfer of title, therefore nothing for an NPE test to bite on."

Justification (2–3 sentences): The record shows the ten inventors assigning to Echodyne Corp. at Reel 047802/Frame 0335 (recorded 2018-12-18), followed by a 2020-03-10 corrective assignment that changes only the assignee's name, and a 2025-07-29 security interest to JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. — none of which moves ownership away from the original operating assignee. Because there is no assignment to any third-party holder, LLC, or aggregator, zero of the eight NPE signals are affirmatively present, and the chain is best characterized as operating company retains title under a lender lien. The formal "insufficient data" label reflects a genuine evidence gap — the correspondents of record and two reel/frame numbers could not be retrieved because the USPTO Assignment Center was unreachable in this session; I decline to infer correspondents or NPE status from names alone.

Suggested next step for a definitive file: re-query USPTO Assignment Center by patent number 11402462 in an authenticated session to capture the correspondent of record on Reel 047802/0335 and the reel/frames for the 2020 and 2025 entries — that correspondent is the field that would either close this out as a clean operating-company chain or reveal a repeat-player attorney worth tracking across other Echodyne filings.

I'll research the prior-art citations for US 11,402,462. Let me run targeted searches.

Good — I found the patent's "References Cited" section. Let me pull the full citation list, including foreign documents and non-patent citations.

Let me get the complete citation list from the patent's cited references, plus check Google Patents directly.

Prior-Art (Backward Citation) Analysis — US 11,402,462 B2

Scope/method note. You asked me to search the USPTO database for the literal number 11402462. I could not open USPTO PatentCenter/PAIR directly with the tools available; instead I retrieved the "(56) References Cited" block printed on the face of the granted patent via the mirrored official PDF (patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/.../US11402462.pdf, title page confirms "US011402462B2 … (10) Patent No.: US 11,402,462 B2 … (45) Date of Patent: Aug. 2, 2022 … Echodyne Corp., Kirkland, WA"). That is the authoritative citation list, not a keyword guess.

Read this first — two integrity flags:

1. The citation list I retrieved is truncated and possibly column-scrambled by OCR. It ends mid-entry at 2018/0306096 A1 … Kapusta …… G01… and shows only one foreign document (EP 1806598 A1), which is unusually short for a patent of this class. Treat the list below as substantially complete but unverified at the margins. The full "Other Publications" (non-patent literature) column was not retrieved at all.
2. Date discrepancy in your prompt. The system header says today is 2026-09-29; your task header says 2026-04-26. No effect on the § 102 analysis below, but flagging per the no-auto-correction rule.

All identifiers below appear literally on the face of US 11,402,462. I have not substituted or "corrected" any number. Where the source prints an anomalous form, I reproduce it and flag it.

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Legal framework that governs this citation list

US 11,402,462 has application no. 16/182,151 (filed 2018-11-06) and claims benefit of provisional 62/582,217 (filed 2017-11-06). It is therefore a post-AIA (first-inventor-to-file) patent, and the presumptive effective filing date is 2017-11-06. So:

• § 102(a)(1) art must be publicly available before 2017-11-06.
• § 102(a)(2) art must be a U.S. patent / U.S. application publication effectively filed before 2017-11-06.
• References published after 2017-11-06 but cited on the face are, in my assessment, not § 102 art on this record unless they carry an earlier effective filing date via a priority chain. US 9,853,561 B2 (granted 2017-12-26), US 10,627,507 B1 (granted 2020-04-28), and US 2018/0026365 A1 (pub. 2018-01-25) each fall in this trap and need their priority chains checked.

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Table 1 — U.S. patent documents cited (as printed)

Table 2 — Foreign patent documents cited

Non-patent literature

Not retrieved. The "Other Publications" column did not come through. Do not treat the absence of NPL as meaningful — many radar-scheduling papers/standards (e.g., waveform-scheduling and MIMO radar literature) are the type of art that matters most here.

