It’s the lack of noise you notice first. There’s no clatter of equipment, rumble of engines, or chatter of coworkers. Only the low hum of electronics. For an industrial space, this is eerily quiet, but it makes sense in a building where robots might outnumber people.
I’m at a warehouse — or customer fulfilment center (CFC) — operated by online grocery company Ocado in Luton, just outside London. You might not have heard of Ocado, but it may still have delivered your groceries. Its technology handles online orders for Kroger across 14 US states, Sobeys in Canada, and both Morrisons and its own delivery brand in the UK, with other clients across Europe and Asia.
The grocery business has tight margins, and online orders even more so, with stores having to front the added costs of picking, packing, and shipping orders. Ocado, which launched in 2000, has always been a proponent of using automation to cut those costs.
The Grid: Lightcycles not included. Image: Ocado
At the heart of it all is “the Grid.” Sprawling across most of the warehouse’s top floor, this crisscross of tracks allows a fleet of hundreds of blocky, bulky robots to whoosh around, carefully controlled by a central computer to avoid collisions, moving custom-built trays of bread, tins, ready meals, and more to wherever they need to be. It’s almost entirely automated — so much so that as I stand looking out from a maintenance walkway, I can’t see a single soul apart from the Ocado employees guiding me around that morning. Few humans are required to supervise the robots or work alongside them. Even tech support is handled remotely, by a team in Bulgaria. At one point, I see a robot’s cheery green LEDs turn amber, indicating a problem. It quickly halts, and sits there, flashing orange, for 30 seconds or so, then pings green and trundles happily on again, no in-person help required.
None of this is new. In fact, it’s not even the first time The Verge has seen it — back in 2018, we visited another CFC in the UK, when the Grid was cutting-edge. Now it’s old news; not set to be replaced, but in the midst of an upgrade that adds one crucial element: arms.
Let’s step back for a moment. The cuboid bots on the Grid don’t pack anyone’s shopping bags. Until recently, they’ve only been tasked with moving crates, grabbing a box of beans from the chute where it’s stored, and moving it to another chute, where it drops down alongside a human worker just in time for them to pack a couple of tins into someone’s shopping bag. Workers are expected to pack items in seconds, and the system works because it’s extraordinarily efficient. By the time an employee is ready to pack an item, it’s already at their side, and a display is telling them how many to pack, into which bags, in which crates. Even the order of their instructions is calibrated by the computer to minimize unnecessary movement that might slow them down. This is human work, but optimized to its limits.
Each OGRP arm stays in place while groceries are brought to it to pack. Image: Ocado A small suction cup is all it needs to pick up over a third of the groceries Ocado delivers. Image: Ocado
But now there’s something new. Perched across the Grid, rearing high above their squat compatriots, are a new type of robot. These sit in place, islands in the constant whir of movement around them. But just like the people standing a floor below, they’re busy packing bags.
Dubbed On-Grid Robotic Pick (OGRP), each arm is fitted with a small suction cup on one end. Sixty-five of them sit on the Grid in Luton, with 500 of the original robots that bring crates to them, some with customer shopping bags to be filled, others with groceries ready to be packed, and the arms pick objects up and pack them into the bags. Each OGRP arm has a camera to help pick up groceries, but they’re not designed to recognize damaged goods, so they won’t spot broken eggs or bruised apples, giving humans at least some advantage.
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