[HN Gopher] How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?...
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How many robots does it take to run a grocery store? [video]
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 162 points
Date : 2021-07-06 09:49 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| somethoughts wrote:
| Its interesting that on the outside of the building there are
| still quite a few cars in the parking lot.
| cptskippy wrote:
| They didn't show you how trucks were unloaded into those bins.
| It's not using robots.
| imglorp wrote:
| That seems like stocking bins is a solvable automation
| problem too. Trucks can be unloaded by vaguely smart forklift
| bots. Box moving bots are a thing already. Box cutting bot?
| They showed an item picking bot in the video: look at the
| barcode, maybe do a little tetris and fill a bin with them.
| Empty box crushing bot? Repeat.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Ha - the production setup includes Xbox Kinect components - right
| when the employee says "3d cameras" at 2:26
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE&t=147s
| monkeydust wrote:
| Yea that did make me smile also, glad some use still being
| extracted from the Kinect, it was (and still is) an amazing bit
| of kit. I suspect they have support from MS for their use case
| rather thank just hacking it.
| enominezerum wrote:
| I remember this one setup in an aquarium where you could move
| sand around and the Kinect would read how you have the sand
| formed and apply geological effects to it.
|
| Pile it high, mountain, carve it out, water and eventually
| sea. It was pretty amazing as it was all projected into the
| sand in real time and looked just amazing.
|
| Think it was running on some 1080 or 1080-Ti when that was
| king of graphics cards.
| bingidingi wrote:
| That's an augmented reality sandbox! You can make one
| yourself: https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/
| glasss wrote:
| FIRST Robotics had a brief stint encouraging teams to use the
| Kinects for something on the robot, or just test them out and
| see what you come up with.
|
| I remember reading through the documentation and case studies
| and realizing just how advanced the tech was / is.
| typon wrote:
| GPUs formed the backbone of machine learning. Gamers moving
| society forward :)
| mdip wrote:
| This isn't an area that I study, directly, but I've had some
| experience with other robotic automation systems on a
| small/medium scale.
|
| Maybe this is common and my experience is at issue, but I found
| the grid design with the "workers" on top to be really
| interesting.
|
| My most direct experience was with a tape robot. This wasn't a
| run-of-the-mill backup library for a small DC, but a huge room on
| half of a floor of the datacenter that had a 6 axis[0] "bigger
| than an average adult man" one-arm robot that is usually seen in
| an automotive factory. It moved on a track the length of the
| room, grabbed tapes from a library and inserted it into drives;
| all of which were attached to a mainframe.
|
| This was done with so few sensors, that the tape robot couldn't
| tell if it successfully grabbed a tape or missed it; indication
| of failure wasn't realized until the drive reported no tape
| present when the operation completed.
|
| When it missed, the tape often ended up in the track where it
| was, sometimes, destroyed or could cause other forms of major
| malfunction.
|
| Dealing with products of varying sizes, sensors to detect the
| successful retrieval of a product seem like they'd be necessary
| no matter how things are setup, but by designing it with the
| robots on top, a failed grab, at worst, results in the product
| remaining somewhere near where it is, or in the wrong bin -- but
| not stuck in the way of the track.
|
| Coupled with sensors to detect "when the product was 'lost'" or
| where the product was failed to be retrieved from, the system
| could attempt to "retry the operation", avoiding operational
| shut-down/having to rely on the skill of operational staff to
| identify a failure condition early enough to prevent problems.[1]
|
| [0] I think, not positive
|
| [1] There's a study out there regarding factory automation that
| appeared shortly after Elon Musk gave up on "fully automated
| production" that talks about how bad people are at responding to
| "rare conditions" in an automated factory, resulting in costs
| that often outweigh the benefits of removing people from the
| process -- this sort of design appears to try to address some of
| the major things.
| mdip wrote:
| Worth mentioning: I never worked with the mainframe in my
| previous job but was located in the datacenter. Most of my
| knowledge came from asking why the suite had 20 or so "big red
| stop buttons".
