US 11762101

I'll search for this specific patent and check for any litigation activity.

US Patent 11,762,101 — Analyst Summary

Sources: Full patent text from Google Patents (fetched 2026-09-29) — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US11762101](/patent/US11762101)/en; targeted web searches for litigation/PTAB records (see caveats below).

Bibliographic data (per the authoritative patent text)

Abstract (as published)

"A relative position of a mobile terminal with respect to a vehicle is measured. The mobile terminal includes a position-measurement-necessity determining unit and a position-measurement control unit, and the position-measurement-necessity determining unit determines whether it is necessary to measure the relative position depending on whether the mobile terminal is in a predetermined state when the mobile terminal enters from the outside to the inside of an out-vehicle communication area of a first vehicle communication unit. The position-measurement control unit causes a position measuring unit provided in the vehicle to measure the relative position when the position-measurement-necessity determining unit determines that it is necessary to measure the relative position."

Technical gist (plain language)

The patent addresses power consumption in phone-as-key (digital key) systems. A vehicle (Honda ECU 110) polls by BLE via a first vehicle communication unit (130) and, on detecting a paired smartphone, would normally power up UWB ranging (second vehicle communication unit 140, antennas 141/142/143, ToF trilateration) to locate the phone. Instead, the invention gates the power-hungry UWB position measurement on the phone's own state. The phone (or, alternatively, the vehicle) checks for "predetermined states" after BLE entry into the out-vehicle communication area Ar1:

• Measure (necessary): phone is locked; phone has been un-operated for a threshold time; or the electronic-key app is running.
• Don't measure (unnecessary): phone is not moving (motion sensor); or phone is being charged (or, in a narrower variant, charged and recognized as indoors via GPS/map data — the "indoor-charging state").

If measurement is unnecessary, no position-measurement instruction (Pmr) is sent, so the vehicle does not spin up UWB. If necessary, the vehicle repeatedly ranges the phone and permits electronic-key use once the phone enters a near-vehicle monitoring area Ar2, enabling door lock/unlock, power doors, engine start, A/C, buzzer, welcome light, etc.

Independent claims — plain-language overview

⚠️ Caveat on claim numbering. The text I retrieved is the description and "Configuration Supported by the Above Embodiments" summary, not a cleanly parsed granted-claim set; the granted claims are OCR-garbled in places (e.g., "postilion-measurement-necessity," "UKB communication," "0 LE communication"). The five independent claims below correspond to the five aspects expressly stated in the Summary of the Invention ("As a first aspect…fifth aspect"). Treat the independent claim numbering (1, 10, 11, 12, 13) as inferred, not confirmed.

1. Position measurement system (aspect 1) — A system of a vehicle + user's mobile terminal, for remotely operating the vehicle. The vehicle has a communication unit and a position measuring unit. The system includes: (a) a position-measurement-necessity determining unit that decides whether measuring the relative position is needed depending on whether the mobile terminal is in a predetermined state once the terminal is within the outdoor communication area; and (b) a position-measurement control unit that triggers the position measuring unit only when measurement is determined necessary. The point is avoiding unconditional ranging.

2. Position measurement method (aspect 2) — Same concept framed as method steps: a determination step (decide measurement necessity based on the terminal's predetermined state upon entering the out-vehicle communication area) and a measurement control step (cause the vehicle-side measuring unit to measure when necessary).

3. Position measurement instruction method (aspect 3) — Executed by the mobile terminal: determine measurement necessity based on the terminal's predetermined state, and, if necessary, transmit position measurement instruction information (Pmr) to the vehicle's communication unit instructing it to measure the relative position.

4. Recording medium with position measurement instruction program (aspect 4) — A non-transitory-style recording medium storing a program executed by the terminal's processor, causing the processor to implement the determining unit and the control unit that sends the position measurement instruction to the vehicle communication unit.

5. Vehicle control apparatus (aspect 5) — Vehicle-side apparatus comprising: a vehicle communication control unit; a position measuring unit; a position-measurement-necessity determining unit that receives terminal state information from the mobile terminal via the communication unit, recognizes whether the terminal is in the predetermined state based on that information, and decides whether to measure; and a position-measurement control unit that actuates measurement when needed. This is the "vehicle does the deciding" branch.

Dependent-configuration coverage (spec's items (2)–(9), not necessarily claim-dependency order): determining unit/control unit located in terminal vs. vehicle; locked-state trigger; non-operation-state trigger; electronic-key-app-operating trigger; charging-existence state as a negative trigger; indoor-charging state (charging + GPS/map-based indoor recognition) as a negative trigger; and non-position-change state (motion sensor) as a negative trigger.

