Tom Scott
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2021–2026
5:08 · 8M views · Jul 5, 2021
Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.
Cited in automation and robotics threads as the example of a warehouse built robot-first.
18 comments from Hacker News
I thought this was an interesting insight into what a fully-automated grocery store looks like. And also wild to think about how different things are when you design them for automation from the ground up. this video
Tom Scott had a good video a couple of weeks ago about a grocery packing warehouse that has a sophisticated picking network: this video
These days I try to avoid physical shops as much as possible. Here in the UK, we have a "supermarket" called Ocado. If you haven't heard of them, please look them up on Youtube[0]. They don't have any physical shops I know of, but have recently started stocking M&S products. They are known in the UK to usually be more expensive, but good quality. It might be the Whole Foods of the UK. They run warehouses with a grid of rails and seem to be on a mission to automate as much of the logistics and delivery of products as possible. The website allows me to set up a regular weekly order, I can edit it up until the evening of the day before to add any last minute items. I think I pay £10 a month for unlimited deliveries over £40. Having someone bring a weekly food shop to your door for £2.50 is a great deal. Not only is this a super easy to get food shopping done each week, I can do it from the comfort of my desk (great for when Retros get a little boring!). It also stops me impulse buying things. I know I already have a December 23rd order coming full of Christmas food and I get to avoid the packed Christmas food shoppers and the depressing Christmas decorations and music in store (I'm a scrooge). I don't want a better shopping experience, I want the best food, at the cheapest prices, delivered to me in a reliable way. I don't want to think about buying food any longer than I have to each week. [0] this video
> or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, Over the last few years, I've seen a few in use here in Berlin: [LINK] > or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores For physical retail, or home delivery? People are working on this for traditional stores, but I can't tell which news stories are real and which are hype — after around a decade of Musk promising FSD within a year or so, I know not to simply trust press releases even when they have a video of the thing apparently working. For home delivery, this is mostly kinda solved: this video > Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face. Sure… if they have the money. But can we make an economy where all the stuff is free, and we're "working" n-hours a day smiling at bad jokes and manners of people we don't like, so we can earn money to spend to convince someone else who doesn't like us to spend m-hours a day smiling at our bad jokes and manners?
Not quite on-topic, but I have to wonder: why go and develop these long-winded solutions when we can come up with obvious better ones? -- order on your phone (which is nice and easy because you can add to your grocery list with a smart home speaker/smartphone list throughout the day) and then it's automatically packaged (in an automated warehouse: this video ) and delivered? And for folks who drive to work, have them shipped to their place of work. Places of work make accommodations like have parking for electric cars and cafeterias -- having a place for delivery storage strikes me as an obvious perk that has tremendous benefits both for employers, employees, and the environment.