ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 9 -- United States Patent no. 12,269,678, issued on April 8, was assigned to Daifuku Co. Ltd. (Osaka, Japan).
"Article storage facility" was invented by Fumiaki Tatemi (Tokyo).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In the case where two articles are held by a holding section (31), and an unloading operation is to be performed on the two articles, a controller first performs the unloading operation on the large article (WL), and then performs the unloading operation on the small article (WS). In the case of performing a scooping operation on two articles while no article is held by the holding section (31), the controller first performs the scooping operation on the small article...