Patent Law Practice Center

LG Receives Patents on Robotic Cleaners, Refrigerators and Smartwatches

LG Electronics may not have the largest share of consumer electronics markets, even in its home country South Korea, but the corporation has lately been a patenting juggernaut. LG was awarded the 5th most U.S. patent grants during 2013 and was one of only five companies to eclipse 3,000 patents awarded in that year; LG still played second fiddle to Samsung, which was 2nd place last year with 4,652 patents. LG actually maintains a thorough list of its patent portfolio, sorted so that a reader can easily find which LG products are using which patented technology, on its website. The corporation recently invested $4 million to form Unified Innovative Technology of Delaware, OH, which some have speculated is a move intended to protect LG’s international intellectual property interests. In early November, the company also announced a 10-year agreement with Google for global cross-licensing of patents, similar to a deal signed by Google with Samsung earlier this year.

Korean tech companies love robots. Our recent coverage of Samsung featured a bevy of robotics technologies, so we were piqued when we noticed a patent issued to its neighbor in the same field. U.S. Patent No. 8903590, which is titled Robot Cleaner and Method for Controlling the Same, protects a robot cleaner with a travel unit that responds to a travel mode command, a detection unit for detecting items to be cleaned and a control unit that generates a map for cleaning. This technology is designed to achieve a more efficient and accurate method of generating a map for cleaning within a robotic cleaner.

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