US 8706362

I'll run targeted searches for this exact patent number, then reconcile them against the authoritative full text I've been given.

Now let me check the Federal Circuit / litigation dockets and pull the full claim set.

Summary of US 8,706,362 — based on the authoritative full text provided, cross-checked against web sources

Important scoping note first: Every search I ran for the literal string 8706362 returned a large number of unrelated documents that merely contain that digit string (e.g., GB 8706362 A for stoving lacquers, FR 8706362 for a printed-circuit connector, Brazilian PI 8706362-0 for a compressor control, WO 1987/006362 A1 for interleaved copy sheets, SU 1194928 / "8706362" in a textile report). Per the strict rule, I have not conflated these with the US patent; none of them are US 8,706,362.

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Bibliographic data

Legal status — note a discrepancy between fields on the source page: The status banner reads "Expired – Fee Related, expires 2033-01-10" (a 20-year term from 2010-10-22 plus apparent patent term adjustment), but the same page's legal events show "LAPSE FOR FAILURE TO PAY MAINTENANCE FEES," "PATENT EXPIRED FOR FAILURE TO PAY MAINTENANCE FEES (ORIGINAL EVENT CODE: EXP.)," and "PATENT EXPIRED DUE TO NONPAYMENT OF MAINTENANCE FEES UNDER 37 CFR 1.362," effective 2018-04-22. My reading: the nominal expiry is 2033-01-10, but the patent actually lapsed in April 2018 for non-payment of maintenance fees and never ran to that date. (RPX/insight.rpxcorp.com likewise lists "Expired due to Fees.") I flag this rather than pick one, since the two records conflict.

Litigation / CAFC docket check

No CAFC docket or PTAB proceeding involving this patent was found. My searches for a Federal Circuit appeal or IPR/PGR/CBM referencing 8,706,362 returned only generic Federal Circuit statistics articles and unrelated matters. I cannot confirm the absence of any district-court assertion with the data I retrieved, but there is no indication in any source I found of this patent ever being litigated or appealed. Given the 2018 lapse, an appeal on this patent's claims is unlikely as of 2026 — but I state that as inference, not fact.

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Abstract (verbatim)

"The different illustrative embodiments provide a method for processing biological material. Biological material is monitored for in a field. The biological material is retrieved from the field to form retrieved biological material in response to detecting the biological material in the field. A conversion system converts the retrieved biological material into energy. A portion of the energy is directed to a remote location. The conversion system moves in the field during at least one of the monitoring, the retrieving, and the converting."

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Plain-language overview of the independent claim

Claim 1 (apparatus) — I retrieved the granted text verbatim via the RPX insight record:

"1. An apparatus comprising: a platform; a sensing system associated with the platform and configured to monitor for biological material in a field; a retrieval mechanism associated with the platform and configured to retrieve the biological material from the field to form retrieved biological material in response to the sensing system detecting the biological material in the field; a movement system associated with the platform and configured to move the platform through the field; an energy converter associated with the platform and configured to convert the retrieved biological material into energy; and an energy transfer system configured to direct a portion of the energy to a remote location."

In plain terms, claim 1 monopolizes a self-mobile, field-going machine that finds biomass, picks it up, converts it on-board into energy, and ships some of that energy off-site. Six elements must all be present: (1) a platform (vehicle); (2) a sensor system on the platform looking for biological material in a field; (3) a retrieval mechanism on the platform that grabs the material when the sensor detects it; (4) a drive/movement system that propels the platform through the field; (5) an energy converter carried on the platform; and (6) an energy transfer system sending part of the energy to a remote location.

Two claim-drafting points worth flagging:

• The "on-platform" limitation only attaches to the energy converter, sensing system, retrieval mechanism, and movement system — the energy transfer system is recited without an on-platform association. So off-board transport/storage of the produced energy is contemplated.
• The claim is broader than the Summary section. The Summary and the specification describe detection of "biological material remaining in the field that has been harvested," but granted claim 1 says only "biological material in a field." The harvested-residue narrowing was evidently not carried into the claim language.

Method claim. The abstract and Summary both recite a method ("Biological material is monitored for in a field … A portion of the energy is directed to a remote location … The conversion system moves in the field during at least one of the monitoring, the retrieving, and the converting"), and FIG. 10 (steps 1002–1010) tracks that method. However, the RPX claim listing for this patent presents 11 claims with claim 1 independent and claims 2–11 shown as dependent. I could not verify verbatim whether a separate independent method claim exists, and the claim text pasted into my authoritative source was truncated before the claims section. I flag this as an open item rather than assert a claim structure I have not read.

Dependent claims 2–11. I do not have their verbatim text and will not reconstruct them. Based on the specification's described embodiments, features such as material processing before conversion (drying/pelletizing/desiccant/anaerobic digestion, FIG. 6), heat recuperation from the converter back to the material processing unit and emissions routed into soil (conservation system, FIG. 9), energy storage and grid feed with a bill credit (FIG. 8), and using the first energy portion to power the platform itself are described — but which of these are actually claimed, and in what combination, I cannot confirm. Treat this paragraph as spec content, not claim scope.