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Which cited references could potentially anticipate — by claim family

The independent claims are Examples 1, 8, 15 (apparatus / method / CRM), each requiring only: (i) an antenna radiating a TX beam and forming an RX beam, and (ii) a control circuit steering both beams over a first FOR in a first time period and a second FOR in a second time period. Dependent claims add the narrowing detail. Mapping, with confidence stated:

Bottom line on anticipation: On the face of the citation list, the references are overwhelmingly antenna/beam-steering art (H01Q) and component art (phase shifters, feeds), whereas the granted claims are directed to time-segmented steering across different fields of regard. That mismatch suggests the cited art was attached for the ESA/gain-pattern enablement aspects of the specification — the type of art an examiner or an IDS would cite — and none of the retrieved references, on its face, appears to be a clean § 102 anticipation of independent claims 1/8/15. The nearest-on-its-face candidates are Kolanek (2017/0300047) and Kaiser (2008/0133812), and both require reading beyond what the face shows.

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Verification gaps I will not paper over

1. Full list incomplete — the retrieved block truncates at 2018/0306096 A1; foreign list shows only EP 1806598 A1; NPL column absent entirely.
2. Reference titles/abstracts not read. The "brief description" column is largely inference from CPC codes and assignee/inventor lineage, explicitly marked "not verified." I will not fabricate titles.
3. Anomalous printed identifiers — 2011/00631858 A1 (five-digit sequence) and 2018/0067495 A1 … G06D 1/0231 (non-existent-format subclass). Both reproduced literally, not corrected.
4. Priority chains unresolved for US 9,853,561 B2, US 10,627,507 B1, US 2018/0026365 A1, US 2018/0067488 A1, US 2018/0067495 A1, US 2018/0306096 A1 — several appear post-effective-filing-date and may not be § 102 art at all.
5. No contradiction with the earlier-generated sections, but one continuity point: the earlier summary's "Examples 5 and 12 missing" gap persists here and is material to any anticipation mapping of the claim set.

Recommended next steps for a citable answer: pull the printed patent's front page from USPTO PatentCenter (application 16/182,151) to confirm the (56) list and NPL; run each reference through Google Patents / USPTO full-text to obtain the abstract and the effective filing date; and check the file wrapper (IDS + examiner's PTO-892 and any § 102 rejections) — the examiner's own art listing is far more probative than a face-page list, because it tells you which references were actually relied on.

Sources: US 11,402,462 B2 face-page PDF (patentimages mirror); US 11,402,462 B2 on Google Patents.

I'll start by trying to retrieve the Prior Art section for this patent, since the supplied text does not include it.

The supplied patent text omitted the "Prior Art" / "References Cited" section. Let me try to retrieve it directly, plus relevant prior art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,402,462 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

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0. Sourcing caveat — read this first

The task instructs me to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page." That section is not present in the document supplied to me. The full patent text I was given contains the abstract, the "Examples" (claim-like text), the description, and the Google Patents Classifications and Landscapes blocks — but no "(56) References Cited," "Similar Documents," or "Cited By" tables.

Rather than fabricate a prior-art list, I retrieved what I could:

Any reference I name below is tagged as either 🟢 verified-in-record, 🟡 verified-as-existing-document-but-not-contents-verified, or 🔴 field-knowledge-only (requires verification before use in a real brief). I have not characterized the disclosure of any reference whose text I did not read.

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1. The prior art actually of record on the face of US 11,402,462

From the granted patent's front page ((56) References Cited), rendered literally:

U.S. Patent Documents (as printed; some titles truncated in the source I retrieved):

Foreign: EP 1806598 A1 (7/2007) 🟢.
Other publications: International Bureau, "International Preliminary Report on Patentability from PCT Application No. PCT/US2018/059426" — counterpart of App. 16/182,151 — dated May 22, 2020, 8 pages 🟢.

1.1 What the of-record art doesn't contain — the central analytical point

Two observations drive everything below:

1. The cited art is overwhelmingly antenna/beam-forming art. The identifiable names — Billy et al. (×3) and Chen et al. (×2) — are the surface-scattering / metamaterial electronically-steered antenna family; the older Elliott, Epis, Lalezari, Barrett, Lewis, Shmuel, Numminen, Wang references and Parker's H01Q 3/38 reference sit in the same physical-antenna space. The only cited reference that sits in control/software art is Kaiser, US 2008/0133812 A1 (G06F 9/542 event management / 710/263 interrupt).

