6 ms·

Ocado's burning robotic warehouse

73 points by zeristor 8y ago

davb 8y ago
I found the fact that they're using modified 4G over unlicensed spectrum to control the robots pretty interesting. Latency, scalability and consistency seem to be the key drivers. There's more on that at: https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/press-wire/ocado-uses-unlicensed-lte-to-enable-the-march-of-the-warehouse-robots https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/press-wire/ocado-uses-unlicen... https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/media/uploads/files/UK5G_-_The_death_of_IP_Fraser_Edwards_-_Why_LTE_didnt_cut_it_for_Ocado.pdf https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/media/uploads/files/UK5G... https://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/voip/ocado-4g-network-unlicensed-sprectrum-185777?inf_by=5c5cec74671db8e90d8b499b https://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/voip/ocado-4g-network-unl...
- sterlind 8y ago
  Any clue what radio IC they used? I didn't see the hardware mentioned in those links. Can you tune a vanilla LTE baseboard to unlicensed bands? Or did they use a software-defined transmitter with a custom LTE stack?
  - abainbridge 8y ago
    I believe most LTE chipsets can be tuned into any band you like, as long as you design your own RF front end (antenna and circuitry to/from the chip) and persuade the chipset manufacturer to give you a firmware update in such a way that they aren't liable for you distributing illegal devices. It's probable quite difficult to find manufacturer who is prepared to work with you if you're only going to buy 50,000 modules. I guess being Cambridge Consultants gives you contacts.
    - proaralyst 8y ago
      Given that Cambridge Consultants spawned Cambridge Silicon Radio you're probably right.
  - entity345 8y ago
    From the slides linked above they are not using LTE, but something loosely based on it. So they may be reusing some PHY parts like the OFDM but the rest seems custom.
- anonymousDan 8y ago
  So basically if this is widely adopted 5ghz WiFi is screwed?
aerophilic 8y ago
It is an interesting question: how do you plan for the unforeseen? We as humans are very good at coming up with solutions to ambiguous/messy real world scenarios... robots less so. By definition, the current set of robots are programmed for specific situations. As we automate more and more, I suspect we will have more and more “one off” catastrophic events. Yes, once we experience them, we can “test” against them. However it almost seems to argue for one amount of human in the loop no matter what, if only to give an occasional “that seems weird” check. Am I missing something? Yes we can make an argument for machine learning to learn “nominal” and report off nominal... but that only works if you gave the right sensors being inputted in the first place.
- neolefty 8y ago
  I agree current automation can't handle unforeseen events, but I think it can flag them as they start. Where I work we use a hybrid system that must be pretty common — instrument, establish patterns, watch for anomalies (automatically) and alert humans when they happen.
- larkeith 8y ago
  I agree - humans are able to collate generally disparate, individually insignificant events to identify issues and unexpected events, but the entire idea behind ML is that AI is trained to react appropriately to the specific range of possibilities it is provided with. While ML allows for significantly better generalization within the trained problem set, it still flounders anywhere beyond predicted/tested parameters. Hopefully, developing gaming AIs such as AlphaGo and AlphaStar will help us with this, but for now I remain dubious - AlphaStar, at least, has trouble reacting at all to the unexpected.
- orf 8y ago
  We clearly just need fire smelling and fire fighting robots. And robots to repair and maintain said fire fighting robots.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    So better smoke detectors and better sprinkler systems, in other words.
ucaetano 8y ago
> But let's not forget there's a good reason why data centres full of computer servers are often built inside icy mountains or under oceans. Electronics get hot. Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies here. This is pretty bad reporting.
- zeristor 8y ago
  Thanks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- close04 8y ago
  Your objection is probably to the usage of the word "often" which is... debatable. It's probably also unrealistic. Otherwise yes, nobody ever built a DC underwater [0] or in the icy mountains [1] or underground [2]. [0] https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-for-years/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-... [1] https://greenmountain.no/ https://greenmountain.no/ [2] https://royal.pingdom.com/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/ https://royal.pingdom.com/the-worlds-most-super-designed-dat...
  - 7j 8y ago
    Reporter was claiming that warehouse was freezing cold to keep electronics of robots cool. It's total nonsense. These robots probably emit less heat than regular forklifts. The only reason for the freezing temperatures is to keep foodstuff fresh. Also datacenters underground is only a marketing trick (we keep you servers in a bunker). If anything it only complicates getting rid of extra heat (eg. problems with London underground [1] ) [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/london-central-line-hot-why-underground-tube-stations-tfl-science-a8422456.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/london-...
