Spime Watch: Ocado grocery

*Trying to logistically re-engineer a grocery depot, like Amazon, but, well, more so. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that these British guys run their software on the Amazon cloud.

The robotic grocery store of somebody else's future

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So its third warehouse—currently in live trials near Andover, west of London—is being designed from scratch. Its main floor is laid out in giant grid about the size of a football field, split into washing-machine-size squares. Beneath each square is a vertical stack of five crates of groceries. On the surface of the grid are up to 1,000 robots, each able to lift crates from below.

The robots scuttle around, passing within centimeters of each other, at up to nine miles per hour. Orders relayed via a specially designed 4G network instruct the robots to grab crates and shuttle them to the edge of the grid, where pickers can grab the needed products. The robots work as a swarm: if the required product is four crates down in a stack, say, several can remove boxes to open the way.

The Andover warehouse, which is likely to enter full service in 2017, is a trial for an even larger facility in Erith, just outside London, which will begin construction next year. Its storage area will be three times the size. That means working out where to store goods and retrieve them, using thousands of robots, is incredibly complex. Clarke says that the computational demands of this optimization problem are bearable…