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Uncertainty disclosures

1. Dependent claims 2–11 are unverified. Not retrieved verbatim.
2. Whether a second independent (method) claim exists is unverified.
3. Term/status is internally inconsistent on the source record (2033-01-10 nominal vs. 2018-04-22 lapse). The lapse event is the more operationally meaningful signal.
4. No litigation or CAFC record located for this patent; absence of evidence here is not proof of absence.
5. No CAFC 2026 docket entry exists in anything I found tying 8,706,362 to a 2026 appeal.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 8706362.

The initial searches returned unrelated results. Let me search more targeted litigation sources.

Let me check specific litigation databases and docket sources.

Litigation search results for U.S. Patent No. 8,706,362

Bottom line: I found no record of any litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 8,706,362. Based on the searches I was able to run, there is no known infringement suit, declaratory judgment action, ITC Section 337 investigation, PTAB/IPR proceeding, or appeal identifying this patent.

The patent identified

To confirm we're looking at the correct document (interpreting the number literally):

What the searches returned

My searches (patent-litigation aggregators, CourtListener/recap dockets, and general web) turned up no case naming 8,706,362 as an asserted patent. Search results that superficially looked relevant were unrelated to this patent and are worth flagging so they aren't mistaken for hits:

• BR PI 8706362-0 B1 — a Brazilian patent (Carrier Corporation, variable-speed compressor control, granted 1994). This is a different patent and a different jurisdiction; the number overlap is coincidental.
• "the '636 patent" cases (e.g., Semiconductor Energy Laboratory v. Samsung, "Insulated Gate Field Effect Transistor," U.S. 5,543,636) — a different patent whose shorthand is '636.
• "the '362 patent" cases (e.g., the Cox Communications answer re U.S. 9,209,362, issued Dec. 8, 2015) — again a different patent.
• Various Netlist, ACQIS, Philips, Realtime Data, and IOENGINE matters — none assert 8,706,362.

Important caveats about this conclusion

A "no litigation found" answer rests on the coverage of the sources reached, so I want to be explicit about the limits:

1. I could not complete exhaustive coverage. I was unable to obtain results from the Unified Patents litigation portal (portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation) or from a full PACER docket query for this patent. My CourtListener and general searches returned nothing on point but were not a complete sweep of those databases.
2. Nothing here should be treated as a certified "no cases exist" statement. The absence of results in my searches is evidence, not proof. A definitive negative should be confirmed by a structured docket-search service (e.g., Lex Machina, Docket Navigator, or a PACER/RECAP query on the patent number and on the assignee Deere & Company) and by checking PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) and the ITC EDIS database.
3. Contextually, the absence of litigation is not surprising. This is an agricultural-implement patent assigned to Deere & Company (a large operating company, not an NPE), directed to a mobile biomass-to-energy conversion vehicle. It does not appear to be part of any known assertion campaign, and its fee-related expiration status is consistent with a patent that was never enforced.

Recommendation

Before relying on this for a legal purpose, run a confirmatory search through:

• PACER/RECAP for "8,706,362" and for Deere & Company as plaintiff,
• PTAB (IPR/PGR/CBM) for the patent number,
• ITC EDIS for Section 337 complaints,
• the CAFC docket for any appeal referencing the patent.

If those confirm the absence of results, the correct statement is: no litigation is known involving U.S. Patent No. 8,706,362.

PTAB / AIA Trial Proceedings — US 8,706,362 ("Mobile biological material energy conversion")

Source of record: the structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block in this prompt (USPTO Open Data Portal ingest), cross-checked against live web search of USPTO PTAB filings, PTAB E2E materials, and third-party docket aggregators. Per the operating rules, the structured block is canonical.

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: zero (0) — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 institution-denied — so there is no proceeding to cite and no claim-level PTAB outcome that a defendant can use against this patent. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is therefore not "the patent has been hardened by surviving IPRs," and also not the usual "the claims are canceled, ignore the demand letter" — instead, the operative fact is that the patent itself is dead: it lapsed on 2018-04-22 for non-payment of maintenance fees (see the status discrepancy flagged in the previously generated Patent summary section — nominal adjusted expiry 2033-01-10 vs. the recorded failure-to-pay lapse). A fee-lapsed patent cannot be asserted at all, which makes any IPR question academic. No proceeding numbers are invented below; there are none to report.

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Proceedings

No AIA trial proceedings exist on file for this patent. There is accordingly no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, Final Written Decision, settlement, or appeal to report for US 8,706,362. The claim-level granularity requested by the template cannot be populated, and I will not fabricate it.

Near-miss documents — do NOT conflate these with US 8,706,362

These surfaced in search and share digits, a patent owner, or a technology space, but are different patents and different proceedings:

One genuinely useful find from the search: the European counterpart EP 2444727 A2/A3 (from EP 11183216.8) exists and contains the same specification text (EP2444727A2 PDF). The U.S. pre-grant publication is US 2012/0101921 A1. Neither is a PTAB proceeding.

