$1 Trillion and an SBIR
Taxpayer Funded Inventions for Tuesday, October 26, 2021
Hello from FedInvent,
On Tuesday, USPTO granted 6,786 new patents. One hundred fifty-six had taxpayer funding.
The FedInvent Patent Report is available here.
If you want to explore Tuesday's patent by Department, start here.
Here's a sample of what we found on Tuesday.
An SBIR and a $1 Trillion Company
If you'd like to get a better understanding of how Tesla's autonomous driving technology works, check out US patent 11157014, "Multi-Channel Sensor Simulation for autonomous Control Systems." National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant funded Tesla's invention. Tesla's patent was granted the same week that the company reached a $1 trillion market cap, yes one trillion. The trillion-dollar market cap occurred after Hertz, the car rental company emerging from bankruptcy that is now run by Mark Fields, the former CEO of Ford, announced it was buying 100,000 Tesla Model 3 sedans. Hertz will also install 1,000 chargers at its facilities to charge the new EV fleet. Tesla stock is electric right now. Shares are up about 60% over the past three months.
On Wednesday, Uber announced it would be renting 50,000 Model 3 sedans from Hertz. Uber drivers can rent a Tesla Model 3 for $344/week. Uber drivers can rent a Tesla through Hertz starting on November 1 in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Washington DC. Carvana will handle selling the used Teslas for Hertz.
Uber and Hertz made their well-timed announcements ahead of the Glasgow Climate Change Conference that starts on Sunday. Both companies are reducing their carbon footprint. Uber's announcement is timely. Ride-hail drivers produce more pollution per passenger-mile traveled because they spend more than a third of their time driving around empty. (Taxi drivers, too.). Researchers generally assume that electrifying one ride-hail vehicle reduces the same amount of CO2 as converting three regular gas-powered vehicles. And if the Uber drivers or the renters are on well-traveled roads, they can flip on Autopilot to make the drive easier.
Crowd-Sourced Indoor Mapping
TRX Systems in Greenbelt, Maryland, received US Patent 11156464, "Crowd Sourced Mapping With Robust Structural Features." The invention is a location and mapping service that creates a global database of indoor navigation maps through crowd-sourcing and data fusion technologies. DARPA and the National Science Foundation funded this research. This patent is a new addition to their already significant portfolio of patents and pending patent applications.
The crowd-sourced feature mapping detects and describes unique structural features of a building based on data from one or more tracked devices moving through that building. Building models have many applications, including improved location, navigation, routing, and building visualization. The invention includes a feature descriptor associated with a detected structural feature that may comprise sufficient descriptive information to uniquely identify the detected structural feature. Descriptive information may include physical information about the detected structural feature -- height, location, color, etc.; signal data associated with the detected structural feature's environment (radio frequency ("RF"), magnetic field ("EMI"), vibration, and acoustic signals); and image data.
Crowd-sourcing aspects of this invention cover pulling location data from the mobile devices moving around the building. We'll leave the issues about capturing location data and tracking cellphones to the privacy experts for now. Here, devices can include smartphones and robots. The robots are a tell that this will be a beneficial technology for first responders and warfighters.
Robots
While we're on robots, Boston Dynamics received US Patent 11154990, "Braking and Regeneration Control in a Legged Robot." DARPA funded this research. Boston Dynamics robot drawings are among this week's most interesting.
A DNA Vaccine
The Army patented a DNA vaccine to protect mammals from Sin Nombre Virus (11155834). Discovered in 1993 near the Cañon de la Muerte on the Navajo Reservation, it was originally named the Muerto Canyon hantavirus, in keeping with the convention for naming new pathogens.
The Needle-Free Intradermal Injection Device
The needle-free injection device caught our eye after watching news stories featuring people getting their COVID vaccinations with very long needles. PharmaJet, Inc. received Patent 11154659. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) funded the research. The PharmaJet website explains that one in four adults has a fear of needles. According to OSHA, there are between 600,000-800,000 needlestick injuries every year in the US alone. In addition, as many as 500 million used needles are added to trash dumps and landfills every year due to vaccination. The COVID pandemic is likely to have significantly increased that number. Seventy-five million of those needles may be infected with blood-borne illnesses. PharmaJet's solution is a Syringe for injection by jet action, without needle, for use with replaceable ampoules or carpules, type of ampule or cartridge containing liquid medication to be inserted using a syringe, hence the name.
The Bayh-Dole Scofflaws
This Tuesday, there are two Bayh-Dole scofflaws. BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration, Inc. (11158941) and Rampart Communications (11159220). Rampart is probably working for NSA. BAE is a defense contractor. The inventor on BAE's patent cites DARPA as a funding source for his peer-reviewed journal articles.
Other news on the scofflaw front, Raytheon Technologies' CEO, Greg Hayes announced that Raytheon Missile Defense (RMD) and its industry partner, Northrup Grumman, made history with the first-ever successful flight test of a scramjet-powered Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, or HAWC was paid for by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the US Air Force. RMD is also working with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL). Northrup Grumman worked with AFRL on testing the new jet propulsion system.
We'll move the Raytheon and Northrup Grumman scofflaw patents and patent applications into the DARPA and US Air Force category.
The Innovation Agenda
Chair the National Council for Expanding American Innovation (NCEAI or Council) is being renamed the Council for Inclusive Innovation or CI2. Gina Raimondo, Secretary, US Department of Commerce, will chair the group.
The memorandum notes that "With the most recent data from the US Patent and Trademark Office indicating that only 12.8% of inventors listed on patents granted in a single year are women, and little to no data on the participation of other underrepresented groups, we can all agree that there is much work to be done to build a stronger and more inclusive innovation sector."
The 12.8% number comes from an updated version of USPTO's 2019 report, "Progress and Potential." The original 2019 report uses data from 2016. The 2020 updated report updates the findings from the 2019 report using three years of new data, covering January 2017 through December 2019. Here is the link to the latest version of the report.
There are many issues about how to determine what gender, race, or ethnicity an inventor is based on the names on a patent document alone and the lack of consistent demographic information being captured as part of the application process. We are routinely surprised to learn that our mental store of gender-defining names is inadequate when researching inventors. There is also the question of what is the most accurate way to capture this data. And whether inventors want to report this information. Assignee and inventor disambiguation is hard enough. Adding gender, race, and ethnicity to the mix will probably be challenging.
Patents By The Numbers
On Tuesday, USPTO granted 6,786 new patents. One hundred fifty-six had taxpayer funding.
Here are the numbers for these taxpayer-funded patents:
145 patents have Government Interest Statements.
33 have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
The 156 patents have 183 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 524 inventors.
The 511 American inventors came from 39 states and the District of Columbia.
Massachusetts ranks first for first named inventors and number two for total inventors. California was number one in total inventors by state and number two in first-named inventors.
13 foreign inventors come from 7 countries.
There are 84 patents (53.8%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
12 patents are assigned to Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs).
A federal department is one of the assignees on 20 patents.
8 patent applications have Y CPC classifications indicating that USPTO believes the invention may be useful in helping to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Patent Count By Department
Patents By Technology Center
Here are this week’s numbers.
The Health Complex
Funding References to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Institutes and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
That's this week's FedInvent patents update. Please explore the FedInvent Patents Report as there are many more interesting inventions than we could jam into a newsletter.
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Thanks for reading FedInvent. We'll see you Thursday for the latest on taxpayer-funded patents, new patent applications, and the latest on the federal innovation ecosphere.
The FedInvent Team
About FedInvent
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for.