Congratulations is in order, because someone has just graduated from the robotics lab at England’s online grocer Ocado. They’ve spent the last year and a half practicing the same routine over and over, a training regimen that’s about to get even tougher with a transfer to a bigger facility.
“But the student in question isn’t a person,” writes Forbes (Nov. 30, 2017). It’s a large robotic arm that can “see” and grab dozens of different products. Built from aluminum and featuring a suction nozzle as its “hand,” it has practiced picking up plastic pots of porridge, boxes of tea and packets of popcorn from one plastic box, before placing them in plastic bags stretched open in a separate box. Once the bags are full, it stops. Each object takes about 5 seconds to move, making the arm over time about as fast as a human picker.
Ocado’s robot is unique in being able to grasp all these different products. Industrial robots are typically designed to pick up one thing well, like uniform bottles of water or tubes of toothpaste. But there’s been little research on grabbing objects randomly scattered inside a box. Even Amazon, with over 50% of e-commerce sales, and whose warehouses are teeming with wheeled Kiva robots and cranes, relies on human pickers for the intricate task of taking individual products out of one bucket and placing them in another.
Ocado, comparable to Trader Joe’s in terms of quality – but based totally on-line is the world’s largest dedicated online grocery retailer, with sales of $1.4 billion. Its highly automated warehouses (see this 1.5 minute video) are manned almost entirely by robots. The robots “swarm” around a giant cube filled with grocery products, a kind of hive that’s as wide as a football field. They then deliver boxes filled with products for humans to sift through before those humans bag and load them onto trucks.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Will this robot replace workers?
- What are the advantages of this approach?