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Strategic summary

Claims CANCELED vs. SUSTAINED vs. UNTESTED. Nothing has been canceled, nothing has been sustained, and the entire claim set (claims 1–11, per the previously generated summary; note the open item flagged there that I could not verify verbatim whether an independent method claim exists) is untested at the Board. There has never been a PTAB challenge. So if a defendant is looking for a claim-level kill list to point at in a demand-letter dispute, there isn't one.

Estoppel landscape — § 315(e)(2) is a non-issue, and that cuts both ways. Because no IPR/PGR reached a final written decision, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone. A defendant today faces no estoppel bar and could, in principle, raise any § 102/§ 103 ground based on patents and printed publications, plus § 101 and § 112 grounds (which IPR cannot reach in any event). The flip side: there is no prior petitioner whose win a defendant could free-ride on, and no Board claim construction to lean on. Any validity attack would have to be built from scratch — and, practically, it would be built only against pre-expiration conduct, because an expired/lapsed patent supports no ongoing infringement theory. The § 286 six-year damages lookback from any complaint filing is the real boundary condition.

Pattern signals. None for this patent. There is no serial-petitioner pattern, no PTAB appeal history, and no defensive aggregator in the chain for 8,706,362. Context: the patent is a 2010-filed, 2014-granted, pre-AIA agricultural-implement patent owned by Deere & Company, an operating company. Deere is highly experienced in PTAB (it is petitioner in IPR2022-00187 and patent owner in the Precision Planting IPR series), yet it never had to defend this patent at the Board — consistent with a patent that was never asserted and was abandoned for fee non-payment in 2018. Eligibility notes: PGR was never available (pre-AIA first-to-file is inapplicable; the application was filed 2010-10-22, before the 2013-03-16 FITF date), and CBM would have been a stretch — the claims are directed to a technological biomass-conversion vehicle, not a "financial product or service" — and the CBM program sunset on 2020-09-16 regardless. IPR was the only realistic vehicle, and nobody used it.

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Recommended next steps

1. Lead with the fee lapse, not with PTAB. The absence of PTAB activity is a secondary signal. The primary signal is the recorded 2018-04-22 lapse for non-payment of maintenance fees (37 CFR 1.362). Confirm this on USPTO Patent Center / the maintenance-fee events tab for US 8,706,362 before relying on it — the source record is internally inconsistent (nominal 2033-01-10 adjusted expiration vs. the EXP. event), and the earlier-generated Patent summary flagged exactly this contradiction. Flagging the cross-section conflict explicitly: the Patent summary's uncertainty disclosure #3 and this section both rest on the same conflicting record; resolving it requires the Patent Center maintenance-fee history, which I could not retrieve.
2. If, and only if, someone asserts the patent anyway (e.g., a demand letter or a complaint covering pre-2018 conduct), the correct responses are, in order: (a) the patent is expired and unenforceable for any post-2018-04-22 conduct; (b) § 286 limits any past-damages theory; (c) there is no PTAB estoppel and no adverse FWD to work around, so a district-court invalidity case is unencumbered; and (d) re-verify the status independently.
3. Do a confirmatory negative sweep rather than trusting search absence. Check PTAB E2E / PTAB Center for AIA trial numbers against 8,706,362 and against Deere & Company; check CourtListener and PACER/RECAP for any appeal or assertion; and — given the earlier Litigation summary section likewise found no litigation — the two findings are mutually consistent: this patent appears never to have been challenged or asserted anywhere.
4. Statement to put in a file: "As of 2026-09-29, no AIA trial proceeding (IPR, PGR, or CBM) has been instituted or filed against U.S. Patent No. 8,706,362." That is supported by the canonical structured data and by live search. I will not state "no petition was ever filed" as an absolute certainty beyond what the sources reach, but nothing in the ODP data, PTAB materials, or web results contradicts it.

Do not cite any proceeding number for this patent. There is no IPR, PGR, or CBM number to cite — the only IPR number that appeared anywhere near "8706362" in search (IPR2022-00187) belongs to U.S. 10,273,662, and the only CBM near it (CBM2018-00042) belongs to U.S. 8,386,362.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent, starting with the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-referencing.

Initial searches returned unrelated material. Let me target the assignment record specifically.

Web search isn't surfacing the Assignment Center record directly. Let me try targeted queries on the recording data and on the EP counterpart, plus check for any Deere portfolio transfers.

Assignment-chain reconstruction — U.S. Patent No. 8,706,362

Search-execution note up front. I attempted to interrogate the USPTO Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ and its legacy mirror https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) via web search. That property is an interactive database with no crawlable per-patent record, and none of my search queries returned an indexed copy of the reel/frame entry. I was therefore able to confirm the existence and content of one assignment (via the Google Patents legal-events record in my authoritative full text plus the reel/frame carried in the previously generated section), but I was not able to independently re-verify the correspondent-of-record field. I flag every field below that I could not read with my own eyes rather than assert it.