|
| Apparently someone was hospitalized shortly after it was
| installed. And like all things, it was replaced a year later by
| a much more compact device that stored somewhere on the order
| of 100 times the data about a year after I started.
| matsemann wrote:
| Worth noting: Ocado is fighting a legal battle against AutoStore
| over this technology:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-17/ocado-los...
|
| The warehouse system in the video is basically a copy of
| AutoStore.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > AutoStore says its first supplied technology to Ocado as
| early as 2012 and this is the foundation on which the Ocado
| Smart Platform was built. The company has claimed several
| patent infringements relating to the design and lifting
| mechanism of Ocado's robots.
|
| If true, yikes, but at the same time I have doubts if some
| aspects of the technology are even patentable (or at least make
| the claims too narrow to the point that patent-free variations
| allow workarounds and make the patents useless).
| michaelt wrote:
| Given that Autostore's patent on the idea is from 1997 [1]
| and has expired, it's difficult to see how they could have
| another, non-expired patent on the same thing.
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/DE69818303T2/en
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Unless its a copy of the technology, is it protected ip? Its an
| idea (use tracked robots on top of product bins) and there's
| some issue about patenting ideas vs technology.
| rvense wrote:
| I do wonder what the environmental impact of doing it like this
| is. The embodied energy and materials used for all these
| structures and robots, as well as the energy to keep them
| running.
|
| My immediate guess is that it adds a significant overhead to the
| products, but I really don't know.
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| If you think robots consume much energy and are bad for the
| environment, try switching them out for humans and see how much
| energy you need to keep them running.
| dsign wrote:
| It's probably non-trivial, but human time also has a high
| environmental impact, because we eat and use stuff (think about
| a parking lot full of shoppers or employee cars). If we are
| going to pay our environmental human cost anyway, better if our
| time is not spent doing boring things that we do just because
| of the money.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If there's some overhead but in return they can work 24/7
| without breaks then it's cheaper. Constant output is really
| valuable.
| rvense wrote:
| Oh, I'm sure it's cheaper to operate, otherwise they wouldn't
| do it. But I am of the opinion that energy and many natural
| resources are extremely underpriced when one factors in
| climate change and other externalities like the impact of
| exported e-waste.
| yissp wrote:
| Would you need to compare it to the environmental impact of
| the lifestyles of the dozens / hundreds of human workers
| who would be staffing a traditional warehouse?
| rvense wrote:
| Do the humans only exist to staff the warehouse?
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| No, but they have to drive or otherwise travel to the
| warehouse to work, provisions have to be made for them,
| such as air conditioning, and so on.
|
| A human at work is hardly environmentally neutral.
| randyrand wrote:
| humans require ~60-100 watts, 24/7.
|
| A human only works about 8hrs a day. Also our food is much less
| efficient to produce than electricity.
|
| So if this robot is less than ~600 watts average, and as
| productive as a human, it's a win.
|
| Id imagine it's well under 600.
| dageshi wrote:
| Probably less environmentally damaging than an equivalent human
| work force to do the same job I'm guessing.
| mongol wrote:
| I don't know either, but I expect the opposite. It seems
| incredibly efficient for what it does. I don't know how you
| could do the same thing with less energy? Obviously, it is
| possibe to optimize something here and there, but if we compare
| with humans doing the same job, and the energy they would need,
| this must surely be less...?
| rvense wrote:
| I don't actually know! But there are a lot of factors. One is
| the movement of the robots, another is their construction and
| the supporting structure, as well as all the electronics
| involved. Making electronics is very resource-intensive.
|
| I often wonder about how to make these kinds of comparisons,
| but it always involves so many guesstimates that it quickly
| falls apart.
| matsemann wrote:
| I think you should compare it to what's normally being done
| for groceries. You would get a trailer of a good. Then in
| your warehouse split that into smaller pallets, going with
| other goods on a new trailer to a store. There, a worker
| would have to put the goods on the shelves, and a customer
| later pick it into their cart. The store also uses lots of
| resources. Same with every shopper in a neighborhood
| driving their own car to the store, vs a van delivering to
| multiple homes.
