The largest online grocery delivery company, Ocado, in England has a circuit of more than 1,000 robots that could fill and complete a grocery order in less than five minutes. These robot workers were co-created by the U.K. manufacturer Tharsus.
There are about 50,000 products that are advertised on the Ocado website. The robots aim to carry and deliver these heavy payloads. They speed across the rails at a rapid rate of 13 feet per second and operate for many hours on only a single electric charge.
They bring back the products and deliver them to a drop-off point on the grid. Then, the human workers bring together the order and prepare it for freight. Meanwhile, for restocking, they pick up the products from the drop-off point and disperse them to their proper containers, according to Digital Trends .
Ocado, which is considered the world’s largest automated warehouse for grocery shopping, stated on its website that the level of performance the company can now achieve is a revolution in grocery logistics. It further stated that the new facility could pick a customer’s order of around 50 items in a few minutes versus many hours at existing fulfillment centers.
CTO Paul Clarke said that the concept of these robots came from the container industry, in which the shipping containers are stacked one on top of another and then moved around by cranes acting above the stacks. Then, Ocado management applied the concept to storage systems for grocery.
At the London-based online-only grocery delivery company Ocado, a swarm of fast-moving shopping robots can assembl… https://t.co/3Mzn9ZnDLG pic.twitter.com/YUEsn5uxDf
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This technology could be adopted by other grocery retailers for better service and performance. Meanwhile, Clarke said that to deploy this technology to other retailers, the company would need to develop a dedicated configuration for each retailer to guarantee a customized experience and complete separation of data and execution capacity, as noted by Co.Design . And to make this technology available to other grocery retailers, Alex Voica, the head of technology PR and communications at Ocado, said that they are offering it “to other grocery retailers in the form of a Platform as a Service rather than selling the technology outright.”
Could these robots replace the humans in Ocado? Clark said that Ocado is expanding and it is a net employer of 13,000 people, none of whom would have a job if it hadn’t been for the automation and robotics they have developed. He also said that the workforce has doubled in the last five years and just added 200 new jobs at the grid facility in Andover.
[Featured Image by Matt Cardy/Getty Images]
