A Starter Kit for a Summary of Prior Art Search

Transcription

1 1) Doing Your Research A Starter Kit for a Summary of Prior Art Search Use any search engine to locate current products. When you identify a product that might be pertinent to your work, do this: 1. Save a picture of the product 2. Save the URL 3. Record the date when you located the product 4. Record the Author, the Title of the page you used, the Publisher (or Owner of the webpage) 5. Download any documents that the publisher makes available. Store these with descriptive titles and dates of access Use Google Patent to locate relevant patents. When you locate a relevant patent, do this: 1. Record the full title of the patent 2. Record the patent number 3. Record the inventor s name(s) and the date of filing 4. Save the URL You should follow some of the links to relevant patents that are attached to each patent that you examine. 2) Writing a Summary of your Prior Art Search 1. Briefly describe the project goals and the customer needs and constraints 2. Briefly describe the goal of your literature search 3. Briefly explain what is useful or not useful in each product or patent you have found. 4. Briefly describe the point that you take away from the patent / product review: a. What ideas can you adapt? b. What ideas would you have to license? c. What ideas exist as products that a client could already purchase? d. What do you need to do if you want to create something novel?

2 Executive Summary for Carpet-Square Project [This is what you should prepare before you leave the first studio. You will use this summary in your introductory design report, due in the 3 rd week studio] The goal of this project is to develop a device to lay 1-foot by 1-foot carpet squares covering a 100 square foot floor in one hour and with minimal human input. The customer requirements and constraints are.[brief summary of customer requirements and problem understanding here]. To develop design ideas and to avoid duplication of existing ideas, a review of patents and current products was conducted. Three current products were identified as relevant to the project s goals; these are presented in Table 1. The first product, Racatac Dolly, makes carpet laying easier, less error prone, and more efficient by supporting the human carpet installer in a comfortable working position [1]. The drawback of this product is that the installation process is still wholly human. The second product, the Carnegie Mellon Mobile Robot for Automated Tile Installation, performs the basic functions of a carpet laying machine, but it is designed to lay hard ceramic tiles, avoiding the problems of manipulating floppy carpet squares [2]. The third product, the DESSO Quickfix, addresses the problem of applying adhesive to carpet tiles, but does not help with manipulating or placing the carpet squares [3]. Overall, the products identified here do not capture the customer desires of an automated carpet tile layer machine because they do not solve the problems of automatically grasping, loading and placing carpet squares that may be both heavy and floppy. Table 2 shows five patent documents [4, 5, 6, 7, 8] that are related to placement of certain types of carpet tiles. Table 2 shows diagrams of these five ideas for systems and adhesives that can be used to affix carpet tiles to flooring. Only one of these ideas, [8], was granted patent protection; it describes a system that carpet installers can use to apply peel-and-stick adhesives to carpet tiles during manual installation. The other applications describe systems that appear not to have been realized in the forms represented in these documents. This review of patents and current art demonstrates that little relevant work has been done on the problems of automated carpet square installation. Specifically, the difficult challenges of identifying, manipulating and aligning objects that are both heavy and floppy have not been solved in a single system, and no relevant concepts for any of these individual functions have been identified that could be adapted for use in designs for new carpet installation systems. To develop an automated carpet installation system for the customer, it will be necessary to develop new design concepts to address each of the system s functions [Presentation of other background research, planning tools or of concept designs would follow here]

3 Table 1. Current Products Relevant to Automated Carpet Tile Placement Product Picture Company Price 1 Racatac Dolly, 3 inch wheels with chest support [1] Racatac $ Mobile Robot for Automatic Installation of Floor Tiles [2] 3 Desso Quickfix [3] Carnegie Mellon University DESSO N/A N/A

4 Table 2. Current Patents Relevant to Automated Carpet Tile Placement Title Image Date Patent ID [4] Adhesive-free None supplied Feb 19, WO A1 carpet tiles and 2002 methods of installing adhesive-free carpet tiles [5] Carpet tile, Jan 29, installation, and 2004 US A1 methods of manufacture and installation thereof [6] Carpet tiles, July products, and , US A1 methods [7] Tile layout system, method and product Jul 29, 2003 US A1 [8] System for carpet tile installation Sept 19, 2000 US B2

5 REFERENCES [1] Jon-Don Cleaning Professionals, Racatac Dolly, Roselle, Illinois: online, Available: we [2] H. Schempf, J. West, Dimitrios Apostolopoulos, "Mobile robot for automatic installation of floor tiles," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, [3] Desso Commercial Carpets, Desso Quickfix, Amsterdam, Netherlands: Online, Available: [4] M. Schine, Kenneth Higgins, "ADHESIVE-FREE CARPET TILES AND METHODS OF INSTALLING ADHESIVE-FREE CARPET TILES." USA Patent WO A1, 20 February [5] J. Pacione, Joseph Pacione, "CARPET TILE, INSTALLATION, AND METHODS OF MANUFACTURE AND INSTALLATION THEREOF." USA Patent US A1, 30 January [6] N. Selman, M. Child, R. Brisline, W. Tippett, S. Miller, Kenneth Higgins, " RESIDENTIAL CARPET PRODUCT AND METHOD." USA Patent US A1, 20 July [7] J. Bell, "Tile layout system, method and product." USA Patent US A1, 31 July [8] D. Oakey, J. Bradford, K. Gray, Graham Scott, "SYSTEM FOR CARPET TILE INSTALLATION." USA Patent US B2, 19 September 2000.