Litigation / CAFC 2026 search results — important negative finding

• No CAFC 2026 docket, district-court case, or PTAB proceeding involving US 11,762,101 was found in my searches. I cannot confirm any litigation or IPR for this patent. Absence of results is not proof of absence.
• A same-digit-string trap in the search results: PTAB proceeding IPR2022-01416 (Canon U.S.A. Inc. et al. v. Slingshot Printing LLC, filed 2022-08-23) is listed with a "Respondent Application Number" of 11762101, but the Respondent Patent Number is 7,938,523 (Tech Center 2800) — a 2010-era printing patent. Per your standing rule not to auto-correct identifiers, I flag this literally: the string "11762101" appears there as an application/serial number field, not as US Patent 11,762,101, and it is a different technology and different parties. The two should not be conflated. (For contrast, US 11,762,101's actual application number is 17/117,501.)

Other uncertainties

• I could not independently re-verify the "Active / expires 2042-04-13" status against USPTO PatentCenter in this session; that figure comes from the patent-text page and rests on a stated assumption of post-Haynes PTA adjustment.
• Assignee, inventors, dates, and abstract above are taken directly from the supplied authoritative patent text and are high confidence. The claim-overview section is high confidence on substance but medium confidence on claim numbering, as noted.

I'll research litigation involving US patent 11762101. Let me run several targeted searches.

The first searches returned mostly unrelated hits. Let me target the litigation portals and patent-specific databases directly.

Still no relevant hits. Let me query the patent's own page ecosystem and litigation databases directly.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 11,762,101

Bottom line

No litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 11,762,101 ("the '101 patent"). My searches of patent litigation aggregators, PTAB/CAFC sources, and general web sources returned no district court complaint, ITC action, PTAB proceeding, or Federal Circuit appeal in which U.S. 11,762,101 is identified as an asserted or challenged patent.

What the '101 patent is (for identification, per the authoritative text)

• Patent: US 11,762,101 B2 — "Position measurement system, position measurement method, position measurement instruction method, recording medium with position measurement instruction program recorded, and vehicle control apparatus"
• Application: US 17/117,501; filed 2020-12-10; granted 2023-09-19
• Priority: Japanese App. No. 2019-226984, filed 2019-12-17 (priority date listed as 2019-12-17)
• Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
• Inventors: Satoshi Hasegawa, Seonghun Lee, Katsuyasu Yamane, Fumiaki Yamaguchi
• Subject matter: measuring the relative position of a mobile terminal (e.g., smartphone) with respect to a vehicle for remote operation, using BLE for area detection and UWB for ranging, with measurement gated on the mobile terminal's "predetermined state."

This identification is corroborated by third-party patent databases (e.g., patentleaderboard.com inventor pages for Fumiaki Yamaguchi and Katsuyasu Yamane, both listing US 11,762,101 dated 2023-09-19, assigned to Honda Motor Co.) — matching the authoritative patent text.

Case-by-case listing

Important false-positive warning (do NOT treat as litigation on this patent)

One search result superficially matched the digits "11762101":

• Canon U.S.A. Inc. et al. v. Slingshot Printing LLC, IPR2022-01416 (PTAB, filed Aug 23, 2022; FWD appealed; termination date Apr 9, 2024) — the case page (ipverse.greyb.com) lists "Respondent Application Number: 11762101" alongside "Respondent Patent Number: 7938523."

This is not a proceeding involving U.S. 11,762,101. The "11762101" field there is the application serial number (i.e., 11/762,101) of U.S. Patent 7,938,523, which belongs to Slingshot Printing LLC and concerns micro-fluid ejection heads (inkjet) — a completely unrelated technology and patent. Under the strict instruction to interpret identifiers literally and not auto-correct them, I flag this as a distinct, unrelated identifier that merely shares the digit string.

Scope, method, and limitations (stated explicitly)

• Queries run included: US patent 11762101 litigation; "11762101" patent lawsuit defendant; portal.unifiedpatents.com litigation "11762101"; "US11762101" Honda patent infringement case; "11762101" OR "11,762,101" patent case docket; and a Honda/electronic-key-specific query.
• The results were dominated by unrelated Honda suits (e.g., Intellectual Ventures II LLC v. Honda Motor Co., D. Del. 1:17-cv-00294, asserting motor patents 7,067,944 / 7,067,952 / 7,154,200 / 7,683,509 / 7,928,348; Signal IP, Inc. v. American Honda Motor Co., C.D. Cal. 2:14-cv-02454-JAK; American Calcar, Inc. v. American Honda and related ACI v. Honda matters) and by unrelated PTAB/IPR matters. None assert or reference the '101 patent.
• I was unable to complete an exhaustive, primary-source verification through PACER, the Unified Patents litigation caselist, Docket Alarm, or RPX Insight for this specific number, because the available search steps were exhausted before I could open those portals' patent-specific pages directly. Therefore, while I found no litigation, I cannot rule out the existence of a recently filed or non-indexed action.

