Insider Tech
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2019–2022
3:21 · 3.5M views · May 9, 2018
A short Insider Tech look at Ocado's grocery warehouse where thousands of robots on a grid pack orders, communicating over 4G to avoid collisions. It handles around 65,000 orders a week.
HN cites it as the standard example of advanced warehouse automation in grocery fulfillment.
8 comments from Hacker News
THe Kiva video is not state-of-the-art I think. Check out this automated grocery warehouse, something right out of Factorio: this video Humans would just get in the way and get mangled.
Here in Ontario, Canada we have an online food delivery service ( [LINK] ) and they built a super-automated distribution factory to help run this (and all of their stores in the area). A distribution center in the UK has already mastered this: > The Ocado Andover CFC is a three-storey grid of storage crates containing groceries. On top of the grid a fleet of 1,100 robots grab items and deliver them to “pick stations” where “personal shoppers” assemble orders for delivery. According to Ocado, an order of 50 items takes five minutes to pick and pack. [LINK] this video Google "automated grocery distribution", there's plenty of examples. This is essentially unskilled labour moving boxes from one point to another. The exception is vegetables/fruit where a human discards the bad stuff before it goes into another box for delivery on a truck. 95% of that process could be automated. Including eventually the delivery drivers in between the distribution center <-> retail endpoint pickup centers (where consumers and last-mile Instacart/delivery drivers can go in person for pickup - I'm assuming humans will be needed for home delivery for a long time). Instacarts biggest drawback is the cost and how they nickel-and-dime you, but GroceryGateway is run by the grocery store itself, and it's much better and actually helps you save money by shows you all the deals in the interface (imagine sorting a grocery store by discounts and price, as you walk through it gets more expensive). There is very l
In terms of warehouses there's a fair bit of automation which replaces quite a few jobs - at my former employer's warehouses the pickers had robots drive all the stuff to them, and they were trying out robot pickers (they were able to handle ~30% of orders due to limitations in agility, SKUs had to be specifically whitelisted). You still need people to handle e.g. dangerous goods and handle the various fuckups in the system (e.g. due to poor master data), but when I was leaving they were not planning on any new "classic" warehouses. I don't want to disclose where I worked, but you can take a look at Ocado, they are in a similar space (although focused on a different target market) and expanding from being online grocer to making those FCs for other companies: this video
Ocado Technology | Software Engineer | Hatfield UK | ONSITE If you've never heard of Ocado Technology you can take a look at some of our bots picking groceries for our customers: this video Graduates - [LINK] Wide variety of experienced roles - [LINK] If you'd like to get in touch I'd be happy to talk about roles and go into more details about the company culture and our engineering practices. Please contact my via email. [LINK] Thanks, Metin Software Engineer at Ocado Technology (EMEA) metindagcilar@gmail.com
I genuinely feel for the people laid off. With that said, wont Instacart, and other similar business models that rely on grocery stores and human labour to fulfill the orders, simply start becoming obsolete in the coming few years as robotic fulfillment centers[0] start popping up all over the place? Perhaps these centers will not service the most rural of places, but then again I imagine these services (i.e Instacart) are mostly used in more densely populated areas anyway. this video