2. The examiner's search appears to have been run in the antenna art (H01Q, G01S 7/03), not in the radar-resource-scheduling and tracking art. The patent's own CPC assignments tell you where the claims conceptually live: G01S 13/422 (sequential lobing, e.g. conical scan), G01S 13/424 (stacked beam radar), G01S 13/685 (simultaneous lobing), G01S 13/723 (track-while-scan radar), G01S 13/726 (multiple target tracking), and G01S 13/931 (automotive). Those classes are, almost by definition, populated with references that steer a beam or beams over different angular regions at different times — which is the entire substance of independent claims 1, 8 and 15.

That gap is the §103 theory of this patent in miniature: the claims were allowed over art about how to make a steerable beam, not over the enormous body of art about when and where to point it.

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2. Effective date, governing law, and POSITA

• Earliest priority: 2017-11-06 (provisional 62/582,217). Actual filing: 2018-11-06. Both post-date 2013-03-16, so AIA § 102/§ 103 apply; prior art is § 102(a)(1) (public disclosures before 2017-11-06) and § 102(a)(2) (earlier-filed, later-published applications).
• Critical consequence: Echodyne's own public disclosures more than one year before 2017-11-06 are not protected by the § 102(b)(1)(A) grace period.
• Corollary: Echodyne's own later-published applications (e.g. US 2018/0156891 A1, published 2018-06-07; US 2019/0074600 A1, published 2019-03-07) are not § 102(a)(2) art against this patent — they published after the 2017-11-06 priority date, and in any event § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership would except them.

POSITA (proposed): a person with at least a B.S. in EE/physics plus ~3–5 years in radar systems engineering, including experience with phased-array/ESA beam steering, radar scheduling, and automotive or defense radar modes. (Deliberately modest — the claims recite no algorithms or numerical limits, so a less sophisticated POSITA enlarges the body of art that anticipates or renders obvious.)

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3. Claim construction notes relevant to § 103

Building on, not repeating, the prior section's glossary work:

• "Field of regard" is expressly defined as "the total angular space on which the sensor makes intentional measurements," and — critically — "need not be contiguous, nor monotonic." This makes FOR1 and FOR2 pure pointing descriptions. There is no structural or algorithmic content in the term.
• "Beam" = instantaneous gain-pattern + instantaneous RD-manifold. Combined with the FOR definition, "steer … over a first field of regard" is satisfied by any sequence of dwells whose union covers an angular set — i.e., ordinary scanning.
• Claim 1 / Example 1 contains no requirement that FOR1 ≠ FOR2, no minimum angular displacement, no resolution, waveform, timing, or trigger limitation. As drafted, the difference between the two "fields of regard" can be arbitrarily small. This is the broadest possible framing of time-shared beam steering.

⚠️ Standing flag from the prior section, carried forward: the supplied text presents the claims as "Examples 1–21," with Examples 5 and 12 missing, and my analysis assumes Example N ≡ claim N. If the granted claim set differs from this text, every mapping below must be redone against the PatentCenter/printed claims. I am not treating this assumption as verified.

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4. Threshold conclusion on the independent claims

Claims 1, 8 and 15 (apparatus / method / CRM) are, on their face, obvious — and quite possibly anticipated — over the ordinary use of an electronically scanned radar.

Strip the claim to its mechanical core: one antenna, one control circuit, transmit and receive beams pointed at angular region A for a while, then at angular region B for a while. This is time-multiplexed sector scanning, a technique as old as steerable radar itself. It is:

• the definition of sequential lobing (the patent's own CPC, G01S 13/422);
• the definition of stacked-beam radar (G01S 13/424);
• the definition of track-while-scan (G01S 13/723).

The claim adds nothing — no trigger, no resolution change, no resource accounting, no nested schedule, no waveform change. Those all live in the dependent claims.

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5. Combination sets rendering the claims obvious

Combination A — Independent claims 1, 8, 15

A1 + A2:

• A1 (statutory category, 🟡): An of-record electronically steerable antenna reference from the Billy/Chen surface-scattering family (US 9,385,435; US 9,450,310; US 9,853,561; US 2012/0194399; US 2014/0266946 — all 🟢 of record). These establish the hardware/control primitive the claim requires: a single antenna aperture whose gain pattern and pointing direction are set by a programmable control circuit, i.e. "at least one antenna" + "control circuit configured to steer."
• A2 (statutory category, 🔴 field-knowledge): Any radar or textbook reference describing time-shared scan sectors / sequential lobing / track-while-scan. The examiner has already classified the patent into G01S 13/422, 13/424, 13/685, 13/723, 13/726, which are the exact subclasses that contain this art. These references supply the "steer over a first FOR during a first time period, and over a second FOR during a second time period" element.

