How we conducted FTO Search for a Agriculture Machine

Overview of Product

Recently, an FTO was assigned. After reading the product details, I found that the product is related to an agriculture machine. Further, the product has a suction assembly for picking the fruits and a conveyor belt for passing the picked fruits to a storage container. The FTO search was restricted for Jurisdiction – EU & ES.

Search Methodology

Initially, the product was thoroughly studied and after understanding extract the key feature of the product was. After extracting keywords and their synonyms along with their related IPC/CPC classes.

We began with the search broadly by using different search strategies such as keywords and their synonyms, IPC/CPC classes, keywords + classes, etc. In addition, the search strategies were restricted with jurisdiction and alive filters. Further, the search results are analyzed to get the patents or patent applications whose all claims are present in the subject product. The preliminary search was performed on the patent databases like ORBIT, PATSEER, ESPACENET, GOOGLE, etc. The assignee/inventor search, citation analysis and similarity search of the related and relevant references were also performed.

Challenges Faced During Search

During the search, we found many patents and patent applications that disclose Agriculture machines broadly but:

these patents are uses smart technology such as sensors, AI cameras, etc., for detecting fruits but our subject product does not use these smart technologies.

When we do a broad search than we found some patents but these are from other jurisdictions such as china and the US our client only needs EU and ES patents or patent applications.

Then we decided to do a broad search based on jurisdiction and tried to remove junk by most relevant IPC/CPC classes in our search strategy.

Approach to finding the bang-on reference

After analyzing a lot of results, it was noticed that there are some good patent references which are very close to our subject products from Spain (ES). So, we decided to do a broad search on the Spanish database (INVENES). This strategy helps me to find some relevant patents for our FTO project and the client is happy with these results.

Types of references Shortlisted

We found 5 relevant patent/patent application whose all independent claims are mapped with the product features and the claims does not include any extra element. The patent/patent application disclosed:

An agriculture machine for collecting fruits. A suction assembly is attached to the machine for grasping the fruits and a conveyor is connected to the suction assembly for transferring the picked fruits to a container.

Report

The search report included multiple sections for summary, key-feature, keywords and classes, relevant results and related results. The product features are listed in the key feature section and relevant result section. The identified relevant patent or patent application claims are mapped with the listed product features in the relevant section and also provide proper searcher comments if required. We only mapped the patents if all independent claims of the patents are present in product features. The patents/patent applications include all features of the products but it also has an extra claimed feature that this kind of reference we are not mapped in the relevant section but listed in the related section. Finally, we provided a search summary in the summary section.