Confidence assessment: Based on the searches actually performed, I have moderate-to-good (not certain) confidence that no litigation naming U.S. 11,762,101 exists as of the search date. Note also that this patent issued only on 2023-09-19, which materially limits the window in which it could have been asserted — a factor consistent with the absence of any found case. If you need a definitive negative, the next step would be a direct case-number/litigation search on Unified Patents' litigation caselist, Docket Alarm, and PACER Docket Search using the specific patent number and Honda's litigation history, none of which I was able to open directly here. I am explicitly flagging this rather than representing my negative finding as exhaustive.

I'll start by verifying the canonical (empty) PTAB list against what the web surfaces.

The initial hits are noise (patent 6,704,621; an unrelated application number). Let me search more precisely, including litigation-driven IPR patterns.

No IPR hits yet. Let me run additional targeted checks, including the patent's Google Patents page and any family-member proceedings.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings are on file for US 11,762,101 B2. The structured USPTO Open Data Portal block supplied in this prompt returns no AIA trial proceedings, and my independent web checks on 2026-09-29 surfaced none either — so the breakdown is 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution-denied. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is not "hardened patent" and not "troll with dead claims" — it is an untested patent: no petitioner has ever litigated validity against these claims at the Board, no claim has been canceled, no estoppel attaches to anyone, and every invalidity theory you can find appears to be fair game. The absence of PTAB activity also means the patent has not been visibly asserted in a sustained campaign (well-asserted patents with a well-resourced defendant typically attract an IPR within a year of service), which is a meaningful negative signal about the plaintiff's enforcement footprint — but treat it as a signal, not a conclusion.

No proceedings to report

There are no IPR, PGR, or CBM entries to enumerate. For completeness, two apparent "hits" that a keyword search throws up are false positives and should not be mistaken for activity on this patent:

• IPR2022-01416 (Canon U.S.A. Inc. et al. v. Slingshot Printing LLC) — the ipverse case card lists an unrelated "Respondent Application Number" of 11762101, but the challenged patent in that case is US 7,938,523 (IPC 2800), filed 2022-08-23, FWD appealed, termination 2024-04-09. The 11762101 field is an application-number/lookup artifact, not US 11,762,101. Not a proceeding on this patent.
• IPR2013-00xxx-tier filings on "the '621 Patent" — that is US 6,704,621 (iOnRoad v. Mobileye/Picitup), cited in a 2013 petition. Different patent entirely; the "'621" shorthand is a coincidence.

I found no petitioner, no petition number, no institution decision, no FWD, no Director Review request, and no CAFC appeal touching US 11,762,101.

Strategic summary

Claim status: 100% UNTESTED. No claim of US 11,762,101 has been canceled, confirmed, or even challenged at the PTAB. The specification's closing "Configuration Supported by the Above Embodiments" section describes a claim set organized around five independent aspects — (1) a position measurement system, (2) a position measurement method, (3) a position measurement instruction method executed by the mobile terminal, (4) a recording medium with a position measurement instruction program, and (5) a vehicle control apparatus — with dependent subject matter drawn to the five "predetermined states": terminal-locked (claim-necessary), non-operation state (claim-necessary), electronic-key-app operating state (claim-necessary), charging/indoor-charging state (claim-unnecessary), and non-position-change state (claim-unnecessary). I am deliberately not assigning specific claim numbers to those features: the claim set itself was not included in the authoritative text provided to me, and per the constraints above I will not guess at claim numbering. If you need claim-level granularity for a validity opinion, pull the issued claims from USPTO Patent Center or Google Patents.

Estoppel landscape: empty — and that cuts entirely in the defendant's favor. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, no one is subject to 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel on these claims. There is no petitioner-side estoppel, no privity chain, and no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, no RPX-style petitioner) anywhere in the record I can find. Practically: every piece of prior art, including art that would have been foreseeable and could reasonably have been raised in an IPR had one been filed, remains fully available to you in district court, at the ITC, and in a fresh IPR. The corollary is that there is also no adverse PTAB record — no institution decision with helpful claim constructions, no FWD with credibility findings against a patent-owner expert — for you to borrow. You will be building the invalidity case from scratch, which also means the patent owner has never had to defend these claims under oath.

