U.K.-Based Ocado Pilots Fruit-Packing Robot Arm
HATFIELD, UK - Humanoid robots are maybe not what one initially jumps to when they think grocery retail, but that may be changing in the near future.
Looking to streamline operations through automation, U.K.-based supermarket titan Ocado, one of the world’s largest online-only grocery retailers, has been hard at work developing a humanoid robot called SecondHands—a robot capable of understanding human speech, 3D vision, and the ability to employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to help the company efficiently pack and dispatch goods from warehouses to homes.
“Robotic picking for grocery is much more complex than general merchandise because of varying form factors, temperatures, shapes and sizes, or gripping techniques,” explained Ocado Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Paul Clarke, to news source VentureBeat. “Our new warehouses built using the Ocado Smart Platform enable us to have robotic picking, and we’ve also automated other extremely repetitive and physically demanding tasks such as the bagging of our crates. We’re on a journey where some robotic picking can be done now for heavier items; SoMa will make robotic picking available at a large scale and deploying it is all about finding the right time.”
Watch the bot in action with select fruits in the videos below.
Ocado has been working with the SoMa project, a Horizon 2020 program for robotics research funded by the European Union, in order to produce a robotic worker capable of handling delicate, irregularly-shaped cargo like fruits and vegetables. According to the news source the aim is to develop “simple, compliant, yet strong, robust, and easy-to-program manipulation systems” to allow for robot grasping in dynamic environments with Ocado’s roughly 50,000 distinct offerings.
VentureBeat also points to competition from French startup Exotec and Pittsburgh-based Bossa Nova Robotics—each developing robotic assistants with grocery retail applicability. For more on these robotic developments, see the original story in its entirety, here.
With new technologies changing our industry every day, who knows how profoundly these produce-handling robots may affect fruits and veggies at retail? For updates on this and other forward-thinking technologies, stay tuned to AndNowUKnow.
