A robotic supermarket. The warehouse, located in London (United Kingdom), is bigger than three football fields, and it is home to thousands of robots (more than 2,000) that move at high speed in a complex dance, dodging each other without colliding and governed by artificial intelligence.
The function of the robots is to collect food as quickly as possible for the British online supermarket Ocado, which is why it has the latest in automation technology. The company started developing the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) for its own use, but the system has been so successful that the license has been acquired by other supermarkets.
Having robots instead of people will allow cheaper and faster deliveries and help with labor shortages by requiring fewer staff in its warehouses, the company explains. They also need smaller warehouses while providing a quick and efficient business response.
How does it work?
A robotic picking arm , expected to be introduced in new and some existing warehouses starting later this year, could cut the need for workers to pick and pack food into shoppers’ bags by up to half. of work, initially and by 80% in the long term, they forecast.
Another system automatically packs bags of groceries destined for shoppers’ homes into boxes ready to be loaded onto trucks, which will reduce labor costs by 30% and could completely replace manual labor in this role.
tireless workers
The robots work nonstop for 20 hours a day, each collecting up to 2 million pieces of food each shift , far more than the capacity of a human worker. The robots can pick up an order in five minutes, which is about five times faster than a trained human worker. At the moment, powered by an algorithm, these robots pick up boxes of items to bring to a human and put them into shopping bags for delivery. But the idea is that the work is practically fully automated.
These are not androids, more like ovens on wheels working on a grid system; the robots, with more than half of their parts printed in 3D, move on a grid, like pieces on a chessboard. Beneath the floor, each square hides a stack up to 21 containers deep. The containers are filled with some of the 50,000 products offered by Ocado, stored according to an algorithm that predicts when they will be needed. When someone places an order, the robots turn on their own and head for the container they need, passing within five millimeters of each other.
The bots are not autonomous , but rather are orchestrated by a system that works like air traffic control and plans their routes for them.
The future
Most of the warehouses that work with this technology are not yet at full capacity, so the new technology would mean that workers could be relocated from certain jobs to others; hence waves of layoffs are not to be expected (at least temporarily).
According to Ocado , this system does not require purpose-built warehouses, so Ocado’s technology can be set up quickly for its customers, which include Marks & Spencer in the UK and Kroger in the US.
Reference: OCADO
