Materials handling facilities such as warehouses or retail stores often store or display items in a hanging fashion. For example, a materials handling facility may include structural features such as walls, gondola racks, shelves or fixtures having bars, arms, hooks or other elements from which available items may be suspended, dangled or hung, and displayed to users (e.g., workers or customers) of the materials handling facility. Where an item or a container in which the item is maintained includes a hole, a slot or another opening, or multiple holes, slots or openings that are commonly aligned, a support bar (or support arm) may be extended through the hole or holes, and the item may be suspended from the support bar accordingly.
Suspending items from a support bar or like element provides a number of advantages. For example, one or more items that lack a flat surface upon which the items may rest or stand may be stored in tandem by hanging the items from a support bar, such that the bar above the item, rather than a shelf or other flat surface beneath the item, provides support for the weight of the items. The same support bar may be utilized to suspend items of varying sizes, shapes or masses, so long as such items or their containers include one or more openings having internal diameters or other dimensions corresponding to the external diameter or other dimension of the support bar. Moreover, in some instances, support may be releasably mounted to pegboards, panels or other structural features provided within inventory areas in a manner that enables one or more of the bars to be quickly and easily placed in different locations. Some such structural features may be configured to accommodate support bars in any number of predetermined locations in three-dimensional space within a materials handling facility, with such locations being defined based on the sizes or dimensions of the respective items to be suspended therefrom.
Today, the use of support bars or other like elements to suspend items in a materials handling facility has a number of drawbacks, however. For example, because any number of items may be provided on a common support bar in a row or series, a user of a materials handling facility may not become aware that the facility's inventory of a given item is depleted until the final item in the row or series is removed from the support bar. Additionally, determining an inventory or performing an accounting of the number or type of available items suspended from support bar may usually only be conducted by a visual inspection, e.g., by manually evaluating and counting each of the items suspended on the bar. While items are sometimes suspended from a support bar in a homogenous manner, e.g., such that each of the items suspended from the bar is identical or fungible, the actual contents of the bar may not be confirmed without performing a visual inspection.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds