Walmart Patent Grants

Automated vertical farming system using mobile robots

Granted: October 10, 2023
Patent Number: 11778956
A vertical farming system includes a storage structure having racks of storage shelves for housing plant-carrying containers. Mobile robots travel around the racks to transfer containers of plants to and from the storage shelves. Under direction of a central control system, one or more mobile robots may transport a container from a storage location to a workstation. Once there, care may be provided for the plant, including water and/or other nutrients, and data may be gathered on the…

High throughput order fullfillment database system

Granted: October 10, 2023
Patent Number: 11782900
The system and method described herein provide an order fulfillment database system. The order fulfillment database system may provide a high throughput speed, high availability, redundancy, and scalability. The order fulfillment database system supports very fast transaction times for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) transactions. Order services instances at a primary cluster provide in-memory databases that service segments of the persistent database and are…

Systems and methods for packing visualizations

Granted: October 10, 2023
Patent Number: 11783268
In some embodiments, apparatuses and methods are provided herein useful to presenting packing instructions to a user. In some embodiments, a system for presenting packing instructions to a user comprises a database configured to store packing information and item visualizations, wherein the packing information includes placements of items in orders in containers, and wherein the item visualizations depict appearances of items sold by the retailer, a control circuit configured to receive…

Flexible store fulfillment

Granted: October 3, 2023
Patent Number: 11775900
Aspects described herein relate to a flexible order fulfillment management system that utilizes predefined fulfillment workflows including common business processes. By utilizing predefined workflows including common business processes, the order fulfillment management system is able to drive store-based fulfillment programs efficiently as multiple fulfillment workflows may utilize the same common business processes and a single fulfillment management system may operate workflows in…

Systems and methods for validating coupons

Granted: October 3, 2023
Patent Number: 11775997
In some embodiments, a system for electronically validating coupons comprises a primary positive coupon database containing positive coupon data. The positive coupon data relates to one or more coupons known to the valid. The system further includes a computing system comprising a control circuit configured to execute a processing module that, when executed, receives electronic coupon data from a coupon comprising a machine-readable code, parses the electronic coupon data, compares the…

Methods and apparatus for improving the selection of advertising

Granted: October 3, 2023
Patent Number: 11776011
The disclosed subject matter relates to a system and method for selecting/recommending ads based on a contextual bandit approach. The disclosed approach leverages various embedding vectors of item, search, page taxonomy trained based on traffic data via advanced deep learning models, and uses model signals (e.g. historical CTR, item price, rating, quality) from other ad placements. The learning mechanism on top of the current methodology to automatic chooses the best feature sets and…

Systems and methods for determining user personas for a user

Granted: October 3, 2023
Patent Number: 11776016
This application relates to apparatus and methods for automatically determining and providing personalized user personas of a customer for specific platforms (e.g., applications). In some examples, a computing device receives a persona request identifying a user and a platform. In response, the computing device obtains user data associated with the user and a plurality of potential user personas from a database. For each of the plurality of potential user personas, the computing device…

Systems and methods for projecting action indicators

Granted: October 3, 2023
Patent Number: 11776366
In some embodiments, apparatuses and methods are provided herein useful to projecting action indicators on items in a retail facility. In some embodiments, a system comprises an image capture device configured to capture an image of a shelving unit, a control circuit configured to identify items located in the shelving unit, determine an action item for an item located in the shelving unit, identify boundaries of the item, and generate an action image including an action indicator based…

Systems and methods for touchless temperature screening system

Granted: September 26, 2023
Patent Number: 11766181
In some embodiments, apparatuses and methods are provided herein useful to screening a body temperature of a human. In some embodiments, there is provided a touchless temperature screening system that screens a body temperature of a human including a housing comprising an output interface; one or more first sensors; a temperature sensor; and a control circuit configured to: cause the output interface to provide one or more messages; receive the one or more user inputs indicative of…

Methods and apparatuses for defending against data poisoning attacks in recommender systems

Granted: September 26, 2023
Patent Number: 11770407
A recommender system can include a defender computing device that is configured to obtain customer interaction data characterizing customer interactions with an ecommerce marketplace. The defender computing device can also be configured to determine an item recommendation based on the customer interaction data using a trained differentially private recommendation model and send the item recommendation to the customer. The trained differentially private recommendation model is more likely…

