USPTO Downloader Tool Setup¶

This tutorial will Tutorial you through setting up and running MCP (Model Context Protocol) server-based tools for USPTO patent document downloading. This tool requires GPUs to run optical character recognition on the patent PDFs and extract the patent text.

Overview¶

This directory contains the following MCP server implementation:

uspto_downloader_MCP.py: Enables patent document downloading and processing from USPTO

Prerequisites¶

Hardware Requirements¶

GPU: NVIDIA A100 or H100 GPU recommended

System Requirements¶

Linux-based system (tested on Ubuntu/CentOS)
CUDA-compatible GPU drivers
Network access for API calls

Setup Instructions¶

1. Environment Setup¶

conda create -n tooluniverse-env python=3.11 -c conda-forge -y
conda activate tooluniverse-env

# Verify CUDA support
python -c "import torch; print(f'CUDA available: {torch.cuda.is_available()}')"

2. Install ToolUniverse and MCP Dependencies¶

# Install compatible NumPy version first
pip install "numpy==2.0"

# Install ToolUniverse
git clone https://github.com/mims-harvard/ToolUniverse.git
cd ToolUniverse

python -m pip install . --no-cache-dir

# Install additional dependencies
pip install requests pymupdf easyocr python-docx Pillow pyarrow fastparquet lxml aiohttp
pip install -U sentence-transformers

4. Environment Configuration¶

Set Environment Variables¶

Set the required environment variables on the client machine where you’re calling the MCP tool from ToolUniverse (not on the GPU server where the tool is running):

# For USPTO server (running on port 7000)
export USPTO_MCP_SERVER_HOST="your-gpu-hostname"

# USPTO API key
export USPTO_API_KEY="your-uspto-api-key"

Important: Set these variables on the machine where you’re executing your ToolUniverse code, even if the MCP server is running on a different GPU machine.

Finding your GPU hostname:

# Get current hostname by running this command on the GPU where your MCP server will run.
hostname

# Example hostnames:
# - gpu-node-01
# - compute-a100-001.cluster.edu
# - localhost (if running locally)

Running the MCP Servers¶

1. Start USPTO MCP Server¶

### 1. Start USPTO MCP Server on the GPU where you want it to run.
python uspto_downloader_mcp_server.py

The server will start on http://0.0.0.0:7000 but will be accessible via your GPU hostname (e.g., http://your-gpu-hostname:7000) for patent document retrieval.

Usage Examples¶

For comprehensive usage examples and testing patterns, please refer to the test file:

# View MCP tool usage examples
cat ToolUniverse/src/tooluniverse/test/test_mcp_tool.py

This test file contains detailed examples of how to interact with the USPTO patent downloader MCP server, including proper API calls and parameter formatting.