Appeal No. 96-4122
Application 08/077,419
road surface inclination. It cannot reasonably be said that
the end result of the conversion taught by Chan are signals
representing vehicle motion in a road-surface reference
system. Even if we assume that Chan teaches conversion of
signals representing vehicle motion from an inertial reference
system to a road surface-fixed reference system, which in our
view it does not, the examiner has not adequately explained
how in light of that teaching one with ordinary skill in the
art would have combined the disclosure of Majeed and Adachi to
arrive at the appellants’ claimed invention. The examiner
concludes that “a person of ordinary skill in the art would
have found it obvious to combine the teachings of Majeed,
Adachi et al. and Chan et al.” (Examiner’s Answer at page 4).
But that is not a sufficient analysis to support the
rejection. Precisely how the combination is made to arrive at
the appellants’ claimed invention has not been set forth.
In the response section of the examiner’s answer (page
8), the examiner states the following about Majeed:
Majeed models vehicle motion by a mass-spring system
(see Fig. 5). The system responds road surface
condition inputs (see Col. 1, lines 31-32). It
would include knowledge of the transverse and
longitudinal inclinations of the road surface. The
mass-spring indirectly reflects vehicle movements in
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