Pattern signals: none. No repeat-petitioner pattern, no Director Review practice, no CAFC appeal practice on this patent. The patent is young — filed 2020-12-10, priority 2019-12-17 (JP 2019-226984), granted 2023-09-19, adjusted expiration 2042-04-13 — and Honda Motor Co., Ltd. is the sole assignee of record. The family is active (Honda continues to file related BLE/UWB digital-key applications, e.g. the US 2022/0030392 and 2024/0300445 lines on narrowing communication and stretching measurement periods to save power), but family breadth is not PTAB activity, and none of the siblings show Board activity either in what I could retrieve.

Recommended next steps

1. Confirm the negative before you rely on it. Re-run the query directly at USPTO PTAB E2E (search by patent number 11,762,101) and cross-check CourtListener for any CAFC appeal captioned against Honda involving this patent number. The ODP ingest provided here is authoritative for its snapshot but is not real-time; a petition filed in the last few weeks would not appear.
2. If you have been served with a complaint asserting this patent, calendar the § 315(b) bar immediately. The one-year clock from service runs on your petition rights, and it is the only hard deadline in play — there is no existing IPR whose statutory 1-year trial deadline, institution-decision deadline, or FWD date you need to track, because there is no trial.
3. Budget for a from-scratch IPR. With no prior Board treatment, your petition faces no § 325(d) "substantially the same art/arguments" problem and no Fintiv/§ 314(a) discretionary-denial problem created by an earlier proceeding. The main risks are ordinary: whether the art is actually anticipatory/obvious against the "predetermined state" limitations, and whether the patent owner can show the examiner already considered your references.
4. Do not cite the false-positive hits. Before any filing, verify that no one on your team has pulled IPR2022-01416 or the 2013 iOnRoad petition into a draft as "prior PTAB activity on the '101 patent." They are not.
5. Frame the demand-letter response accordingly. If opposing counsel implies the patent has been "validated" or has "survived PTAB review," that is not true — but neither can you say it has been weakened. The accurate statement is: no validity challenge to US 11,762,101 has ever been adjudicated by the PTAB or the Federal Circuit.

I'll verify the assignment record against live sources before writing this up.

US 11762101 — Ownership Chain Reconstruction

Patent: US 11,762,101 B2 — "Position measurement system, position measurement method, position measurement instruction method, recording medium with position measurement instruction program recorded, and vehicle control apparatus"
App. No.: 17/117,501 · Filed: 2020-12-10 · Issued: 2023-09-19 · Priority: JP 2019-226984 (2019-12-17) · Status: Active; adjusted expiration 2042-04-13
Sources checked: Google Patents legal events (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11762101/en), USPTO Assignment Center / Assignments on the Web (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html), PlainSite assignment mirrors, PatentLeaderboard inventor rosters, general litigation search.

Inventors

Pattern notes:

• All four are Honda Motor Co., Ltd. employee-inventors; the application is a corporate JP-priority filing (JP 2019-226984). No engineer-held or individually-assigned interest appears.
• No departure signal. PlainSite's profile for Satoshi Hasegawa shows him executing further Honda assignments well after filing (e.g., USPTO assignment 57954/306, inventor paperwork executed 2021-08-31, recorded to Honda; continued Honda filings through 2024). Yamane and Yamaguchi likewise remain associated with the Honda portfolio. There is no "all inventors left within 12 months of filing" pattern here — which is the precondition usually seen before a portfolio fire-sale.

Original assignee

Honda Motor Co., Ltd., 1-1, Minami-Aoyama 2-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-8556, Japan (per the standard Honda assignment cover-sheet address used across its US recordings).

• Business: Operating automotive/motorcycle/power-equipment manufacturer (public, TSE/NYSE: HMC). This is not an IP-holding vehicle.
• Product embodiment: The claims are directed to BLE + UWB relative-position measurement between a vehicle and a smartphone functioning as a digital key (Honda's digital-key / Honda Connect ecosystem on vehicles using BLE+UWB phone-as-key). Honda shipped phone-as-key functionality on production vehicles in this timeframe, so the practice is plausibly embodied in Honda's own vehicles rather than licensed out.
• Current status: Operating. No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition event. The patent remains Active with an adjusted expiration of 2042-04-13, consistent with uninterrupted ownership by the original assignee.

Assignment timeline

Only one conveyance is on record. Everything else in the Google Patents legal-event log is prosecution/administrative (filed, published, granted, expiration adjustment), not a title transfer.

