Shoppers probably don’t think much about what happens next when they place an online grocery order. But it sets-off an intricate dance of software, artificial intelligence, robots, vans and workers. At an Ocado warehouse just outside Luton, I’m in the middle of such a dance. As far as I can see, hundreds of robots whizz around a grid, fetching items for online orders. They move with dizzying speed and precision. In the early days of online shopping, when you placed an order, humans would dash around a warehouse or a store collecting your items .But for years now, Ocado has been using robots to collect and distribute products, bringing them to staff, who pack them into boxes for delivery.
At the center of this debate is Amazon, a company that employees hundreds of thousands of employees in its massive warehouse network, which is also a company whose investment in robots and other automation technologies means it could one day be a huge job eliminator, too. In 2012, Amazon spent $775 million to purchase a young robotics company called Kiva Systems that gave it ownership over a new breed of mobile robots that could carry shelves of products from worker to worker, reading barcodes on the ground for directions along the way. But it also gave Amazon the technical foundation on which it could build new versions of warehouse robotics for years to come, setting the stage for a potential future where the only people inside Amazon’s facilities are those employed to maintain and fix their robotic replacements.
This robotics race — led by Amazon — will have a seismic impact on the warehouse industry, which employs more than 1.1 million Americans today. And the rise of these artificially intelligent robots means there’s likely a day coming when these warehouse robots will be capable of replacing just about every human task, and human worker.
James Matthews, chief executive of Ocado Technology explains the AI has to interpret the information coming from its cameras. “What is an object? Where are the edges of that object? How would one grasp it?” In addition the AI has to work out how to move the arm. “How do I pick that up and accelerate in a way without flinging it across the room? How do I place it in a bag?” he says.
The Luton warehouse has 44 robotic arms, which at the moment account for 15% of the products that flow through the facility, that’s about 400,000 items a week. The rest are handled by staff at picking stations. The robotic arms are being developed to handle a wider range of stock. The staff handle items that robots are not ready for yet, like wine bottles which are heavy and have curved surfaces, making them difficult to grasp.
But the system is ramping up. The company is developing different attachments for the robot arms that will allow them to handle a wider variety of items. “We’re just playing it carefully and ramping slowly over time,” says Mr Matthews. “It’s a deliberate constraint on our behalf, so we continue providing good service to people, and not crushed custard creams in every order, or worse, putting stuff on the track that goes under the wheels of one of the bots and creates an incident.”
In two or three years Ocado expects the robots will account for 70% of the products.
This inevitably means fewer human staff, but the Luton warehouse still has 1,400 staff, and many of those will still be needed in the future. “There will be some sort of curve that tends towards fewer people per building. But it’s not as clear cut as, ‘hey, look, we’re on the verge of just not needing people’. We’re a very long way from that,” Mr Matthews says.
Ocado is hoping to sell its automation technology to companies outside the grocery sector. Late last year it announced a deal with Canada’s McKesson, a large pharmaceuticals distributor.
“Think about which industries have the need to move things around efficiently inside of warehouse… it’s endless,” says Mr Matthews. So where will the automation of warehouses end? Are we heading to human-free warehouses that can run 24 hours a day? Not so fast, says Sarah Bolton, who specialises in commercial real estate at law firm Taylor Wessing. “It’s almost prohibitively expensive, we’re talking hundreds of millions of pounds to fully automate a warehouse,” she points out. “So you’re really only talking about the big tenants in the really big warehouses looking at full automation, just because you have to have that size to make it anywhere near financially viable.”
She also points that automation needs modern buildings, including floors that can stand heavy weights, large spaces without support columns, so there’s less for the robots to crash into. Reliable electricity connections are also vital.
“You’re reliant on new build, and there’s a massive undersupply of new build warehouse stock in the UK at the minute,” says Ms Bolton. AutoStore is tackling some of those challenges. It has a company called Pio which is developing automation for smaller businesses. It uses much of the same technology that AutoStore supplies to big firms – robots buzzing around on a storage grid where goods are stacked vertically