Why a POSITA would combine: The problem the patent itself states — "resources utilized for sensing are subject to some limits … a radar with a high TBP becomes costly" — is the perennial radar-design problem of time-budget allocation across an angular search volume. Where an aperture's instantaneous beam is narrower than the required surveillance volume (which is true of every ESA), the ordinary and known solution is to interrogate sub-regions sequentially. There is no new physical result; the combination is the predictable use of a known technique (sequential sector dwell) with a known, programmable aperture, yielding nothing more than the expected result (coverage of region A then region B). KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007); MPEP § 2143.

Anticipation overlay: A single reference disclosing a two-sector (long-range / short-range) automotive or multifunction radar would likely anticipate claims 1/8/15 under § 102(a)(1) rather than merely render them obvious — a point worth testing before investing in a § 103 combination for these three claims.

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Combination B — Trigger-dependent claims 2–4, 9–11, 16–19

These add only what causes the transition:

Motivation: These are four alternative, well-known ways to hand control between two tasks in a real-time embedded system. The specification itself treats them interchangeably and even lists additional toggle events (branch/goto, doorbell, detection of an object, change in vehicle speed or direction) — i.e., the applicant's own disclosure is an enumeration of standard control-flow mechanisms, which is itself evidence that the category of triggers is a design choice, not an invention.

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Combination C — Beam-characteristic claims 6, 13, 20

Claim 6 requires the transmit beam to have a first characteristic in a third period and a second characteristic in a fourth period, with a matching receive-characteristic pair — i.e. reconfiguring the beam (width, power, shape, waveform) between dwells.

• Grounding: the of-record programmable-metamaterial/surface-scattering antenna references (🟢 Billy ×3, Chen ×2) are precisely about software-selected aperture configurations producing different gain patterns. Pair with any waveform-agility reference (software-defined transmit synthesizer, which the patent's own Background treats as conventional).
• Motivation: Once a POSITA has decided to service two different angular regions with different measurement needs (long-range narrow beam vs. wide-area beam), changing beam width/power and waveform between the two dwells is the predictable and expected way to do it — indeed not to do so would waste the aperture. This is a design choice with a predictable result, squarely within KSR.

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Combination D — Nested / superset field of regard, claims 7, 14, 21

Claim 7 adds a second transmit/receive beam pair steered over a third field of regard that includes the first and second fields of regard, during the same first and second time periods — i.e. a persistent wide surveillance FOR that runs concurrently with the narrower, re-tasked FORs.

• Grounding: this is textbook track-while-scan: a rotating or continuously scanning search beam maintains a broad surveillance FOR while dedicated beams service (or the search beams revisit) designated sub-regions. The patent is classified at G01S 13/726 "Multiple target tracking" and G01S 13/723 "track-while-scan radar" 🟢. Also apt: stacked-beam radar (G01S 13/424) and simultaneous lobing (G01S 13/685), both of which contemplate multiple simultaneous beams.
• Motivation: A radar operator faced with the specification's stated problem — "the navigation system does not fully relinquish the measuring of the highway" while diverting resources to a maneuver region — needs simultaneous wide-area custody and narrow-area fidelity. Running a low-duty-cycle wide FOR concurrently with dedicated narrow FORs is the known solution. The result (continuous custody plus high-fidelity sub-region measurement) is exactly what TWS was developed to deliver.

Note: claim 7/14/21 is the narrowest and therefore hardest-to-invalidate independent-family claim, because it requires concurrency across the same time periods. Any obviousness case must find a reference or combination showing a second beam continuing to cover the union of FOR1 and FOR2 while FOR1 and FOR2 are visited — a TWS or multi-beam reference will do it, but the showing must be explicit as to contemporaneity.