• 2020-12-10 (executed) / recorded 2020-12-10 — Reel not retrieved (see caveat below)
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (original, inventor → company)
  • Assignor: Satoshi Hasegawa; Seonghun Lee; Katsuyasu Yamane; Fumiaki Yamaguchi (the four named inventors)
  • Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
  • Correspondent of record: Not verified for this reel/frame. ⚠️ I could not retrieve the cover sheet or its "name of submitter"/correspondent field for app. 17/117,501 from the sources reachable in this session, and I will not guess it. For orientation only: contemporaneous Honda US recordings in this window list Rankin, Hill & Clark LLP (Willoughby, OH) as correspondent (e.g., assignment cover sheet 506020387, recorded 2020-04-17; assignment 52243/94, recorded 2020-03-27), and Honda Japan-origin filings are frequently submitted with the "Honda Patents & Technologies North America, LLC" power-of-attorney language embedded in the instrument. That is background context, not a verified correspondent for this patent.
  • Context: Original inventor-to-employer assignment — nothing more. No post-issuance transfer of any kind.

Caveat on reel/frame: Google Patents' legal-events table for this patent records the 2020-12-10 "Assigned to HONDA MOTOR CO., LTD." entry with "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST; ASSIGNORS: YAMANE, KATSUYASU; HASEGAWA, SATOSHI; LEE, Seonghun; YAMAGUCHI, FUMIAKI," but the indexed entry does not expose the reel/frame. I am reporting the record without inventing a reel number. Verify the exact reel/frame at Assignment Center.

If Assignment Center returns no further records — and on the evidence available, that is the case — then there are no post-issuance assignments, which itself means Honda Motor Co., Ltd. still owns US 11,762,101. No continuation of the chain (no security agreement, merger, change of name, license, or release) was found.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11762101
    2019 : JP priority application filed
    2020 : US application filed by Honda
         : Inventors assign rights to Honda Motor Co Ltd
    2023 : Patent issued as US 11762101

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Aggregate: zero present signals.

Verdict

Insufficient data — the record contains only the original assignment.

Justification: the sole recorded conveyance is the 2020-12-10 inventor → Honda Motor Co., Ltd. assignment of assignors' interest (Google Patents legal event, app. 17/117,501; reel/frame not retrievable in this session and deliberately not fabricated). There are no post-issuance transfers, no known asserter, no shell LLC, no litigation naming the patent, and no bankruptcy or defensive-aggregator event. The only defensible reading is that Honda, an operating manufacturer that itself ships BLE/UWB phone-as-key vehicles, remains the owner; "Insufficient data" is the correct label precisely because a one-link chain cannot support an NPE call in either direction.

Verify at: USPTO Assignment Center, https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 11762101) — and the mirror at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html. Google Patents legal events: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11762101/en.

Confidence note: I could not open the underlying Assignment Center record for this patent directly (the indexed results reachable in this session did not return the 17/117,501 cover sheet). The "single assignment / Honda ownership" conclusion rests on the Google Patents legal-events entry plus the absence of any competing transfer in the assignment mirrors, PEDS/ODP-style listings, litigation search, and SEC-level corporate-event search. If Assignment Center shows a reel I could not see — particularly a security agreement or change-of-name — that would change item 1–4 calls and should take precedence over this write-up.

I'll research the prior art and citations for US Patent 11,762,101. Let me run several targeted searches.

Let me try to access the patent's citation data directly from Google Patents and USPTO sources.

Prior-Art / Citation Report — U.S. Patent No. 11,762,101

Bottom line (read this first)

I was unable to retrieve the authoritative "(56) References Cited" list — i.e., the examiner/applicant patent citations — for U.S. 11,762,101 from the USPTO or Google Patents during this session. My searches for the citation record returned citation lists belonging to other patents, not the '101 patent (see the false-positive warning below). I am therefore not going to present a fabricated list of references or claim-by-claim anticipation mappings, because doing so would violate the instruction to interpret identifiers literally and to say "I don't know" rather than invent bibliographic data.

What I can ground is below.

1. What the authoritative text confirms about prior art

The full patent text supplied to me cites exactly one prior-art document, and only in the "Description of the Related Art" / background section (i.e., an applicant background citation, not an examiner citation):

No other prior-art document is named in the provided patent text. The remaining "Prior art keywords" shown on the Google Patents page (mobile terminal, vehicle, measurement, unit, state) are keyword tags, not references, and should not be treated as citations.

2. False-positive warning (do NOT treat these as citations of the '101 patent)

The searches for the '101 patent's citation record returned "(56) References Cited" tables belonging to unrelated patents. Flagging these explicitly so they are not misattributed:

• US 9,911,718 B1 citation list (patentimages…US9911718.pdf) — unrelated patent.
• US 11,842,495 B1 citation list (patentimages…US11842495.pdf) — unrelated patent.
• US 9,338,312 "Other Publications" list — unrelated.
• EP 3,884,935 A1, EP 3,593,812 A2, EP 1,772,363 A1, EP 1,431,776 A1, and various WO search reports — all unrelated to the '101 patent.
• The Google Patents "Definitions" block for the '101 patent quotes the patent's own specification; it is not a citation list.

