Shopping Robots

With robots becoming more and more intelligent and versatile, there is now a growing concern that they will soon take over our jobs.

18:55 08 February 2017

With the immense advancements in the field of robotics, there have been growing concerns about the impact of automation on employment.

 

One of the businesses that greatly benefit from robotics and artificial intelligence is Ocado, which uses robots that move across the grid to collect groceries and then bring them to a human picker.

 

Paul Clarke, the online retailer's chief technology officer, said: "Without it we simply couldn't do what we do at this scale,"

 

He then explained: "This warehouse is crammed with machine learning and algorithms that are controlling all manner of operations that are invisible to the human eye,"

 

Ocado is also working with a group of robotic engineers from across Europe for its latest project that could replace human pickers one day. It is a robotic hand sensitive enough to pick up a piece of fruit without damaging it.

 

Paul Clarke explains the technical challenge: "Controlling thousands of robots in real time has required not only building a very sophisticated AI-based air traffic control system but also we've had to evolve a new communications systems to talk to all those robots 10 times a second."