Ocado

Ocado is the UK's largest online grocery supermarket.

History

2021: Failure due to a robot collision that caused a fire

On July 16, 2021, an online supermarket in the UK Ocado was forced to cancel orders from some customers for delivery after robots collided in one of its warehouses, which caused a fire.

The fire at the company's facility according to the preliminary version was caused by the collision of three robots, the company said in a statement. Ocado said that no one was injured, and the damage amounted to less than 1% of the total.

Robots collided at Ocado hypermarket warehouse in the UK, which led to a fire

The company's warehouses have robots the size of a washing machine that move goods along the system grid. Earlier, The Verge published an article that described the essence of the system grid. Deliveries are unpacked into boxes, after which they are placed on conveyors, and then delivered to shelves, where people select or sort everything necessary to fulfill a particular order. However, the new paradigm of this model is to maximize the use of shared space. Although goods still fit in boxes, now they are stored in huge rows and up to 17 such boxes can fit in one row. Although at first glance their location in this stack seems chaotic, but this is not so. All sorting is determined by a special algorithm: often used items are located at the top, and rarer purchases at the bottom.

On July 18, 2021, the company said that the Erith plant, which processes about 150,000 orders per week, should resume operations on July 21-22, although some malfunctions are expected at the beginning of work, specialists continue to work to restore normal service.^[1][2]

2019: The robot set a fire in the warehouse and caused damage of $137 million

In early July 2019, the British online hypermarket Ocado revealed the damage that the fire in the warehouse caused by the robot in February. Data published in the semi-annual report say that the robot caused damage to the company of $137 million.

The consequences of the fire were extremely devastating for Ocado. It is assumed that in general, the company's losses for 2019 will reach almost $175 million.

Ocado specializes in home delivery. The company, like Amazon, has huge warehouses and is investing heavily in automation to speed up the execution of orders. However, the logistics of delivering products are extremely complex, as they come in a huge range of shapes and sizes and changing temperature requirements. Amazon, which is the undisputed leader in online sales, has had to reduce its grocery delivery operations due to technology flaws.

Losses from the fire in the Ocado warehouse amounted to $137 million

The fire at Ocado may be another sign that companies are actively using new technologies to expand the market, underestimating safety. The official cause of the fire was a malfunction of the charger, the company said at a meeting of shareholders.

Melonee Wise, a pioneer of robotics and CEO of Fetch Robotics, also drew the attention of companies to the impending problems of safety in automation. Weise sincerely hopes that in 2019, robot safety will be the top priority of suppliers. The potential errors of one robotics company can throw the entire industry back many years. Weise believes that Ocado should be an example and warning for the entire robotics industry. Although automation technologies provide unprecedented speed and efficiency, they develop much faster than security protocols are developed.^[3]

2017: Using robots to speed up order assembly

In November 2017, Ocado achieved a high degree of automation: the retailer takes about five minutes to assemble orders from 50 points, which receive vegetables, fruits, meat products and milk, which is 24 times faster than before. The secret to success is an army of 1,000 robots that collect products and deliver them to the personnel responsible for packaging.

Ocado is convinced that the future of online product trading is for robots, since only with their help it is possible to organize the prompt and uninterrupted execution of large orders. The company notes that without the help of robots, store employees spend about two hours assembling an order of 50 items.

Robots in Ocado

In 2016, Ocado opened a new center equipped with the latest technology to fulfill online applications, in which the most time-consuming part of the process is automated - the assembly of orders.

More than 50 thousand products sold by Ocado are located in rows of rectangular sections with baskets. Robots under the control of special software move over these rows at a speed of 4 meters per second. Stopping near the desired sections, they grab baskets of goods, after which they take them to employees packing products in boxes.

The Ocado Center is divided into three zones depending on the temperature conditions for products, and robots created in partnership with Tharsus help collect orders in two of them. Only in the freezing zone, the assembly is still manual because the current robot model is not designed for negative temperatures. However, by the beginning of November 2017, Ocado and its partners are working on an improved version that can withstand frost.  

Ocado is also thinking about automating the delivery of orders. In particular, the company is considering the possibility of using unmanned vehicles and drones.^[4]

Notes