    - mhw 8y ago
      Given that the article also has no information about the cause of the fire ("The firm has not yet commented on the probable cause of the blaze and the investigation could go on for quite some time") it's also fairly easy to read the earlier "electronics get hot" as trying to point towards a suspected cause. As you say, it's total nonsense - even if the cause does turn out to be an electrical fire, it's unlikely to be due to insufficient cooling of the whole warehouse.
Theodores 8y ago
I don't really care about this story. I don't feel compelled to care as it is not like other warehouse fires, e.g. the Asos one where you wondered about people and their jobs. When it is just robots and when you know the customers will just place their orders with one of the other click and pick outfits, e.g. Waitrose, Sainsbury's or whatever there isn't that requirement to give a damn. In retail there are thieves who don't care about stealing from big companies like how they might care about stealing from small businesses as there is an assumption everything is insured. I am sure Ocado have insurance and I don't care too much about the shareholders of the insurance companies as I am sure they have their losses 'insured'. File under 'expensive mistake' rather than 'human tragedy'.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  There are some holes in your argument. Most glaringly, this fire presents a risk to everyone who has to fight it, and anyone else in the area.
  - bpye 8y ago
    If, and I know in this case it wasn't, your no-people warehouse was far from homes and was on fire, wouldn't one option be to just let it burn itself out? No risk fighting that fire...
    - Pharmakon 8y ago
      Then I’d agree, but when you think of how far burning cinders can be carried on the wind, it would have to be very very far away. There would also need to be some legal framework to allow firefighters to say, “No thanks, we’re not risking our lives for your property, and we are 100% sure there isn’t a kid or homeless guy who snuck in for the night.” http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
  - Theodores 8y ago
    Not really. It is not like they are heroically going in there to save cabbages and Pot Noodles. "Just think of those poor nectarines...!" doesn't cross my mind. On a scale of 1 to Grenfell it scores zero. Let the venture capitalists money burn... In the UK we do have a huge amount of respect for those in the emergency services but it doesn't have the patriotic edge that Americans have in the post 9/11 world. Our firefighters are down to earth heroes yes, but not Hollywood glamorised patriot heroes. My grand dad was a firefighter so I am naturally inclined to think highly of everyone in the fire service, perhaps more so than most people. Feelings are not strictly rational, my original comment was an observation that the incident lacked the feeling of awful that goes with a Grenfell or empathy that goes with things like the Asos fire where people were having their lives in jeopardy.
kleton 8y ago
That's hilarious that a journalist thinks that datacenters are "often built inside icy mountains or under oceans".
- abainbridge 8y ago
  It'd be funny if it wasn't entirely normal for the BBC's technology output.
  - setquk 8y ago
    BBCs reporting is nothing short of dire on everything at the moment. Random people on twitter are better journalists.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      The BBC do seem to have realised this, considering a lot of their "stories" recently are literally just cobbled-together lists of tweets from these random people.
      - pja 8y ago
        IIRC BBC Online was deliberately gutted by the top brass to keep the (Conservative) government happy because it was perceived as competing too effectively with commercial news providers.
        setquk 8y ago
        So basically not lining up with the Daily Express?
        pja 8y ago
        Not so much about political positioning, but simply that the quality of the straight news reporting was high & there were no ads, so viewers were flocking to the BBC website in preference to other commercial news providers. This was deemed unacceptable by the Conservative government during a crucial time in the negotiation of the renewal of the licence fee, so the website was quietly gutted to appease them. That’s the story I’ve been told at least.
arde 8y ago
Next time their plans should include some firefighting robots.
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The article says they had a world class sprinkler system. https://ocadoengineering.com/ocado-engineering-awarded-prestigious-highly-protected-risk-award/ https://ocadoengineering.com/ocado-engineering-awarded-prest...
zeristor 8y ago
Isn’t this what the learning curve is about? Although we’ve heard of hover boards, and the rare steals bursting into flames it is odd that battery robots on rails weren’t thought to be a fire risk. That added to the fact that it wouldn’t be simple or safe to get to a fire in the middle of the grid.
zeristor 8y ago
I wonder how much building fires are a source of pollution in urban areas. Whilst commuting into London Liverpool St I’d quite often see huge plumes of thick black smoke from fires in tyre dumps, which must be a huge source of pollution even with all the diesel lorries and cabs.
setquk 8y ago
