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