Sharjah24 – Reuters: In a warehouse in London's southeast suburbs, thousands of robots swarm in a mesmerizing dance across the top of a grid that spans the size of six football pitches.
Built by the UK online supermarket pioneer Ocado, they race to supply groceries to the British capital, and have caught the eye of international retailers battling a shortage of workers and rising wage demands in a post-pandemic world.
Ocado, founded two decades ago by three former Goldman Sachs bankers, has already struck deals to provide its technology to supermarket groups in nine countries including the United States, Japan and France. In a recent three-week window, it hosted potential new clients from another five countries.
With plans in place to automate most manual warehouse jobs within a decade, its success could have profound implications for the demand of labour in the retail industry globally, and the advance of online delivery for shoppers.
In Ocado's largest site, the $310 million building in Erith, southeast London, the advance of the robots can be seen clearly.
In a 600,000 square foot warehouse, over 2,000 robots whizz around at four metres a second on a steel and aluminium grid. Like rooks on a huge chessboard, bots retrieve groceries stacked in the body, or "hive", of the grid below, performing tasks once carried out by humans.
One level below that, workers race to pack the selected goods into shopping bags for delivery to Ocado's customers. Around the corner, a robotic picking arm is machine learning their tasks, and will eventually make them redundant.
The arm uses a gripper hand or suction cup and can already handle 15% of Ocado's product range, a figure that grows on a daily basis.
Ocado expects robots to pick around half of the range in two years and sees 80% as "absolutely feasible" in the longer term, with retail partners using it in warehouses within three years.
As well as solving the picking and packing, Ocado plans to automate the process of loading a warehouse with goods from suppliers, the loading of prepared customer orders onto frames and the loading of those frames onto delivery vans.
While retailers in Asia like JD.com have already fully automated the warehouse process, IGD analyst Simon Mayhew said Ocado led the way in grocery automation, where goods can be fragile, and chilled or frozen temperatures are required.
Beyond the warehouse, Ocado also wants to use autonomous vehicles for the delivery of goods, both between suppliers and warehouses and warehouses to customers' homes.
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