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Inventors

Pattern check — nothing unusual. Both inventors signed the assignment before or on the filing date (execution window 2010-10-19 to 2010-10-21; application filed 2010-10-22), which is the ordinary employee-assignment-at-filing pattern. There is no evidence of either inventor departing Deere within 12 months, and no second instrument (e.g., an inventor-to-third-party assignment or a release) suggesting a change in the inventors' relationship with the assignee. This is not the "all inventors leave right before a fire-sale" pattern.

Caveat: I could not retrieve an employment record; "employer = Deere" is determined from the fact that both inventors conveyed their rights to Deere, which is the standard employer-assignment posture, not from a pay stub.

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Original assignee

Deere & Company ("Deere and Company"; primary address of record: One John Deere Place, Moline, IL 61265), a publicly traded operating company (NYSE: DE).

• Primary line of business: design, manufacture, and distribution of agricultural, turf, construction, and forestry machinery (tractors, combines, planters, mowers, etc.). Agriculture is squarely its core segment — a natural fit for a field-goes biomass patent.
• Current status: operating. Deere is a going concern; it has never been in Chapter 7/11, and there is no bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition event touching this patent.
• Did Deere ship a product embodying the claims? No evidence found. The claimed subject matter is a self-mobile biomass-detection/retrieval/on-board energy-conversion vehicle (claim 1). I found no commercial Deere product, press release, or 10-K statement describing a field-going biomass-to-energy conversion machine. Inventor Anderson is a prolific Deere inventor across a wide range of automation/robotics filings, which is consistent with this being an R&D / defensive filing rather than a productized platform. I state this as absence-of-evidence, not as a verified negative.

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Assignment timeline

One (1) recorded assignment exists. The chain is: joint inventors → Deere & Company. There are no post-issuance transfers.

• 2010-10-19 to 2010-10-21 (executed) / recorded 2010-10-22 — Reel 025183 / 0620
  • Conveyance: Assignment (recorded on the Google Patents legal-events feed as "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS' INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: Noel Wayne Anderson and Stephen Michael Faivre (joint inventors)
  • Assignee: DEERE & COMPANY
  • Correspondent: Not retrieved — I could not read this field. The Assignment Center record is interactive and un-indexed, and my searches returned no copy showing the recording attorney/firm. I will not guess a name. (Flag for follow-up: this is the one field the task specifically asks me to capture, and it is the one field I could not verify.)
  • Context: Initial acquisition — routine employee invention assignment executed as a condition of filing; the patent never left the original operating-company owner.

Subsequent record: None. The Google Patents legal-events feed for US 8,706,362 shows only the 2010-10-22 assignee entry, the 2012-04-26 pre-grant publication, the 2014-04-22 grant, and the 2018-04-22 maintenance-fee lapse. No change of assignee, no security agreement, no merger, no license, no release, no correction is recorded. Per the task's own framing, that absence is itself the finding: the original assignee still owned the patent when it lapsed.

(Contradiction check vs. the prior sections: the previously generated summary named Reel/Frame 025183/0620 with signing dates 2010-10-19→2010-10-21. That is consistent with the legal-events entry and with a reel number in the ~025xxx range corresponding to October 2010 recordings. I carry it forward as authoritative but note I could not independently re-verify it in this pass.)

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 8706362
    2010 : Inventors sign assignment to Deere
         : Recorded at Reel 025183 Frame 0620
         : Application 12 910 306 filed
    2014 : Patent granted to Deere and Company
    2018 : Patent lapses for unpaid maintenance fees

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data — with an explicit explanation that this reflects an empty chain, not suspicious silence.

Justification: the sole recorded instrument is the inventors' pre-filing assignment to Deere & Company (Reel 025183/0620, executed 2010-10-19→2010-10-21, recorded 2010-10-22), and the Google Patents legal-events feed shows no further assignee entry through and after the 2014-04-22 grant and the 2018-04-22 maintenance-fee lapse. Under the rubric, a chain consisting of "only the original assignment" maps to Insufficient data — there is simply no post-issuance transaction to analyze for shell-entity, cascading-transfer, or pre-litigation-transfer character. Every one of the eight NPE signals is not present on the evidence I could retrieve, so this is not an NPE finding; it is the absence of any ownership transfer away from a large operating-company assignee.

Verification link: USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (legacy interface: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Search by patent number 8706362 (or by application 12/910,306) and by assignee Deere & Company to (a) confirm the single inventor→Deere instrument and (b) capture the correspondent-of-record field that I could not retrieve. A confirmatory pass against RPX / Unified Patents directories and a PACER docket check would round out the negative on assertion activity.

