Some distribution warehouses for e-commerce mighthave 100 million different kinds of articles stored in awarehouse. To handle so many different kinds of arti-cles in a warehouse poses technical challenges to ware-house automation in comparison to factory automation.On the contrary, distribution warehouses need to have ar-ticles picked by robots, which defines a fundamental prob-lem set for robotics: pick-and-place. In other words, thewarehouse automation problem means that new techno-logical developments must be adjoined to the fundamentalproblem format. This may be one of the factors drawingan increased number of warehouse automation players.