Under the strict rule to interpret identifiers literally, none of the above share the '101 patent's identity and none should be reported as its prior art.

3. Domain-informed candidate prior art — CLEARLY LABELED AS UNVERIFIED

The following reflects my general knowledge of the technical field (BLE/UWB "digital key" remote-entry systems). These are NOT confirmed as citations, examiner references, or of-record art in the '101 prosecution. Treat them only as directions for a proper prior-art search, not as the patent's citation record:

• BLE-out-vehicle-area detection combined with UWB/ToF ranging for phone-as-key — the general architecture asserted in '101 claim 1. The relevant art cluster is the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) Digital Key specifications and the smartphone-UWB passive-entry patent family (Apple, Samsung, NXP, Bosch, Continental, Denso, Toyota, etc.).
• State-gated measurement / power-savings gating — art on suppressing ranging or polling based on phone lock state, charging state, motion (inertial) state, or app-foreground state. This is the likely § 103 battleground for dependent claims 4–8 (locked state; non-operation state; app-operating state; charging state; indoor-charging state) and claim 9 (non-position-change state).
• Honda's own related filings (JP 2019-226984 is the '101 priority case; the U.S. sibling publication is US 2021/0181356 A1) may have family members with search reports citing art relevant to claim 1.

4. Claim-1 architecture (context for any future § 102 analysis)

Independent claim 1 (per the authoritative text) recites a system with: a vehicle having a vehicle communication unit and a position measuring unit; a position-measurement-necessity determining unit that decides whether measurement is needed depending on whether the mobile terminal is in a predetermined state when the mobile terminal is within an out-vehicle communication area; and a position-measurement control unit that triggers measurement when needed. Any § 102 reference would have to disclose all of these elements, including the state-based gating condition. The specification's "predetermined state" branches (locked, non-operation ≥ second predetermined time, e-key app in operation, non-position-change, charging/indoor-charging) map to dependent claims 4–9.

5. Confidence and recommended next steps

• Confidence that the (56) citation list above is incomplete: High. I could not open a source showing the '101 patent's actual front-page citations.
• Confidence in the one spec-cited reference (JP 2014-54902): High — it is quoted directly from the supplied patent text.
• To obtain the definitive citation record, the next step is to open the '101 patent's USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter "References Cited" pane, its Google Patents "Citations / Cited By" tabs, or the US 2021/0181356 A1 publication page, and enumerate the U.S. patent documents, foreign patent documents, and NPL entries from the front page. Those portals could not be opened in this session before my search budget was exhausted.

I am explicitly flagging the gap rather than representing the above as an exhaustive citation analysis. If you can supply the front-page "(56) References Cited" list (or the USPTO/Google Patents citation pane), I will produce the requested per-reference table with full citation, dates, description, and claim-by-claim § 102 anticipation mapping.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent, starting with the references cited on the patent itself and the relevant field.

Let me pull the patent's own citation list and search for closely-related prior art on gating ranging on phone state.

Key discovery: closely-related Honda filings. Let me now retrieve the '101 patent's own front-page citations and probe specific claim elements.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,762,101 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Prepared: April 26, 2026 | Patent: US 11,762,101 B2 ("the '101 patent") | Assignee: Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

Preliminary caveats (read first)

1. Claim text. The authoritative document supplied to me truncates the issued claim set at "Configuration (8)." My mapping of claims below is reconstructed from (a) the five enumerated statutory "aspects" in the Summary, (b) the numbered "Configuration Supported by the Above Embodiments" paragraphs (1)–(8)+, and (c) the claim-drafting pattern of the family. I treat Claims 1–9 as the system/Apparatus-dependent chain, Claims 10–11 as the two method claims, Claim 12 as the CRM claim, and Claim 13 as the vehicle control apparatus claim. A verbatim claim set should be pulled from the USPTO before any opinion is relied upon.

2. Prior-art citation set. I could not retrieve the '101 patent's actual front-page/IDS citations in this search. The citation lists that surfaced (e.g., EC search reports listing JP 2001158284, DE 102009060392, US 2014/0247349, US 5,313,213, DE 102015007172, JP 3600378) belong to other, unrelated documents (EP 3514487; WO 2016/189878; FR 2933185; US 9,404,999) and must not be attributed to the '101 patent. The combinations below are therefore constructed from (i) the admitted prior art inside the '101's own specification, (ii) references I verified by URL in this session, and (iii) the field's known art. Where a reference's effective filing date could not be verified, I say so.

3. No litigation context. Per the previously generated litigation summary, no litigation or PTAB proceeding is known against the '101 patent, so there is no adjudicated claim construction or invalidity record to build on.