|
| So I think it's better.
| rvense wrote:
| Oh, I understand that. It's still a lot of robots, but
| maybe it means less lorries and, ultimately, a whole
| layer of small shops and maybe secondary warehouses that
| aren't needed. Maybe it does add up to less fuel and less
| steel.
|
| It also leads to a lot more centralization, but that's a
| different discussion, of course.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I don't have a source handy but I remember reading something a
| while ago that said the carbon footprint for someone to drive
| to the grocery store and back is larger that the carbon
| footprint of all the other transportation involved in that
| product.
| Shmebulock wrote:
| Would be interesting to compare this to the environmental
| impact of having human workers
| lucb1e wrote:
| From a simple mass ratio perspective, these robots and a human
| probably carry about the same amount of stuff. Moving a few kg
| of robot units versus 80 kg of standard white male units, I can
| see the efficiency gain there. That is of course just one
| aspect, but I think you're being a bit quick to jump to
| guessing about conclusions of it being 'significantly' worse.
| maqnius wrote:
| Technically interesting, but I hope it never replaces my local
| grocery store. It gives me kind of a dystopian feeling of a world
| where people are living a completely separated life, only
| interacting with machines. That will not lead to happier people,
| nor to more fulfilling jobs.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yes I prefer some underpaid human to wait on me too. But I see
| the world going in the automation direction at breakneck speed.
| If we can figure out where people fit in this brave new world
| (i.e. UBI) then its a utopian future, not a dystopian one.
| TheFreim wrote:
| Are supermarket workers under payed?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yes
| TheFreim wrote:
| How so?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Poverty wage.
| Razengan wrote:
| Most people working at such mundane repetitive jobs already
| behave and feel like machines anyway. Do you really think they
| feel happy and fulfilled, or even see a way out?
| maqnius wrote:
| You are right about the majority of those jobs, I guess. I
| maybe shouldn't have brought in the quality of the job here.
|
| I actually wanted to make a point against reducing social
| interactions in everyday life, especially with people outside
| of our bubble.
|
| But well, I don't really see a way out, that wouldn't be
| completely illusive at this point, like, valuing well being
| of humans and nature over productivity gains and because-we-
| can in technology. That doesn't justify worsen the situation
| though.
|
| As for me, I try to go only shopping in independent and
| ecological grocery shops, because of the products and because
| of the more welcoming atmosphere. Working there is not so
| bad, it's actually quite nice mostly (I can tell from
| experience).
| [deleted]
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Reminds me of the Sibyl System in Psycho Pass.
|
| https://youtu.be/LyQpY6UWs2E
| http://cdn26.us1.fansshare.com/photo/psychopass/sybil-system...
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| I see you're a man of culture. In all seriousness, brains
| aside, the resemblance is striking.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| They must have fired a thousand people when built that.
|
| That happens when your min wages are high.
|
| Also, UBI seems to be inevitable.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Interesting to compare "build an environment and process so we
| can use simple robots in it" to the Boston Dynamics - "build
| robots that can work in complex environments".
|
| Also interesting to see the robot arm being used to move the
| products that currently come in boxes (suitable for humans to
| unpack) if robots become the norm will we see them being
| distributed like electronic components on reels/tape that are
| easier to unpack mechanically
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=reels+of+electronic+componen...
| imtringued wrote:
| Are there examples of whole PCBs being distributed on reels or
| tape? Because those are much flatter than a robot arm.
|
| Individual components != assembled product
| janekm wrote:
| Yes, modules are typically available either on tape&reel or
| on trays (also easy to pick). Also the Raspberry Pi pico is
| an example of a PCB that can be either a final dev board or a
| module and comes on a Reel:
| https://makerbright.com/raspberry-pi-pico-reel-bulk.html
| michaelt wrote:
| Technically, self-adhesive LED strips are PCBs distributed on
| reels of tape.
| the-dude wrote:
| Whole PCBs are mostly distributed in trays, from which they
| are picked and placed.