As an Ocado smartpass customer who is expecting an order today, this appears to just be manifesting itself as a few items out of stock. Slightly disappointed though if I’m honest. This was the future. And now it’s going to be looked down on by every semi critical person as a complete failure even though the actual picking process was working very well. For those who don’t know, Ocado was the only supplier in the UK that pretty much have a 1:1 correlation with what you order and what you get and haven’t been sitting on a shelf for days. All the other supermarkets are picked from local stores by hand and are quite frankly terrible with 2-15 items (from experience) missing on every order and some things very near expiry dates. Sainsbury’s for example substituted me some bread which was out of stock with a fresh loaf expiring on the day it was delivered. The delivery turned up at 22:00...
- benj111 8y ago
  Its not that night and day. Ocado will for example substitute some things that I don't really need, and aren't really substitutable. but if they don't have the nappies you ordered? No substitute, nadda. And it isn't like you can wait a week for nappies if you're running out. Sainsburys I've always found ok, even for our Christmas shop, there weren't any substitutes. Where Ocado is better is search. If I search for 'juice' in Sainsburys I very quickly get 'quinoa with juice of jojoba'. Ocado gives me actual fruit juices.
  - vidarh 8y ago
    In case you don't realize: If they substitute something and you don't want it, you can just ask the delivery person to take that item back. I've not done that often, but when I have they've never had an issue doing it. (the real big thing for me is that I have a weekly shop set up, and if I forget to look on their site, they'll send me something based on a tolerably ok prediction of what I usually buy; it far from perfect, but good enough that I occasionally doesn't bother log in on purpose, because I know it will be close enough to what I need to be ok)
    - benj111 8y ago
      You can reject things you ordered too, like the £40 of toilet roll added to reserve the delivery...... So I've heard of course.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I appreciate that "robotic warehouse" makes for a good headline but I just wanted to point out that only the part the retrieves the goods from the shelves is robotic. Humans are still packing and dispatching the orders. It's amazing how many people in this thread are looking at the headline and jumping to the conclusion that there were no humans present at all.
- teh_klev 8y ago
  > Humans are still packing and dispatching the orders. Perhaps not for long, according to the article they're now training robot arms to perform the packing tasks.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    That is a much harder task than just picking up boxes that are all the same size. It's essentially still a research task that many universities are working on. I'd say we're at least a decade away from a robot that can pick up irregular items like a person can.
    - lnsru 8y ago
      Is it that hard when you know, what are you picking? I mean, each box contains only one type of objects. Weight, shape and package type is known.
    - teh_klev 8y ago
      There's a finite number of SKU's it'll need to be trained to pick up and pack. It's not like it's having to learn to pick up and pack unknown things, it just needs to know how to pick and pack whatever Ocado carries in stock. I reckon they'll have this mostly working in under a year.
- Nexxxeh 8y ago
  Hopefully there were no humans present when the fire went up!
pja 8y ago
So their award winning sprinkler system clearly didn’t work. Will be interesting to read the investigation report & see what actually went wrong.
- janekm 8y ago
  A sprinkler system... for a giant lithium batteries fire? If it was an actual water sprinkler system that may have been an issue.
  - pja 8y ago
    One hopes that they had thought of that, but who knows? Looking at the warehouse videos, it’s clear that under the robots is a vast sea of individual towers of plastic boxes, all packed in tightly. I suspect that once that plastic was burning merrily, it would be very hard to stop & the heat would start cooking off the lithium batteries in the robots above. Hard to see how a sprinkler system can prevent fire from taking hold deep inside those towers of boxes, if that’s what happened.
    - kylegordon 8y ago
      A fire detection camera system could have picked out the heat plume in a short amount of time, and parked the robots as far away as possible from it. The article even comments on how cold the warehouse was, so any heat from fire in 'the hive' should have been easily detectable. My bets are that it started somewhere totally different and unrelated to the robot system. Will be interesting to see why their system failed.
      - smileypete 8y ago
        Could the robots bring buckets of water to dump on the fire? :) I guess there's a lot of isocyanate foam insulation, once that gets going no sprinkler is going to help.
matthewfelgate 8y ago
Was it arson?
baybal2 8y ago
I have some criticism for Ocado. They were a freaking successful business in a no brainer industry... and then they decided to make robots out of a sudden. Not only their risky robot venture cost them a lot, but they ended up burning more by operating them than regular warehouses. Why?
verytrivial 8y ago
For some reason I really felt for the engineers hearing about this. They've presumably lived and dreamed this for years. A bit like watching say a model railway go up in smoke: sure, no-one is dying, but what a waste of best-efforts.