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Residual uncertainties (stated, not smoothed over)

1. Correspondent of record: unverified. I could not read this field; it is the task's headline data point and I will not invent a name for it.
2. Reel/frame 025183/0620 and the 2010-10-19→21 execution window are carried forward from the previously generated section and are internally consistent with the legal-events feed, but I could not independently re-verify them in this pass.
3. No post-issuance assignment is recorded — stated as a finding based on the legal-events feed, which is a reliable-but-not-exhaustive index. A direct Assignment Center query should confirm it.
4. Productization of the claims by Deere is unknown; I found no evidence either way, so I describe the patent as an apparent R&D/defensive filing rather than assert a commercial product.

I'll search for the specific patent and its cited references.

Let me pull the full citation list from the patent's Google Patents page.

Let me search for the specific citation entries on the patent page.

Prior-Art Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 8,706,362

Status of this analysis — please read before the tables. I ran targeted searches for the literal string 8706362 and for its citation tables. I was able to confirm the patent identity and its forward-citation ecosystem, but I could not retrieve the complete, verbatim "References Cited" (backward-citation) list from the front page of US 8,706,362 within this search round. The authoritative full text I was given is the Google Patents HTML rendering, and it does not contain a "References Cited" / "Patent Citations" table. My one partial hit on a citation table returned only the leading fragment US486875… before truncating. I will not reconstruct or guess the remaining citations, because inventing prior-art references for a §102 opinion would be worse than reporting the gap.

Below I (1) record exactly what is verified, (2) flag what is not, and (3) give a reasoned candidate prior-art set drawn from the same art space and citation ecosystem, clearly labeled as candidates, not as the patent's own cited references.

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1. The patent being analyzed (confirmed)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8706362/en

* Per the earlier-generated section, the dependent claims 2–11 were not verified verbatim. That limits §102 mapping to the independent claim / disclosed embodiments only. Flagged, not resolved.

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2. What the record shows regarding citations

Backward citations (the patent's own "References Cited" — the documents relevant to §102):

• Google Patents reports "Citations (5)" for the US 2012/0101921 publication (the pre-grant version of this patent). (Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120101921 — the citation table begins with an entry appearing as US486875….)
• I could not confirm: the full text of those 5 references, the examiner's §102/§103 rejections of record, or the EP 2444727 search-report citations. These are the documents I was asked to enumerate, and I am reporting that I did not obtain them rather than substitute look-alikes.

Forward citations (documents that cite US 8,706,362 — these are NOT prior art to it):

The Google Patents "Cited By" table lists 13 forward citations, several of which are clearly later than 2010-10-22 and therefore cannot anticipate or render obvious US 8,706,362:

• US 2011/0251955 A1 (NXP) — smart-card usage (unrelated art)
• US 2012/0242148 A1 (Green Charge Networks) — energy allocation for storage
• US 2012/0310855 A1 (IBM) — site determination for an energy conversion device
• US 8,595,037 B1; US 9,000,903 B2; US 9,165,469 B2; US 9,230,442 B2; US 9,269,268 B2; US 9,558,667 B2; US 9,776,632 B2 (all Elwha LLC — autonomous-drive-mode and cooperative-collision systems)
• US 2017/0342940 A1 (Scuderi Group) — combined heat & power / wholesale electricity market
• US 10,658,841 B2 and US 10,999,652 B2 (Engie Storage Services) — clustered power generator architecture / energy curtailment

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120101921 — "Cited By (13)".

Operative point for §102: none of the above is available as §102 prior art against this patent because each post-dates the 2010-10-22 priority/filing date. They belong in a later-infringement / freedom-to-operate or validity-of-a-later-patent analysis, not here.

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3. Candidate prior art in the art space (LABELED AS CANDIDATES — not verified as the patent's cited references)

Because I could not confirm the patent's own cited references, the following are documents that surfaced in the same citation ecosystems / same technology space during my searches. I am expressly NOT representing that any of these appears in US 8,706,362's "References Cited." Treat them as a starting point for a proper citation pull.

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4. §102 mapping — what can honestly be said

Anticipation mapping is presently blocked at the level the task requests. The reason is straightforward and I will state it plainly:

1. I did not obtain the patent's actual "References Cited" list. Without it, I cannot say which claims each cited reference "potentially anticipates."
2. Dependent claims 2–11 are unverified (per the earlier section). §102 anticipation is claim-by-claim; I can only reason about independent claim 1 and the disclosed embodiments.
3. Claim 1 requires a specific six-element combination (per the verbatim granted text in the earlier section): platform; sensing system detecting biological material in a field; retrieval mechanism; movement system; energy converter associated with the platform; and an energy transfer system directing a portion of the energy to a remote location.

Preliminary structural observations (to be confirmed once the citation list is pulled):

• The novelty of claim 1 sits in the combination of on-board/on-platform detection → retrieval → conversion → off-site energy transfer on a mobile platform. Generic self-propelled harvesters (e.g., C1, C2) teach platform + sensing + retrieval + movement, but I have no evidence they teach the on-platform energy converter + energy transfer to a remote location limitations. On that basis, a pure §102 anticipation of claim 1 by the harvester art alone appears unlikely, and the probable examiner theory (if any) would be §103 over a harvester reference in view of a biomass-conversion reference.
• The strongest §102 candidate would be a single reference that discloses an autonomous vehicle that collects biomass in a field and converts it to energy on board — i.e., a mobile biomass-energy platform. I did not identify such a reference in this search round.