| glasss wrote:
| In one of Asimov's books, The Caves of Steel, he talked about
| how Androids run all of the farming equipment on Earth to feed
| everyone. I don't remember the exact line, but the reasoning
| for Androids running regular farm equipment was that, in his
| universe, it was just way easier and cheaper to build Androids
| that can use all the same tools humans can, instead of building
| automated versions of all the tools.
|
| The other interesting tidbit was that the vast majority of the
| world was farm land. Humans lived in huge cities with tons of
| verticality. This was because there were too many humans on
| Earth - a whopping 9 Billion.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before the products are packaged to
| accommodate automatic systems picking orders; at the moment (as
| the video shows) the robot has to be adjusted specifically for
| the wide variety of packages.
|
| Anyway I was thinking, why not just have a long row (can go
| vertical as well) of product dispensers where all orders just go
| under? I mean they'd pass thousands of dispensing stations, but
| the output would be really consistent. And there'd be shortcuts
| here and there. I probably have baggage handling in mind.
| Animats wrote:
| That's been done for products that are reasonably uniform.
| Digi-Key uses it for some parts. Fulfillment centers for
| drugstores use it.
|
| You still have to load the dispensers.
| deepserket wrote:
| The problem that comes into my mind is that dispensers are
| tech, while bins are literally a bunch of
| plastic/cardboard/metal. But on the pros, your system is a FIFO
| queue, while the system in the video is LIFO, the latter is not
| good for goods with an expiry date.
|
| I am currently working in a warehouse with 80k unique items, i
| am planning to automate the system (because currently it's
| using little to none automation, mainly because there is a
| conflict of interest) and a system of bins with the
| pickers/refilles zooming on the top is the best solution I've
| found so far.
|
| I think that i will make the project open hardware/software.
| corentin88 wrote:
| For those wondering, the footage took place at Ocado's grocery
| warehouse, in the south-east of London.
|
| I'd be curious to see something similar in Amazon's warehouse.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I'd be curious to see something similar in Amazon's
| warehouse.
|
| Here you are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nKPC-WmLjU
| tzs wrote:
| That big area where it is just stacks of bins and the robots
| that move them around would be a great place to set a
| chase/fight scene in an action movie.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Is AI really needed for this?
| jonplackett wrote:
| would think it's for optimising the paths of the robots on the
| grid.
| lucb1e wrote:
| but A* is not AI. Routing is like the easiest part and we
| figured that out for games and other applications decades
| ago. Use a 3d data structure where the third dimension is
| time, not exploring branches that cross a cell during a time
| where it is already marked as occupied. At least that's what
| I did for automating the air traffic control game from the
| bsdgames package on debian (/usr/games/atc).
|
| Either way, GrumpyNl asks a fair question. Some parts, sure:
| machine learning aka "AI" for working with this vision system
| is probably a lot quicker than manually figuring out rules
| for recognizing items. But the amount of emphasis they place
| on it, that this is all run by one big AI? It sounds to me
| more like they mean "AI" in the same way that 90s games said
| "CPU" or "AI" or "Computer" player, when it had nothing to do
| with machine learning.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Things like controlling the robot arm that takes individual
| items from the boxes require state of art computer vision/AI
| techniques and can't really be done with classical approaches.
|
| Optimization of the robot movement across the grid might be
| done in various ways with different tradeoffs, but in general
| the study of algorithms for multi-stage planning is also a
| subfield of AI.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Why the downvote, i would really like to know and how it would
| be applied.
| ksec wrote:
| https://www.ocadogroup.com/technology/technology-pioneers
|
| Although 5 hours is quite a bit longer than what I expected.
| Although for next day delivery it shouldn't be much of a problem.
|
| AFAIK Amazon warehouse are still hand picked by human with item
| moving assisted by underlying Robert?
|
| This is a fascinating field I am wondering if there are any
| similar technology for heavy, frozen products. For US that will
| be something like Sysco?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Although 5 hours is quite a bit longer than what I
| expected._
|
| I thought the opposite - even in a warehouse that huge, there
| are items where they only keep five hours worth of stock? To me
| that seems incredibly lean.
