Appeal No. 2001-2603
Application No. 08/867,857
The examiner appears to set forth a rational case for obviousness by describing the teachings
of the prior art, the differences between those teachings and the instant claimed subject matter, and a
plausible reason why the claimed subject matter as a whole would have been obvious over the prior
art, within the meaning of 35 U.S.C. § 103.
Appellants argue the various references individually and then conclude that the examiner’s
conclusion of obviousness must be based on hindsight. The arguments made in the principal brief
are basically repeated in the reply brief. We disagree with appellants’ arguments.
While appellants argue that Kyrazis describes a high bandwidth, dynamically rigid
metrology system and that it uses a pair of stabilized laser beam detectors, with each detector
including three reference beam lasers (principal brief-pages 11-12), we fail to find any relevance of
this argument to the instant claimed subject matter. While appellant argues that Kyrazis “fails to
teach measurement of the true position of the end effector” (principal brief-page 12), appellants do
not dispute the examiner’s explanation that “the end effector can be a probe or other machine tool”
(answer-page 4), i.e., appellants do not provide any explanationas to why Kyrazis, or any applied
reference, is not considered to teach an “end effector.” As far as measurement of the true position,
the examiner has explained that it is Merry that is relied on for the teaching of comparing a desired
position with a true, or measured, position. Thus, this argument with respect to Kyrazis is
unpersuasive.
In explaining the differences between the subject matter of instant claim 9 and Kyrazis,
appellants explain, at page 12 of the principal brief, that the former has a “computing system that
6
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007