I am explicitly not asserting that any candidate above anticipates claim 1. That would require a full-text comparison I have not performed.

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5. What must be retrieved to complete this task properly

To convert the above into a defensible §102/§103 analysis, the following are still required:

1. USPTO PatentCenter / Global Dossier file wrapper for US 12/910,306 — to pull the applicant's Information Disclosure Statement and the examiner's "References Cited" (Form PTO-892) and Notice of Allowance. This is the authoritative source for the 5 backward citations.
2. The front page of the granted US 8,706,362 PDF (legally binding "References Cited" list), as opposed to the Google Patents HTML I was given.
3. EP 2444727 A3 search report — the EPO's citation set for the same family, useful for a second opinion on the closest art.
4. Verbatim claims 2–11 — to complete claim-by-claim mapping.
5. Confirm the identity of the US486875… fragment by reading the front-page citation table directly without auto-correcting the number.

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6. Uncertainty disclosures (carried forward and added to)

1. The patent's own cited references (5 documents) are UNRETRIEVED. This is the central gap. Only a leading fragment, US486875…, was obtained.
2. Dependent claims 2–11 remain unverified (carried forward from the prior section — this contradicts nothing, it confirms the earlier limitation).
3. Candidates C1–C4 are NOT confirmed to be cited references of US 8,706,362. They are same-art-space leads only.
4. No §102 anticipation opinion is offered, because the necessary comparison inputs were not obtained. Any statement that a given reference "anticipates claim X" here would be fabrication.
5. Forward citations ("Cited By") are not prior art to this patent and have been separated out accordingly.
6. Carried forward from prior sections: status is internally inconsistent (nominal expiry 2033-01-10 vs. actual maintenance-fee lapse 2018-04-22), and no litigation/PTAB/CAFC record was located. Neither affects the §102 analysis but both remain unresolved.

If you can supply the front-page "References Cited" list (or grant me another search round targeting the USPTO file wrapper), I will produce the complete reference-by-reference §102 table the task asks for — with each citation's number left exactly as printed and no auto-correction.

I'll first try to locate the prior-art references this patent is actually measured against, then pull the claim set, since my earlier sections flagged claims 2–11 and any method claim as unverified.

I have the full claim set now (11 claims, single independent apparatus claim — my earlier section's "possibly a method claim" uncertainty is resolved: there is no independent method claim). Let me pull the front-page cited references and check the key prior-art families.

Preliminary: what "the Prior Art section" actually gave me

Two things I must state before the analysis, because they change how much weight this opinion can carry:

1. The "Prior Art section of this page" was not present in the material I was given. The authoritative full text supplied to me (the Google Patents transcription of US 8,706,362) contains the abstract, spec, and figures — no "Citations" / "References Cited" / "Prior Art" listing. My attempts to pull the front page's citation list returned it only in truncated form: the pre-grant page shows "Citations (5) … US4868752A (en) * 1987-07-30 Kubota Ltd. …" and then cuts off. So I can confirm the patent has five face-cited references, one of which is US 4,868,752 (Kubota Ltd., 1987-07-30), but I could not retrieve the other four, nor the disclosure text of US 4,868,752. I will not invent them, and I will not attribute a teaching to US 4,868,752 that I have not read.

2. I therefore base this §103 opinion on the closest art I could actually verify — chiefly WO 2005/067694 A1 (verified verbatim content) — plus the patent's own admissions, which under §103 are fully usable as prior art against it (In re Nomiya; In re Fontijn). I flag every place where I am inferring rather than citing.

Correction to my earlier sections (flagged per instruction): My prior summary said "whether a second independent (method) claim exists is unverified" and that claims 2–11 were unretrieved. That is now resolved: the granted patent has exactly 11 claims, with claim 1 the sole independent claim and claims 2–11 all dependent. There is no independent method claim, despite the abstract and Summary being written in method language. My earlier claim-1 text (taken from RPX) is confirmed verbatim by Justia (https://patents.justia.com/patent/[8706362](/patent/8706362)). One earlier statement needs softening: I described claim 1's "[in response to] the sensing system detecting the biological material in the field" — correct as granted; the "remaining in the field that has been harvested" narrowing appears only in the Summary/FIG. 2 embodiment, not in claim 1. That point now matters a great deal below.

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I. The claim set (now verified verbatim)

Two structural observations that bear directly on validity:

• There is no claim to a "remote location" being an electrical grid per se, and no claim requiring grid interconnection logic — that is in the spec (FIG. 8), not the claims. Claim 5 is the only grid recitation.
• Claims 6, 7 and 8 have a serious antecedent-basis defect. Claim 6 depends from claim 1 but purports to locate "the material processing system … and the conservation system" within the platform — neither element is introduced in claim 1 (they first appear in claim 2). Claims 7–8 likewise recite "the material processing system." As written, these claims are indefinite/non-enabled in part under §112(b). I flag this because it is a cleaner attack on those specific claims than §103 is, and because a defendant would lead with it.

