In a warehouse larger than three football fields, 3,000 bots scuttle along at 13 feet per second, swerving to avoid each other in a complex dance governed by artificial intelligence. Their goal? To get your groceries much faster than humanly possible.
The south-east London warehouse is run by British online supermarket Ocado and features the latest in its automation technology. The company started out developing the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) for its own use, but the system has proved so successful it licenses it to other supermarkets.
Playing chicken with robots
The bots -- which look like washing machines on wheels -- move on top of 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 an order is sent to the warehouse, the bots spring to life and head towards the container they require, passing within five millimeters of each other.
"We basically play chicken with them: they go on a collision course only to divert at the last moment," says Alex Harvey, chief of advanced technology at Ocado Technology.
An Ocado warehouse bot.
The bots are not autonomous but orchestrated by a system that works like air traffic control, planning their routes for them. Armed with a grabbing mechanism, the bots can pick up one container each. If a product is stored five containers down, for example, four bots will first remove the containers above it, clearing the way for a "hero" bot that is fulfilling an order.
Once the "hero" bot has grasped a container, it takes it to a picking station, where a person (or another robot, depending on the technology installed in each warehouse) will select the item and add it to an order. The finished order is then moved -- by bots -- to a van for delivery.
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