Appeal No. 2006-0945
Application No. 10/245,888
1. The examiner has argued, and the appellants have not counter-argued, that absent the air-
conditioning limitations in claim 1, Narita teaches the remaining aspects of claim 1. Indeed,
the inclusion of the air conditioner effects on vehicle load is shown in the appellants’
specification to be essential to the invention.
The present invention is based on a novel recognition obtained from thorough
research and investigations, that it would be highly effective to control the
coasting lockup capacity of the torque converter in an optimized manner,
depending upon the load state of the air conditioner [See specification at page 3].
2. The application specifically embraces the somewhat broadly defined range of {On, Off} as a
range of the claimed “operation load of the air conditioner.” In particular, the specification
states “in the first embodiment, the degree of the air conditioner load is judged based on the
ON/OFF state of the air conditioner switch” (See specification p. 14). We note that the
application’s Fig. 2 embodies claim 1 for this minimal definition of air conditioner load
range (See Fig. 2, references S31 through S39).
Within this context, appellants argue that the two lock-up control mechanisms that are taught
by Narita are distinct, different, mutually exclusive, cannot be combined, and devoid of any
suggestion to combine.
As noted above, the first embodiment (Narita I) taught by Narita does teach the use of
learning to update data table entries to control coasting lockup capacity, but without any mention
of an air conditioner. (See Narita’s description of the embodiment in Figs. 5 to 7 in col. 10, l. 16
to col. 11, l. 53).
4
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007