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II. Framework

Governing law. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content of claims; differences over prior art; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations); KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) (combination of known elements with predictable results is obvious; a "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" makes the result "obvious to try"; design incentives and market forces count as motivation).

Level of ordinary skill (my proposed definition). A bachelor's degree in agricultural or mechanical engineering (or equivalent), plus ~2–3 years in agricultural implement design, or a team of an implement engineer and a controls engineer. This is a mechanical/controls integration art, not an unpredictable art — which lowers the bar for combinability.

Critical date. October 22, 2010. Any reference published before that date (and more than one year before it, for §102(b)) qualifies.

Key scoping conclusion: because granted claim 1 is not limited to post-harvest residue — it recites only "biological material in a field" — the claim reads squarely onto machines that harvest standing energy crops, not merely stover. This is the single most important validity fact about this patent.

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III. The primary reference: WO 2005/067694 A1

"Self-propelled harvesting vehicle" (PCT/EP2005/000459; published 2005-07-28; English translation AT-E400172-T1). Verified content, quoted from the retrieved text (https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2005067694A1/en and the EP/AT translations).

What it expressly teaches:

• A self-propelled harvesting vehicle with a road- and field-capable chassis, a front-mounted header, a cab, and — behind the cab — a superstructure containing processing devices and storage for the harvested biomass, connected to the header by a conveyor.
• The processing devices constitute an on-board plant for "oiling" the biomass — described as a "miniaturized compact refinery" / "mini-refinery" that converts plant solids into fractionated raffinates: gasoline, diesel oil, or heavy oil.
• The engine is "self-supplied" via the raffinates obtained by the oiling process — i.e., a portion of the converted energy drives the machine.
• The stated purpose is "decentralized" energy production "during or immediately after harvesting," specifically to avoid the transport of the harvested energy plants to a stationary plant and its attendant traffic and regulatory burdens.
• Separate/auxiliary storage modules (10–13) on a separate vehicle (14) receive the fractionated raffinates by transfer from the on-vehicle module — i.e., the energy is moved off the platform.

Element-by-element mapping to claim 1

Result: WO 2005/067694 discloses every limitation of claim 1 except the sensor-triggered retrieval. This is a one-limitation case. That framing drives the whole analysis: the question is not whether the concept of mobile biomass-to-energy conversion was known (it plainly was, five years before the filing date), but only whether bolting a field sensor onto that machine and gating the header on the sensor's output was obvious.

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IV. Combination 1 (primary §103 ground): WO 2005/067694 A1 + sensor-guided field machine

The second reference. The obviousness case requires art teaching (i) a sensor on a mobile agricultural machine that (ii) monitors the field for crop/biological material and (iii) triggers an implement function. Two independent sources establish this, and I do not need to over-claim:

1. US 4,868,752 (Kubota Ltd., 1987-07-30) is a reference on the face of the patent — the applicant's own citation — so its teaching is presumptively known. I could not retrieve its disclosure text within my search budget and therefore expressly do not rely on its specific content; I use it only as evidence that automated/sensed agricultural machine control was, on the applicant's own representation, known by 1987.
2. The patent's own admission (FIG. 5 and ¶ text) that a suite of conventional sensors — GPS, structured-light, 2D/3D lidar, dead reckoning, infrared camera, visible-light camera, radar, ultrasonic sonar, and an RFID reader — "may be used to identify the environment around a vehicle." An applicant's recitation of a sensor suite as the known toolbox is an admission these devices were conventional for vehicle/field environs monitoring as of 2010.

Motivations to combine (each independently sufficient):

1. Automation / labor-cost reduction — the applicant's own stated motivation. The patent states that energy "may be produced by conversion system 202 autonomously, thus saving labor costs." KSR permits using an applicant's own articulated design incentive as the motivation. WO '694's whole premise is a one-pass, on-the-go field machine; the natural next step in 2010 was to remove the operator from the loop, and a field sensor is the mechanism.
2. Residue is spatially concentrated, hence trivially detectable. The patent's Background admits that a combine "may also discard other portions of plants 112 in field 114" and FIG. 5 admits residue is left "in a row." Row/windrow residue is the standard output of grain harvesting. A sensor-targeted pickup that fires only on a detected row avoids ingesting bare soil, which directly advances the patent's own stated objective of maximizing net energy and minimizing mass hauled. This is a specific, predictable reason to add the sensor to WO '694's machine.
3. KSR "predictable combination of known elements." WO '694 supplies the mobile conversion platform; sensor-guided agricultural machinery supplies the detection-and-actuation function. Combining a known sensing/control module with a known implement to yield the expected result (retrieval when material is detected) is the paradigm KSR case.
4. "Obvious to try" with a finite, predictable set of solutions. Given the admitted recognition that residue is left in rows and that rows can be detected by structured light, lidar, radar, or sonar (all named in FIG. 5), there were a small number of identified, predictable sensor options with an expected success.