Method and apparatus for delivery order fee determination and assignment

Granted: September 19, 2023
Patent Number: 11763406
This application relates to apparatus and methods for determining delivery prices for, and the assigning of, order deliveries. In some examples, a computing device may obtain order data identifying an order for delivery. The computing device may transmit a request to deliver the order for a first price to a first driver. The computing device may determine that a response to the request has not been received, and obtain risk values corresponding to identified delivery request acceptance…

Methods and apparatus for automatically providing digital advertisements

Granted: September 19, 2023
Patent Number: 11763349
This application relates to apparatus and methods for automatically determining and providing digital advertisements to targeted users. In some examples, a computing device receives campaign data identifying items to advertise on a website, and generates campaign user data identifying a user that has engaged all of the items on the website. The computing device may then determine a portion of the users based on a relationship between each user and the campaign user data, and may…

Systems and methods for detecting exposed data

Granted: September 19, 2023
Patent Number: 11763016
In some embodiments, apparatuses and methods are provided herein useful to determining if sensitive data has been exposed externally. In some embodiments, a system for determining if sensitive data has been exposed externally comprises an external database including a plurality of external repositories, an internal database including a plurality of internal repositories, an internal catalog including search candidates, and a control circuit configured to transmit a content search query,…

Methods and apparatus for refining a search

Granted: September 19, 2023
Patent Number: 11762871
The disclosed subject matter relates to a system and method for providing an automated assistant that retrieves information from a knowledge base in response to a user's natural language communications. A refinement signal based on a subsequent user communication relevant to a previous search, establishes the type of search to be performed by the automated assistant in generating a response to the user communications. A reply communication to the user includes the selected results from…

Methods and apparatus for hypervisor boot up

Granted: September 19, 2023
Patent Number: 11762666
This application relates to apparatus and methods for booting servers, such as cloud datacenter compute servers. The servers may execute one or more hypervisors, such as stateless hypervisors, with each hypervisor supporting one or more virtual machines. In some examples, each of a plurality of servers are configured to boot from a network. The compute servers may obtain an IP address identifying a location of hypervisor bootable images. Upon a reboot, the servers may request and obtain…

Apparatus and method of monitoring product placement within a shopping facility

Granted: September 19, 2023
Patent Number: 11761160
Methods and apparatuses are provided for use in monitoring product placement within a shopping facility. Some embodiments provide an apparatus configured to determine product placement conditions within a shopping facility, comprising: a transceiver configured to wirelessly receive communications; a product monitoring control circuit coupled with the transceiver; a memory coupled with the control circuit and storing computer instructions that when executed by the control circuit cause…

Systems and methods for correction of geographic inconsistency in item properties

Granted: June 27, 2023
Patent Number: 11689888
Methods, systems, and non-transitory computer readable media are correction of geographic inconsistency in item properties. A system identifies locations of interest based on a location of a mobile device and acquires item-descriptive and item-property data associated with an item at the location of interest. The system connects to a secure network to identify a corresponding item and retrieve corresponding item-property data associated with the corresponding item from a secure item…

System and method for remote controlling of electronic shelf labels

Granted: June 27, 2023
Patent Number: 11687872
Systems, methods, and processor-readable storage media for remote controlling of electronic shelf labels. An example method includes receiving, at a computing device, store layout data of a retail store and product data. The product data identifies at least one product and a price of the product. The method causes an optical emitter to emit an optical signal to at least one electronic shelf label based at least in part on the store layout data, the product data, and a predetermined rule.…

Systems and methods for proactively predicting user intents in personal agents

Granted: June 27, 2023
Patent Number: 11687802
This application relates to systems and methods for proactively predicting user intents on personal agents. In some examples, a user intent prediction system can include a computing device configured to obtain user intent data identifying a desired action by a user on a network-enabled tool. The computing device is further configured to obtain contextual data characterizing a user's interaction with the network-enabled tool. The computing device can then determine at least one predicted…

Tote handling for chilled or frozen goods

Granted: June 27, 2023
Patent Number: 11685588
An automated order fulfillment system is disclosed having different temperature zones and robots and containers capable of and/or configured to work in these different temperature zones. Containers include insulated wall panels and a thermal insert which may be chilled to maintain a temperature within the container below ambient temperature. Structure within a storage location for the containers may be used to open and close the containers to facilitate cooling of the thermal insert.