Some claims fence a part; this one fences a robot. Boston Dynamics' grant US12251831B2 ("Integrated mobile manipulator robot," issued March 18, 2025; inventors Michael Murphy, Benjamin Zelnick, Malik Hansen, Vadim Chernyak, Christopher Everett Thorne, Alex Perkins) carries a CPC stack that walks the whole machine: B25J 5/007 (the mobile base), 9/06 and 17/0283 (the arm and its joints), 9/1666 (path control), 15/0616 (the suction gripper). It's the integration that's claimed.
The mechanism is the system itself — how a manipulator arm is mounted on and coordinated with a mobile base so the combined machine can move to a location and manipulate there. This is the architecture of Boston Dynamics' Stretch-class warehouse robot: a base that drives into a trailer or aisle and an arm that unloads or picks. The breadth of the CPC reflects that the invention spans subsystems, not a single component.
For the manipulation beat, integrated-mobile-manipulator system claims are the high-value end of robotics IP because they fence a product category. A competitor can't avoid them by swapping one part — they'd have to architect a different machine. That said, system claims that recite many elements can also be narrower than they look: the more required elements, the easier it is to fall outside by omitting one.
From a portfolio angle, this is the keystone of Boston Dynamics' 2024–2025 manipulation cluster, sitting above the gripper-mechanism grant (US12103164B2, 2024), the dynamic-mass-estimation control grant (US12240105B2, 2025), and the perception-mast grant (US12186919B2, 2025). The company has, in two years, fenced the hand, the weighing control, the sensor head, and now the integrated whole — a deliberate, layered product-IP stack.
Caveats. Mobile manipulators have prior art going back decades (the concept is old); the grant turns on the specific integration and coordination recited in claim 1, not on the idea of putting an arm on a base. The element-rich classification means scope depends on which elements are mandatory. Read the independent claim for the required configuration.
For the file: the keystone system claim of Boston Dynamics' mobile-manipulation portfolio. Pull US12251831B2 with the gripper, mass-estimation, and perception-mast siblings on PatentBear; read claim 1 for the mandatory integration elements — the whole cluster is the product fence.