this is a grocery packing warehouse in
the southeast of london folks have
ordered their groceries online and
instead of people walking up and down
the aisles of a traditional grocery
store to pick up items
these little devices move more than a
million items every day between them
instead of trying to build machines that
fit into a world designed for humans
this entire facility the size of seven
football fields is custom built
to make this as efficient as possible i
cannot get across on camera
just how incredibly large this whole
place is
the top speed of those boxes is about 14
kilometers an hour and they pass within
five millimeters of each other when they
move
so how many robots are there in the hive
well that depends on how you count them
what you're looking at behind me
is the hive we've got the grid which is
the metal
structure it's filled with products so
that product is housed within what we
call
totes or these open boxes that you can
see at the top of the grid
we have around 2 300 bots and they move
the stock around the warehouse so that
we can pair it up with customer orders
to be delivered
the bots will move in the x and y
direction they can also move in the z
direction
so we have a cable voice system that
means that they can lower
down a gripper assembly and grab onto
the stock that we have in the grid in
some areas we have
as deep as 21 totes all in a line
we have sensors underneath the bot that
mean that every time it passes over one
of the
squares on the grid it has a laser
underneath it that can tell when it
moves over that cell so it will say
i've passed a cell i've passed a cell
i've passed a cell we have around
58 000 different types of individual
products within the grid
we'll use the huge amounts of data that
we gather to understand
what customers are most likely to order
and place them in the easiest to reach
locations for bots
all of that combined means that we can
have stock in to the warehouse and out
again from our suppliers
into a delivery van in just five hours
the robots deliver their crates over to
the packing area some of that packing is
done by humans
but there are mechanical arms as well
one of the big problems they've got to
solve
is that grocery packaging is designed
for people and the interactions between
all the objects they deal with can be
complicated currently we're standing
underneath the grid structure that we
saw earlier
the robots that we saw are actually
dropping off products to the station
once they're dropped off they're
becoming control of the robot and the
robot sides how to pick them
before the grid robot picks up the tote
and takes it away again
there's two 3d cameras above the totes
so it takes an image of the
storage box before it picks from it
decides on the best grass point confirm
that the product is correct
and then place it into a customer
shopping and it's doing all of that on
live customer orders
we make sure that we don't mix something
that was heavy with something that's
soft there are things that robot compact
i think such as very very heavy
very large or very fragile items but
there's a lot of range in between that
it's fairly safe to call each individual
packing arm a robot
each one has a separate controller and
it has to make a lot of decisions in
real time
using cameras and sensors on each
individual arm but here in the hive
it's not quite as simple controlling all
of this
is what we refer to as the hive mind so
this artificial intelligence system that
controls
everything once the stop comes in from
that
exact point that it enters the system
the hive mind will track it
every single movement the hive mind will
tell the bots exactly
where they need to stop but it is the
bots control system that allows it to
follow a movement profile and stop
exactly as the hive mind
expects it to there's just a five
millimeter gap between bots so that's
both as they pass
each other and if they stop next to a
bot as well
this spot with the orange light may have
experienced something within its sensors
and all of those readings it's taking
that when it feeds that back to the hive
mind it's not quite what the hive mind
was expecting
so it just brings it to a safe stop for
investigation
we do have a number of grid operators
that sit at the edge of the grid
and they're able to use our cctv system
that we have above the grid
so look at exactly what's going on with
that bot and they can try and fix that
remotely and send commands to the bot
wirelessly
the boundary between individual and
group is a little blurry it's a termite
colony and collection of individuals
working together
or one big super organism is the
microbiome in your gut
part of you because in the last couple
of decades scientists have started to
work out
the bacteria in your digestive system
produce and consume neurotransmitters
that affect how you think but most
people wouldn't consider their gut
bacteria to be part
of them we tend to ascribe intelligence
and identity to things that act at
roughly our scale
it's easy to look at the hive see the
moving boxes and go okay
2 000 robots but with only one
controller
and the box is just following the paths
they're given i'd say there's a good
argument that that is
one robot with 2 000 ways to interact
with the world
thank you so much to everyone here at
ocado there is a link to them and
more about their technology in the
description
you