tireless worker

Robots work non-stop for 20 hours a day and each collects up to 2 million food each turn, more than the capacity of human workers. Robots can take orders in five minutes, about five times faster than trained human workers. Now, driven by an algorithm, this robot picks up boxes of goods to bring to humans and puts them in shopping bags for delivery. But the idea is that the work is practically completely automated.

This isn’t an android, instead it looks like an oven on wheels running on a grid system; the robot, with more than half of its parts printed in 3D, moves on a grid, like a piece on a chessboard. Beneath the ground, each box hides stacks of up to 21 containers. The bin is stocked with some of the 50,000 products Ocado offers, saved according to an algorithm who predicts when they will be needed. When someone places an order, the robots turn on themselves and head to the container they need, moving within five millimeters of each other.

Bots are not autonomousInstead, they are governed by a system that functions like air traffic control and plans their routes for them.

Future

Most warehouses working with this technology are not yet at full capacity, so new technology means workers can be moved from certain jobs to others; therefore a wave of layoffs is not expected (at least temporarily).

Based on ocadothe system does not require a dedicated warehouse, allowing Ocado’s technology to quickly deploy to its customers, including Marks & Spencer in the UK and Kroger in the US.

Reference: OCADO