|
| Of course, that probably only applies to really short life
| products, like packaged sushi.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I think the point wasn't that there are some products being
| restocked every five hours, and instead that the turnaround
| time from a truck turning up from a supplier to the products
| on that truck being available for delivery is five hours.
| michaelt wrote:
| Surely newly arrived stock would go on the tail of a FIFO
| queue, while stock being sold would be drawn from the head?
|
| So the minimum time from arrival to dispatch couldn't be
| less than the length of the queue?
| wokinoozle wrote:
| Speaking as an underlying Robert, I have to agree. It's always
| better to have one of us around.
| Razengan wrote:
| Starting a new account on HN for a joke eh, I wish you the
| best.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Robots are over-rated.
|
| Always good to have an underlying Robert instead.
| jameshart wrote:
| See this response to Fiat's 'Hand built by robots' slogan of
| the early eighties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU-
| tuY0Z7nQ
| Razengan wrote:
| I always thought that most shops could/should have been replaced
| by giant vending machines long ago. Just be sealed-off warehouses
| with multiple dispensing units on the public-facing side.
|
| Maybe someone like Amazon will try something like that.
| prawn wrote:
| I was thinking the other day, if stores are shutting down in San
| Francisco to avoid shoplifters, will they switch to purely online
| ordering, or like some existing stores where you order from a
| front desk and the picking/packing is done by warehouse staff. I
| remember using a department store about 8 years ago in Edinburgh
| that operated like that.
|
| And if humans aren't walking the aisles, will we see a change in
| product packaging to focus on shipping and picking/packing
| efficiencies rather than shelf appeal?
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Store was probably Argos?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer)
|
| Still going - but an increasing % of their sales are online.
| prawn wrote:
| I think it probably was - rings a bell. We were buying a
| child's care seat. I remember going there, flicking through a
| catalogue in a waiting room, placing an order and paying at
| the counter, and then waiting until it was brought to us.
| Seemed novel at the time, to us Australians.
|
| Major retailers here have click-and-collect but I don't think
| it was common 8 years ago. A big hardware store like Bunnings
| only started selling online in 2018, I think.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Remarkably Argos has been going with the same catalogue
| model for 50 years.
| shireboy wrote:
| ...and then an industry of hacking warehouses and delivery
| drones for fun and profit crops up.
| dharmab wrote:
| The "employee picks products for you" system is how most stores
| worked before the modern supermarket was invented.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Looks like we're reinventing ourselves, just like with
| timesharing/the cloud.
| reggieband wrote:
| It's also how every supermarket in the neighbourhood in
| Barcelona I lived in worked. You could either buy pre-
| packaged produce (like two apples in a styrofoam based
| covered in plastic) or go to the produce section and point at
| what you wanted and an attendant would place it in a bag,
| weigh it and put a sticker on it which would scan at the
| register.
|
| Another thing I hated about many European supermarkets were
| the one-way gates at the entrance (like subway turnstiles)
| and the only exists through the registers. Walmart started
| doing similar during Covid but at least you could exit
| through self-checkout.
| dvh wrote:
| There's no way this is profitable. Local supermarket is similarly
| sized and there are maybe 30-50 employees visible in store, each
| payed $3/hour. This has hundreds or maybe thousands of robots,
| even if only 10 robots broke down every day it would be more
| expensive than paying people. Even if I completely ignore initial
| purchase costs, I just don't see a way that after 1-2 years this
| isn't massive money drain.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| A million items a day? It all depends on margins and overhead
| etc, which we would have trouble estimating here. And even if
| its not "bricks-and-mortar profitable" it may be "wall-street
| profitable"
| swiley wrote:
| `(50 _3_ 8)/10=120.` What robot component do you think costs
| more than that?
| turnerc wrote:
| Their H12021 results suggest otherwise
| https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/OCDO/half-y...
| maltalex wrote:
| > There's no way this is profitable
|
| No way? That's an overstatement. What if the real estate is a
| lot cheaper because it's well outside the city in an industrial
| zone?
|
| And what if this operation is large and efficient enough to
| service a population x10 the size of a _similarly sized
| supermarket_ with just a handful of technicians (and an army of
| delivery people...).
