Hey, a patent is a patent. If you think of it first and protect your idea with a patent, it doesn’t matter if someone else discovers it independent of you. The patent still stands.
Remember the transition to the over-sized tennis racket back in the 70’s. It put the Prince racket at the top of sales, and since their larger head racket was patented by Prince, any other company that wanted to produce a bigger racket was required to pay a royalty to to so.
The application of electronic control to just about any system or combination of systems is pretty obvious these days (and has been for decades).