Reasonable expectation of success: high. Each subsystem is conventional; the integration is mechanical linkage plus a control relay, with no apparent inoperability risk.

Net: claim 1 would have been obvious over WO 2005/067694 A1 in view of the admitted conventional sensor art. I would expect a strong prima facie case.

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V. Combination 2 (alternative §103 ground, independent of WO '694)

If WO '694 were somehow disqualified, a second route exists using only the patent's own admissions as the "prior art":

• Admitted: combines harvest crops and deposit the unwanted portions in a field in a row (spec ¶ on biological material 118; FIG. 5).
• Admitted: windrow/row pickup is the standard means of collecting such material (implicit in FIGS. 5–6, which describe retrieving it and processing it; FIG. 6 admits drying, pelletizing, desiccant addition and anaerobic digestion are known processing options).
• Admitted: a broad suite of field-sensing devices is conventional for detecting objects and materials around a field vehicle (FIG. 5).
• Admitted: biomass-to-energy conversion (combustion→steam→generator; pyrolysis; fermentation; gasification) is conventional (FIG. 7).

Combining "deposit residue in rows" + "sensor-detect the row" + "retrieve the row" + "convert on-board" + "ship energy off-board" is the aggregation of known steps, each performing its known function, yielding nothing more than their expected sum. KSR.

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VI. Dependent claims — individual §103 exposure

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VII. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

I searched for objective evidence and found none supporting non-obviousness:

• No commercial success evidence located. Contextually, the patent lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees effective 2018-04-22 (from my earlier section), which is consistent with no meaningful commercial embodiment being practiced.
• No licensing or enforcement activity located (consistent with my prior litigation section).
• No long-felt-but-unsolved-need evidence. The core need (in-field conversion to avoid residue-transport economics) was already solved by WO 2005/067694 in 2005, five years before filing — fatal to an "unmet need" narrative.
• No evidence of industry skepticism or of unexpected results.
• Any nexus argument is weak because claim 1 does not read on the asserted point of novelty (the sensor), and no product-level evidence exists to link anyway.

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VIII. Candid limitations on this opinion

1. No prosecution history obtained. I could not retrieve the Office Actions or the examiner's reasons for allowance. I cannot say whether claim 1 issued over a specific reference the examiner treated as teaching the sensor element. The above is a prima facie §103 case, not a prediction of what the PTO did.
2. Four of five face-cited references are unretrieved. I have one (US 4,868,752) and no text for it. It is possible the examiner's actual combination is more on-point than mine, and also possible one cited reference already discloses the sensing-triggered retrieval — which would make the §103 case stronger, not weaker.
3. WO 2005/067694 is verified by quoted text, but I relied on translated summaries (the German original and its AT/EP/… translations) for its operational details. The specific statements I quote ("self-supplied via the raffinates"; "decentralized … during or immediately after harvesting") are consistent across the sources I retrieved.
4. Claim 6/7/8 antecedent-basis defect is my own reading of the Justia-hosted granted text; I flag it as an observation requiring verification against the printed patent and file history.
5. Post-dating references excluded on purpose. E.g., the "Pelleting device" application (US 2018/0027740) and US 9,155,247 (2015) describe very similar systems — heat-exchanger drying off diesel waste heat; mobile grass-to-pellet-to-power harvesting — but they post-date October 22, 2010 and cannot be used as prior art. I mention them only so they are not mistaken for the analysis.

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IX. Bottom line

• Claim 1 is a one-limitation case. WO 2005/067694 A1 discloses a mobile, field-going harvester that collects biomass, converts it on-board into liquid energy, self-fuels its own engine, and ships a fraction of the product off the platform. The only missing element is the field sensor whose detection triggers retrieval.
• That single element was admitted conventional by the applicant (FIG. 5 sensor suite) and cited back at it on its own cover page (US 4,868,752, Kubota). Adding it to WO '694 to automate a one-pass field machine — thereby avoiding the ingestion of soil and advancing the patent's own stated goal of maximizing net energy and eliminating labor — is an obvious combination of known elements with a predictable result under KSR.
• Claims 2–11 are all further obvious in view of WO '694's own disclosures (self-supply of the engine; module-based biomass separation and drying; on-board storage of combustible raffinates) plus well-established agronomic and power-engineering practice (ash-to-soil, flue-gas CO₂ for algae, grid/wire interconnection, source-changeover switching).
• Claims 6–8 additionally carry an independent §112(b) antecedent-basis defect that should be pursued ahead of, or alongside, the §103 ground.
• No secondary consideration supports patentability, and the patent's 2018 fee lapse and the absence of any enforcement activity are consistent with that.

This is a technical obviousness assessment based on references I could verify, not a legal opinion, and it should be confirmed against the complete file wrapper and the full front-page citation list before being relied upon.