I. Governing framework

Under Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), and KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007), the inquiry is: (1) scope and content of the prior art; (2) differences between the claims and the prior art; (3) PHOSITA's level of ordinary skill; (4) secondary considerations. Where a claim recites a result (here: "determines whether it is necessary to measure … depending on whether the mobile terminal is in a predetermined state") without the specific mechanism, the claim is more, not less, vulnerable — any state-gated ranging will read on it.

PHOSITA (proposed): a B.S. in EE/CS or equivalent plus 3–5 years in wireless vehicle-access systems (PEPS, BLE/UWB ranging, smartphone-as-key), familiar with ToF/trilateration, BLE advertising/polling, and mobile-app power management.

Level of ordinary skill is high in this art. By the Dec. 17, 2019 priority date, BLE + UWB smartphone-key architectures were mainstream automotive engineering (see §IV.D).

The conceded problem

The '101 specification states its own object: "provide a position measurement system … capable of measuring the relative position of a mobile terminal with respect to a vehicle while reducing power consumption" and expressly contrasts the claimed approach with "a case where the position measuring unit unconditionally measures the relative position … when the mobile terminal positions within the out-vehicle communication area." The patent concedes that (a) unconditional measurement is the known baseline, and (b) the entire advantage is the elimination of measurement in states where it is not needed. That concession supplies both the motivation and the KSR "known technique" rationale for the gating logic.

II. Claim 1 — element-by-element decomposition

The invention, as claimed, is a control-logic gating function layered onto an otherwise conventional BLE-detection / UWB-ranging architecture. There is no new ranging physics, no new antenna arrangement, no new authentication scheme. That framing is critical: the § 103 question reduces to whether the prior art suggested gating a power-expensive ranging operation on a readily observable state of the phone.

III. Verified prior-art reference set

IV. The obviousness combinations

A. Combination I — Claims 1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 13

Proposed: PA-1 (or PA-2) as the primary PEPS/electronic-key reference, in view of PA-4 (and/or PA-3).

Rationale (KSR "known technique / design incentive"):

1. Same field, same problem, same art. All references are directed to smartphone-as-vehicle-key and to conserving power in wireless vehicle access. KSR holds that a combination of familiar elements according to known methods to yield predictable results is obvious.
2. Express motivation supplied by the patent itself. The '101 concedes the object is to reduce power consumption vs. unconditional measurement. Where the specification states the problem in exactly those terms, the motivation is not speculative — it is the patentee's own.
3. UWB is the obvious candidate for duty-cycling. The '101's own text notes UWB occupies a 500 MHz–"ten-odd GHz" band. Multi-anchor ToF ranging (three UWB antennas, X/Y/Z, trilateration) is orders-of-magnitude more power-expensive than BLE polling. Suppressing the expensive operation when it is not needed is the paradigm "known technique to improve similar devices in the same way."
4. The gating signal is free. Phone lock state, idle timers, foreground-app state, charging state, and motion are all already available to the e-key app via standard OS APIs — no added hardware, no added vehicle cost. KSR's "obvious to try" rationale applies with particular force where the alternative is a set of finite, identified, predictable variables.
5. Predictable result. The output of the claimed logic is binary (measure / don't measure). Nothing in the claim produces an unexpected physical or numerical result.

Why PA-4 is the strongest secondary reference: it does not merely suggest power saving in the abstract — it teaches detecting the portable device's charging/energy state and deactivating the communication unit in response. That is the exact logical predicate of the '101's claimed "determining unit" (element D), merely transplanted from "insufficient energy" to "not needed."

Claim 2 (determining/control units located in the terminal; terminal transmits position-measurement-instruction information): Concedes and resolves a pure allocation question. The '101's own specification states the two available options and their respective tradeoffs — terminal-side: "reduce the processing load on the vehicle side … decrease the amount of communication"; vehicle-side: "reduce the processing load on the mobile terminal side." A patentee who articulates both alternatives and their respective advantages in the specification has handed the challenger a prima facie case of obviousness for both: choosing where to place a decision function to trade processing load against communication volume is the textbook "known design alternative." PA-5 (Honda sibling) confirms the terminal-side placement with an instruction message was itself an obvious implementation.

Claims 10, 11, 12 (method; instruction method; CRM): These track Claim 1/2 verbatim as process steps and a program causing the processor to perform them. Where the system claim is obvious, method and CRM claims reciting the same steps with no additional limitations rise and fall with it. Claim 12 depends on the same "predetermined state" gating and adds nothing (the processor is merely "caused to function as" the same two units).

Claim 13 (vehicle control apparatus; vehicle-side determining unit receives terminal state information): Obvious over Combination I for the reasons in Claim 2, and additionally over PA-4 — which already places the state-monitoring module unit on the portable side and the decision logic on the vehicle/security side.

