In this dataset, it is a filing that claims a system with two or more actuators driving the same load path, plus some mechanism for coordinating them — position feedback, force sensing, or a control loop that reconciles differences between channels. The search combined this concept with force-fight mitigation terms like force equalization, load sharing and cross channel monitoring, which is why the results cluster heavily around aircraft flight-control surfaces rather than generic multi-actuator machinery. Not every dual-actuator patent qualifies; the mitigation element is what puts a record in scope here.

The ranking covers 27 companies with a steep concentration at the top: the leading assignee holds 26 of the 111 records in scope, and the top five together account for 71.2% of all records. By the tenth-ranked company, holdings have dropped to just 3 records, and the remaining companies in the ranking each hold a handful or fewer. This is a field with a small number of entrenched aerospace and actuation-system suppliers rather than many equally-sized competitors.

Filings peaked at 13 in 2021 and the visible count falls to 0 by 2024, a -100% change over that span. Part of this is a genuine cooling, but part of it is a publication-lag artefact: patent applications typically take around 18 months to publish, so 2025 and 2026 figures in any dataset are always undercounted at the time of analysis. Treat 2024 as the last year that can be read with confidence, and expect the two most recent years to revise upward as more records publish.

US8245967B2, assigned to The Boeing Company, claims a feedback control loop that combines rate-feedback differences from position sensors with force differences from delta-pressure sensors to compute a positioning command that equalizes force across a control surface. It is one of the more structurally specific claims in the corpus, so a new design that avoids either the rate-difference term or the force-difference summation, or that computes equalization by a materially different control strategy, has room to design around it. It is not a blanket claim over all force equalization approaches.

IPC composition shows heavy concentration in B64C (74.8% of records) and F15B (27.9%), with G05D, G05B, B64D, H02P and G06F each under 10%. The G06F digital-processing share, at just 4.5%, stands out as thin relative to how software-defined modern flight-control law has become, suggesting algorithmic and diagnostic approaches to force-fight mitigation are comparatively under-claimed against the mechanical and hydraulic core.