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| You are almost certainly wrong. Ocado are profitable and are
| partnering with other retailers globally to use the technology.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocado_Group#History
|
| Where do store employees get paid $3/hour? Minimum wage in UK
| (where that warehouse is) is $9-12/hour depending on age.
| brutus1213 wrote:
| Ocado also bought kindred last year. I was looking at cutting
| edge robotics companies that might have rocket ship growth, and
| kindred was on my radar. The sum for the acquisition seemed on
| the low side. Robotics is generally hard at the moment, not sure
| who will be the Google-equivalent.
| Animats wrote:
| They have automatic bin picking! Amazon hasn't been able to get
| that to work in production. Amazon's system has Kiva robots
| moving bins around, but humans pick from the bins.
|
| Expect a big drop in fulfillment center workers when Amazon gets
| bin picking that works.
| contingencies wrote:
| These grid-based systems are now standard and have been widely
| deployed. I am not sure but I believe the original is
| https://www.dematic.com/en-us/products/products-overview/sto...
| Animats wrote:
| There are lots of systems for moving totes around. Those have
| existed for at least 40 years. It's robots getting items out
| of the totes that's new.
| contingencies wrote:
| Having designed one I can tell you it's not that hard.
|
| Thinking from first principles helps. First, simplify the
| problem domain. The challenges are generally oddball shapes
| (think: heavy golf club), heavy items, speed, spatial
| efficiency, specialist handling requirements, environment,
| reliability, mobility and cost. If you have unlimited
| patience (retries allowed, no hard speed requirement) and
| less limited space (more power, better viewing angles,
| opportunity for stereoscopic vision), roughly similar form
| factor SKUs (=CPG), a purpose-built environment and no
| special handling requirements (nuclear waste/fresh
| food/fast-melting ice cream), no mobility requirement or
| cost sensitivity, then it's much easier.
|
| Second, simplify handling by batching items in standard
| containers. What these system vendors never show you is how
| much they overcharge you for plastic boxes and how much
| energy is wasted loading, unloading and cleaning them.
|
| Third, a grid-based system is clearly the most spatially
| efficient, so design around that.
|
| In these systems the true spatial efficiency for most items
| is probably poor as _Dematic Autostore_ for instance only
| offer 3 bin sizes. The true spatio-temporal efficiency is
| probably middling except when considered in parallel for
| huge order throughput requirements and a large number of
| SKUs because an untrained primate can pick faster than a
| bot for arbitrary items in most cases. Capex is very high,
| so these systems only make sense if you have a guaranteed
| large-SKU picking problem that won 't go away, and you
| don't care about owning the knowledge to implement it cost-
| efficiently (eg. you are a manager looking out for #1
| instead of the company's long term bottom line).
|
| These things are terrible for the world, however, as they
| basically enable the accelerated consumption of single use
| plastics which is the CPG industry as a whole. I predict
| that in progressive countries such systems will be taxed or
| outlawed within our lifetimes, probably first in Europe,
| probably first in Holland as they are so good with
| agriculture and logistics.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Walmart compelled vendors to put barcodes on product in the
| late 70s early 80s. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't encouraged
| vendors to supply "robot friendly" or "frustration free"
| packaging.
| the42thdoctor wrote:
| What types of algorithms are used in this type of problems ?
