Page 4 - Logistics News July/Aug 2018

Thought Leadership

Robots pack groceries in

UK automated warehouse

By Lauren Hartzenberg, courtesy www.bizcommunity.com

Thousands of robots have been put to work inside a warehouse collecting grocery
orders for online customers.

INSIDE A warehouse located in the small
town of Andover, England, more than
1,000 robots seamlessly navigate around a
three-storey-high aluminium grid packing
groceries for online shoppers. This high-tech
customer fulfilment centre belongs to online
grocer Ocado, who claims the system could
revolutionise online retail.
The fleet of bots is able to put together
an order of 50 groceries in just five minutes,

processing 65,000 orders every week for the
grocer’s 645,000 online customers.
They zip around the three-dimensional
‘hive’ picking up products from crates and
ferrying them to packing stations, where
people put the orders together. The bots
come within half a centimetre of each other
while zipping around the grid’s 250,000
storage locations, but they never bump into
one another thanks to an air traffic control-
style system that directs their movements.
Ocado, founded in 2000 and now valued
at $7.6 billion, is a tech start-up as well
as an online grocery company. Its original
business model has evolved to a point
where it supports not only the company’s
own online grocery fulfilment, but also a
growing number of online grocers who buy
its platform as a service (PaaS) as part of a
managed customer fulfilment service.
In addition to the handful of supermarkets
in Europe and Canada that have bought
Ocado’s operating platform, it has been
reported that the company is prepped for
expansion in its homeland too, with plans to
build the world’s largest automated customer
fulfilment centre for online groceries at Erith,
just outside London. Here, 3,500 swarming
robots will prepare 200,000 orders a week. •

4 July/August 2018 | Logistics News