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Ocado showcases robotic arm for grocery picking
Ocado Technology is announcing a major development in the pursuit of creating robotic grocery picking solutions for Ocado’s highly-automated warehouses….
Ocado Technology is announcing a major development in the pursuit of creating robotic grocery picking solutions for Ocado’s highly-automated warehouses. The Ocado Technology robotics team has created a robotic arm capable of safely grasping a wide variety of products, including many from Ocado’s current range which includes over 48,000 hypermarket items.
The robotic arm comes as a result of the close collaboration between Ocado Technology and theĀ Technische UniversitƤt Berlin (TUB), and represents an integral part ofĀ the SoMa projectĀ – a European Union-funded,Ā Horizon 2020 programmeĀ for research and innovation in the field of humanoidĀ robotics.
The SoMa project also includes researchers, academics and scientists from the University of Pisa, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Deutsches Zentrum fĆ¼rĀ Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR, the German aerospace agency), the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and Disney Research ZĆ¼rich.
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“Ocado and its academic partners are developing some of the most innovative technologies in the field of robotics. With SoMa, we are pursuing a new direction for robotic grasping by developing robot hands that can safely pick easily damageable items such as fruits and vegetables. The RBO Hand 2 designed by the Technische UniversitƤt Berlin offers a versatile, cost-effective and safe solution for robotic grasping and manipulation that integrates very well with Ocado’s highly-automated warehouse retail solutions.” – Dr. Graham Deacon, robotics research team leader at Ocado Technology.
To avoid damaging sensitive and unpredictably shaped grocery items, the robotic arm uses the principle ofĀ environmental constraint exploitationĀ to establish a carefully orchestrated interaction between the hand, the object being grasped, and the environment surrounding the respective item.
The SoMa project is part of a continuum of robotics and engineering R&D projects in development at Ocado. In December 2016, Ocado commenced operations from its highly automated AndoverĀ warehouse which includes hundreds of robots swarming on a grid the size of several football pitches. In addition, Ocado Technology is a coordinator ofĀ the SecondHands project, another Horizon 2020-funded programme that aims to design a collaborative robot that can learn from and offer assistance to warehouse maintenanceĀ technicians in a proactive manner.