B. Combination II — Claim 3 (determining unit located in the vehicle; terminal transmits terminal state information)

Proposed: Combination I, further in view of PA-2 or PA-4 for the vehicle-side awareness of terminal state.

• PA-4's module unit reports/uses energy state within the vehicle-onboard security system context.
• PA-2's gateway is fully aware of the portable device's state and charging apparatus.
• The '101 specification itself frames vehicle-side placement as the alternative whose advantage is reduced mobile-terminal processing load — a stated, predictable engineering tradeoff, not an inventive leap.

Strength: strong.

C. Combination III — Claims 4, 5, 6 (states that make measurement necessary)

Motivation to combine (all three): Each state is a cheap, already-available proxy for "the user is or is not plausibly about to use the vehicle." A PHOSITA seeking to reduce measurement power would enumerate exactly these signals, because they require no additional sensing hardware and the gating logic is a boolean condition. This is KSR's "a finite number of identified, predictable solutions."

D. Combination IV — Claims 7, 8, 9 (states that make measurement unnecessary)

Note on internal tension: Claims 4/5 (locked/idle ⇒ measure) and Claim 7/8 (charging ⇒ do not measure) overlap factually — a charging phone is typically also locked. The '101 resolves this only in the flowchart (step S4 checks the "unnecessary" states before step S5 checks the "necessary" states). That is a priority/ordering convention, not a technical contribution. It does, however, support a § 112(b) indefiniteness argument regarding the scope of "predetermined state" in independent Claim 1 — an alternative or additional validity theory worth preserving.

V. Rebuttal to expected non-obviousness arguments

VI. Critical family-risk finding (advise the client separately)

This is not a § 103 point, but it dominates the practical risk picture and must be flagged:

• PA-5 (US 2021/0179014 A1) and PA-6 (US 2021/0179022 A1 / US 11,866,005) are Honda applications claiming JP priority as of the same day as the '101 (JP 2019‑227115 vs. the '101's JP 2019‑226984, both filed 2019‑12‑17) and they disclose the same mobile terminal, the same "predetermined state" gating concept, and the same "measurement instruction information" transmitted terminal-side. PA-5's own text recited transmitting "measurement instruction information Mri if the mobile terminal 10 has a predetermined state" — verbatim the operative concept of the '101's Claim 2.
• Their escape from prior art depends entirely on two things: (i) same-day priority means they are not "effectively filed before" the '101 under AIA § 102(a)(2); and (ii) common ownership by Honda Motor Co. removes them under § 102(b)(2)(C) even if the '101's JP priority were lost or if any sibling were re-dated later.
• Implication: If the '101's JP 2019‑226984 priority were ever successfully challenged (e.g., inadequate written-description support for the "predetermined state" genus), the siblings' 2019-12-17 effective filing date would precede the '101's new effective date of 2020‑12‑10 — and the § 102(b)(2)(C) common-ownership exception would then be doing all the work. Any challenge should test (a) the sufficiency of the '101's priority documentation and (b) Honda's chain of title as of the relevant dates.
• Double patenting: the co-pending/issued siblings also present an obviousness-type double patenting exposure, since Claims 1–9 and the siblings' claims are not patentably distinct in any meaningful way.

VII. Overall assessment

Bottom line: The '101 patent's independent claims are directed to gating a known, power-expensive ranging operation on a readily available state of the phone — a control-logic improvement whose entire stated benefit is the predictable result of not performing an operation. The strongest § 103 case combines (i) the admitted vehicle-phone-key/PEPS art and (ii) references teaching state-conditioned activation/deactivation of the terminal's radio (PA-3, PA-4). The dependent claims add specific gating states that are individually recognizable power-management heuristics rather than technical contributions; the specification itself supplies most of the motivation.

Explicit limitations of this analysis:

1. I could not verify the '101 patent's actual examiner-cited/IDS references; the citation lists surfaced in search belonged to unrelated documents. A definitive opinion requires the patent's front page, the IDS, and the file wrapper.
2. Effective filing dates are unverified for PA-2 (US 11,007,977 / US 2020/0247363), PA-7 (US 2021/0365541), and the CN/JP background references (PA-8). Each must be date-checked: any reference published or effectively filed after 2019‑12‑17 is not prior art to the '101 and drops out of every combination. This is the single largest gap in the present analysis.
3. No anticipation (§ 102) reference was located in this search. The closest single-reference disclosure is Honda's own PA-5 sibling, which is excluded only by same-day priority and § 102(b)(2)(C) common ownership.
4. Confidence: moderate on the bare § 103 conclusion as to Claims 1 and 4–6; high as to Claims 2, 3, 7, 8, and 10–13 once a date-verified primary PEPS reference is supplied.