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209 points Luc | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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philipwhiuk ◴[] No.43935844[source]
It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse.

The later is a much easier problem.

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Closi ◴[] No.43935979[source]
Not sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history!

They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.

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gjm11 ◴[] No.43936146[source]
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. (https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indicates that shortly after the UK judgement they settled on terms very favourable to Ocado.)

This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore". (I suppose it's not quite inconsistent with it; maybe Ocado copied a pile of things that AutoStore never patented, and the patented bits were always a sideshow?)

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1. omneity ◴[] No.43936182[source]
> This seems difficult to square with your claim that Ocado "just copied AutoStore".

I just looked at videos of the two technologies and it seems difficult to ignore the relationship.

Perhaps this is a case of "technically correct", i.e. that they technically did not infringe the patents, but that in practice they leveraged as much as they could around the patent claims?

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2. Closi ◴[] No.43937281[source]
Ocado's first automated warehouse installation was also purchased from Autostore (before they built their own solution, and now market/sell it)