NYIPLA 2005 Inventor of the Year
Karen I. Trovato and Leendert Dorst
Method and Apparatus for Path Planning

Karen Trovato and Leo Dorst won the '2005 Inventor of the Year' award from the New York Intellectual Property Law Association, for our invention 'Method and Apparatus for Path Planning'. The basic patent application was filed in 1987, and granted in 2003. It was one of the test cases in the patenting of software, and has quite a track record in patent law. This page collects some of the relevant documents.

• NYIPLA announcement of the award. This contains links to information about the NYIPLA organization.
• Philips press release of May 25, 2005 by Philips Research. It includes a brief explanation of the invention in fairly non-technical terms. We also made it into the Business Highlights of the Philips 2nd Quarterly Report for 2005 (page 12). i Plus Philips Passport, the research technology magazine, issue 24, Setp. 2005, pg 16.
• In Dutch:
  • UvA: blurb van het ScienceWeb van de Universiteit van Amsterdam, een artikel in het universiteitsblad Folia (verschenen in jr.58,vol.38,pg.16 en jr.59,vol.01,pg. 9).
  • Een bericht op Noorderlog, de wetenschapssite van de VPRO.
    
  • Een artikel in GO (tijdschrift van de Nederlandse Go Bond, vol. 42:3,pg.18-19.
    
  • Op 30 september 2005 werd Leo Dorst geinterviewed door Hoe?Zo! radio, een wetenschapsprogramma van de TELEAC. Hun site bevat een stream met het programma (het interview loopt van minuut 15 tot 24, en van minuut 27 tot 35). Hier is bovendien een pagina met alle Lego-modellen waarnaar wordt gerefereerd in het interview.

Here is some technical background: patent text, legal documents, and Karen's Ph.D. thesis.

• Method and Apparatus for Path Planning, text (2MB PDF) of US patent 06,604,005, granted August 5, 2003. This is the main patent of many related inventions, 11 with Leo's name on it (see here), 23 in total for Karen, see here.
• The original appeals court decision of December 19, 1994, on the non-patentability of our invention. It was later overturned en banc.
• J.R. Goodman, T.E. Marlette, P.K. Tryzna, Toward a Fact-Based Standard for Determining Whether Programmed Computers are Patentable Subject Matter: The Scientific Wisdom of Alappat and the Ignorance of Trovato, Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, vol.77, no.5, pp 349-422, May 1995. 700k PDF
  (By the way, 'Ignorance of Trovato' is lawyer's shorthand for 'the ignorance displayed in the appeals court decision on the Trovato/Dorst patent case'.)
• We are mentioned in the 1995 annual report of the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) as a crucial landmark in the patentability of software (on pg.85, not all included, 400kb PDF).
• K.I. Trovato, A* Planning in Discrete Configuration Spaces of Autonomous Systems , 1996.
  In 1996, Karen Trovato obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam on the subject matter of the invention (promotor: prof.dr.ir.F.C.A.Groen, copromotor dr.ir.L.Dorst). Here is her thesis (3Mb PDF).