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6. Motivation-to-combine — consolidated

Per MPEP § 2143 and KSR, any one of these suffices:

1. Problem-driven (the strongest). The patent's own Background frames the invention as a C-SWAP-constrained time-bandwidth-product allocation problem. That framing is the motivation: where a resource is bounded (TBP, dwell time, processing) and the measurement volume exceeds instantaneous capability, a POSITA is led to (a) divide the volume, (b) sequence the dwells, and (c) re-task on events. Every one of Combinations A–D is a solution to the problem the applicant states.
2. Predictable use of a known technique to improve a similar device — sequential sector dwell with a programmable aperture, in the same way (§ 2143.01(IV)).
3. Design incentive / known design choice — choice among command/event/interrupt/time triggers is an enumerated design choice with no unexpected result.
4. "Obvious to try" is not required, but finite number of identified, predictable solutions applies to the trigger and characteristic limitations.
5. Teaching away is absent — nothing in the of-record art (all antenna-art) disparages time-sharing a beam across angular sectors.

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7. Applicant's likely rebuttals — and how they fare

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8. Relative vulnerability of the claim set

Practical takeaway: the commercially valuable distinction in this patent is almost certainly claims 7/14/21 plus the specification's nested-list scheduling disclosure (FIGS. 3A–3B), not the independent claims. If I were building an invalidity case, I would lead with claims 1/8/15 and work down; if I were defending, I would want a certificate of correction or reissue consideration cannot be assumed and the dependent-claim nesting is what matters — but be aware that claim 1's breadth is a genuine weakness, not a strength.

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9. Verification checklist before this analysis is relied upon

1. Pull the granted claims from USPTO PatentCenter and confirm the mapping "Example N → claim N." Resolve the missing Examples 5 and 12 — they may be independent claims or contain limitations that change the analysis above.
2. Retrieve the complete "References Cited" list (my retrieval truncated at 2015/010917…) and confirm there are no additional control/scheduling references. Also retrieve the "Cited By" and "Similar Documents" tables, which the tool limit prevented me from obtaining.
3. Retrieve the full text/title of each of-record reference — I have numbers, dates and inventors but not verified disclosures. In particular verify:
   • US 10,627,507 B1 (Parker) — H01Q 3/38, an examiner-style citation with an asterisk in the rendering; date 2020 is after this patent's filing, so if it was cited it must have been cited as § 102(a)(2) art on a different basis, or the date/asterisk should be re-checked. This is anomalous and worth flagging.
   • US 9,853,561 B2 (Chen et al.), 12/2017 — publication date is only ~1 month after the 2017-11-06 priority date; confirm whether it qualifies as art at all.
   • 2011/00631858 A1 (Kondou) — the number as rendered is malformed (10 digits); confirm the correct literal identifier before citing it anywhere.
4. Establish the § 102(a)(1) status of Echodyne's own public materials — notably the MESA-K-DEV press release / datasheet dated May 2, 2016 (more than one year before 2017-11-06, so outside the grace period), which describes an "ultra-low C-SWAP electronically scanning radar … supporting long and short range modes" with a ±60° AZ / ±40° EL field of view "scanned rapidly with sub-microsecond beam switching," and the whitepaper "Highly-Adaptive Radar for Cognitive Imaging" (date unknown to me — must be verified). Public accessibility must be proven for a printed-publication theory.
5. Confirm no IPR/PGR is on file (none found in my earlier searches, but those were not exhaustive) and that the 2025-07-29 JPMorgan security interest has not introduced standing complications.

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10. Uncertainty flags (explicit)

• I could not read the "Prior Art" section you directed me to use — it is not in the supplied text. My reference table in § 1 is a partial reconstruction from the granted PDF's front page, retrieved via search-result snippets, and is incomplete.
• I have not verified the disclosure of any single reference. Where I have built a combination on art categories rather than named, verified references, I have marked it 🔴 or 🟡.
• I have not fabricated claim-limiting details. Where the claim text is missing (Examples 5, 12) or the claim-number mapping is assumed, I have said so.
• Nothing here is a legal opinion. This is a technical invalidity-risk assessment grounded in the sources cited; a validity/infringement opinion would require the full claim set, full reference texts, and the file history (including the PCT/US2018/059426 IPRP, which found the claims patentable — a non-binding but relevant data point that the applicant will cite).

Sources: US 11,402,462 B2 — Google Patents · US 11,402,462 B2 granted PDF (front page, (56) References Cited) · US 2019/0137601 A1 · US 10,601,130 B2 · US 10,684,354 B2 · Echodyne MESA-K-DEV datasheet/press release (May 2, 2016) · Echodyne, "Highly-Adaptive Radar for Cognitive Imaging" · Echodyne EchoShield product literature