Google's Parent Company Designing Automated Warehouse Technology

A sister company of Google has new ideas about how to automate distribution centers. X Development, the experiment and idea-focused subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet Inc., filed two patent applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the past week, Supply Chain Dive reports. Both applications describe robots designed to analyze the position of items in a warehouse and, if need be, rearrange them to maximize storage space. One application, filed on Jan. 2, is for a group of robots controlled by a central processing system that tracks how many of an item is on each pallet in a distribution center. If the system finds one or more pallets of an item that can be consolidated, then one or more robots would move those items and the associated pallets around to stack them and free up space.