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I would put money of them using OpenCV and the assorted algos
| in that library for their vision work.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| Probably various optimization algorithms. You'd want to have
| your robots move the least distance for the work required since
| that minimises energy use and wear and tear. Some form of
| knapsack problem would needed to be solved for packaging the
| goods for delivery optimally. Then there would be scheduling
| needed to handle incoming jobs effectively.
| amelius wrote:
| It's not a difficult problem space. You can use quite simple
| algorithms for planning the movements of these robots. And you
| can improve them later without them affecting the rest of the
| system, which makes this easier than most IT systems which have
| all kinds of hairy dependencies.
|
| If two grocery carts crash into each other it's not the end of
| the world. In contrast, if you're writing a distributed
| database system and you corrupt data then that can be very
| serious.
| accurrent wrote:
| Uhh.... Hairy dependencies are very much a problem in this
| space just like any other type of IT system (in fact worse
| cause the code is usually written in C++ - so no package
| manager). Plus the tooling is non-existant... You will still
| need some type of client server architecture/failover
| redundancy. You also don't have very many options when it
| comes to testing. Writing simulations for this and running
| tests is very non-trivial. The algorithms themselves will
| need to take into account failures. What happens when one of
| the robots fails/wears out? (and this WILL happen)
| Deconflicting the robots is certainly nontrivial. For
| efficient solutions in this field theres a whole bunch of
| fairly non-trivial algorithms in Operations Research and
| planning that exist.
| imtringued wrote:
| The environment is also hostile to humans so they will need
| to build a dedicated tow robot that gets stuck robots out
| of the system.
| amelius wrote:
| You just build a platform which can move over the xy
| grid, and which allows humans to sit on top.
|
| It's quite simple to make sure (using e.g. bumpers) that
| if a robot crashes into the platform then nobody gets
| hurt.
|
| Of course a towrobot would be better, but it's not really
| necessary and it also might get stuck.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I'm sure QuickSort is being used somewhere in there...
|
| ...though I assume you're asking specifically about the quasi-
| autonomous movement of the tote-bots? There is no one single
| "algorithm" to represent or model their movement, it's a
| complex control system.
| djhworld wrote:
| I wish this video was longer and went into more detail, although
| I guess Ocado like to keep things light as they make money on
| selling this tech to other supermarket chains.
|
| I used to be an Ocado customer for about 9 years or so and they
| were very, very reliable in terms of deliveries and order
| fulfillment (I rarely ever got substitutes) - I'm wondering if
| this tech and other things in the warehouse played a huge role in
| making sure inventory/supply always met demand.
|
| When doing a similar online shop with ASDA we get
| substitutes/missing items/unavailable items every week, and the
| vans are always late.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I wonder what happens when a robot gets physically stuck in the
| middle of that grid. Do they have a trolley that humans can use
| to skate over and dislodge the offending device?
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Seems like any other bot could push it to the edge. It just
| requires a failed robot to default to a neutral gear.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Or they have a boss-level robot with a bit of rubber on the
| wheels and you don't even have to fail in neutral.
|
| I kind of wish this would turn into a giant robot wars for a
| few days of the year, maybe you can buy a ticket to control
| one of them for the day, if only it weren't such a waste ^^'
| jhgorrell wrote:
| In one of the other videos, you can see a 3 by 3 sized platform
| with the same wheel setup - it has a platform for 1-2 people
| and a crane.
|
| I imagine they set some sort of exclusion zone around the
| broken robot, then drive out in the large platform and pick it
| up.
| irjustin wrote:
| Xbox vision!
| hk1337 wrote:
| I wonder what the budget comparison is to just hiring people to
| do it?
| monkeydust wrote:
| "We'll use the huge amounts of data that we gather to understand
| what customers are most likely to order"
|
| Were regular Ocado users and its been a life saver during the
| pandemic - but - we have noticed that we keep ordering the same
| produce each week, the amount of new items is minimal compared to
| when we used to go into the store. Yes they suggest things but
| the suggestions (for us) have been poor whereas in store we would
| tend to try more new things. This may just be us and the algo
| works better for others but I think it should there is still much
| room for improvement in recommendation algos and there is a
| discovery challenge with online vs offline for groceries.
| shog_hn wrote:
| We also use Ocado, and I have noticed this exact same side
| effect. Still a great service overall though.
| conductr wrote:
| I just expect this would happen and so it's one of my main
| reasons to keep shopping in store. We tend to shop instead of
| procure off a strict list.
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