One corporate family, made up of several related entities filing under different corporate names, tops the ranking with 36 records and also holds the strongest co-assignee pairing in the dataset with 15 shared filings. A second tier exists too: the fifth-ranked assignee holds 16 records, which is a meaningful competing position rather than a token filer. Below that the ranking tapers quickly to a long tail of single-record entrants, so freedom-to-operate work should focus first on the leading family’s closed-loop control claims and then check the mid-tier filer for adjacent coverage.

Filings grew 140% from 2021 (5 records) to 2024 (12 records), which is the most recent span the data can support as complete. Counts drop in 2025 and 2026, but that reflects the roughly 18-month lag between filing and publication rather than a real slowdown, so those two years should not be read as a trend reversal. The field’s actual peak so far was 2017 at 12 filings, meaning 2024 matched but did not yet exceed that earlier high.

The patent claims a computer system that takes rotational drilling time and slide drilling time for a wellpath, calculates a tortuosity value from that split, checks it against a threshold, and automatically changes a drilling parameter when the threshold is exceeded. It is a specific method tied to a defined input pair and an automatic response, filed by Landmark Graphics Corporation and published mid-2016. It would most directly constrain new filings that use the same rotational-versus-slide time ratio as the trigger for parameter changes; approaches using different tortuosity inputs or manual rather than automatic adjustment sit further from its scope.