Until recently, Ocado was known as the world’s largest online only grocery retailer. However, in February 2019 they floated off that retail business into a joint venture with Marks and Spencer.
That leaves Ocado as the technology business they have always been under the bonnet and the international platform provider they have more recently become, but even that does not define who they really are, let alone where they are headed. Their founding vision was to use a huge amount of technology and automation to do online grocery scalably, sustainably and profitably. It was also part of that founding vision that once they had evolved and proven a solution for themselves, that we would then make this solution available to other retailers around the world, as they are now also doing. At the center of their business model are huge automated warehouses, the largest and most sophisticated of their kind in the world. According to Paul Clarke, CTO at Ocado Group, the core of the company is an innovation factory for creative disruptive solutions to hard problems. By way of example, the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) is a solution for operating online grocery businesses that combines six disruptive technologies: AI, Robotics, Digital Twins, Cloud, Big Data, and IoT.
Ocado has successfully completed two EU-funded research and innovation projects called SoMa and SecondHands, “which combine state of the art robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced sensors to understand and assist human warehouse workers in real time”. Soft Manipulation (SoMa) is the key for the development of simple, compliant, yet strong, robust, and easy-to-program manipulation systems. SecondHands aims to develop a robot assistant that is trained to understand maintenance tasks so that it can either pro-actively, or as a result of prompting, offer assistance to automation maintenance technicians performing routine and preventative maintenance.
Both SecondHands and SoMa were EU Horizon2020 projects and a cooperation between different Universities, Institutions and Ocado.
SecondHands and SoMa were funded by the EU Horizon2020 program.
SoMa was concerned with designing soft robotic hands for skillful and competent exploitation, and developing versatile, robust, cost-effective, and safe robotic grasping and manipulation capabilities. The developed Soft Manipulation technology has been applied to the food and agriculture industry - to the handling of irregularly shaped, flexible, and easily damageable goods. The goal of SecondHands was to design a robot that could collaborate with maintenance technicians in a proactive manner, i.e. a second pair of hands that can assist the technician when he/she is in need of help.
“One of the challenges we faced on the SoMa project was characterising the operation of the hands, which led us to undertake many actual physical experiments. It didn’t make a lot of sense for us to try and simulate that, which is a shame, because it would have saved us a lot of time. So we had to resort to doing the real experiments in the real world in order to get some results that we could rely on.” Graham Deacon, Robotics Research Fellow at Ocado. Article in Current- online magazine - by Chris Brown.
"As a highly innovative organisation, we need multiple ways to skin the innovational cat. Much of this innovation is just business as usual and occurs in our core engineering teams, including plenty of projects that other businesses would consider research. Then we have our business sponsored research streams such as robotics research, many applications of AI/ ML, simulation and so on. And then we have our 10X or advanced research department that are placing the bets that the business might shy away from placing or which the organisational antibodies in the mother ship might try to kill off. These are bets that I and my colleagues in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) get to place." Paul Clarke, CTO, Ocado Group
Tech trends: AI - deep learning, IoT, algorithm-design, digital twins, blockchain, extended reality AR/VR, Big data, Robotics, etc.
Societal trends: Global networking, Urbanization, Ageing population, Transparency, Prototyping, Sustainable responsibility, Ecosystem networks.
The SoMa and SecondHands projects can be linked to SDG no. 9 - Industry, innovation and infrastructure - since they are innovations that eventually will influence many different industries, and also no. 8 - responsible consumption and production - as they will contribute to increasing the efficiency in several industries and at the same time potentially improve the working conditions of industry workers. No. 12 - Sustainable production and consumption - due to that soft hands can adapt to the shape of fragile groceries to handle them without the risk of damage.
Interviews with Paul Clarke, CTO, Ocado Group Inc. and Sverker Lindbo, Head of concept development, Ocado Group Inc.
Online: https://www.ocadogroup.com/, https://www.ocadogroup.com/technology/powering-osp,
https://www.distrelec.de/current/en/automation/ocados-soma-robot-could-change-the-grocery-business-forever/, https://secondhands.eu/, http://soma-project.eu/