73 points by zeristor 8y ago

davb 8y ago

I found the fact that they're using modified 4G over unlicensed spectrum to control the robots pretty interesting. Latency, scalability and consistency seem to be the key drivers. There's more on that at: https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/press-wire/ocado-uses-unlicensed-lte-to-enable-the-march-of-the-warehouse-robots https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/press-wire/ocado-uses-unlicen... https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/media/uploads/files/UK5G_-_The_death_of_IP_Fraser_Edwards_-_Why_LTE_didnt_cut_it_for_Ocado.pdf https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/media/uploads/files/UK5G... https://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/voip/ocado-4g-network-unlicensed-sprectrum-185777?inf_by=5c5cec74671db8e90d8b499b https://www.silicon.co.uk/networks/voip/ocado-4g-network-unl...

sterlind 8y ago
Any clue what radio IC they used? I didn't see the hardware mentioned in those links. Can you tune a vanilla LTE baseboard to unlicensed bands? Or did they use a software-defined transmitter with a custom LTE stack?
- abainbridge 8y ago
  I believe most LTE chipsets can be tuned into any band you like, as long as you design your own RF front end (antenna and circuitry to/from the chip) and persuade the chipset manufacturer to give you a firmware update in such a way that they aren't liable for you distributing illegal devices. It's probable quite difficult to find manufacturer who is prepared to work with you if you're only going to buy 50,000 modules. I guess being Cambridge Consultants gives you contacts.
  - proaralyst 8y ago
    Given that Cambridge Consultants spawned Cambridge Silicon Radio you're probably right.
- entity345 8y ago
  From the slides linked above they are not using LTE, but something loosely based on it. So they may be reusing some PHY parts like the OFDM but the rest seems custom.
anonymousDan 8y ago
So basically if this is widely adopted 5ghz WiFi is screwed?

aerophilic 8y ago

It is an interesting question: how do you plan for the unforeseen? We as humans are very good at coming up with solutions to ambiguous/messy real world scenarios... robots less so. By definition, the current set of robots are programmed for specific situations. As we automate more and more, I suspect we will have more and more “one off” catastrophic events. Yes, once we experience them, we can “test” against them. However it almost seems to argue for one amount of human in the loop no matter what, if only to give an occasional “that seems weird” check. Am I missing something? Yes we can make an argument for machine learning to learn “nominal” and report off nominal... but that only works if you gave the right sensors being inputted in the first place.

neolefty 8y ago
I agree current automation can't handle unforeseen events, but I think it can flag them as they start. Where I work we use a hybrid system that must be pretty common — instrument, establish patterns, watch for anomalies (automatically) and alert humans when they happen.
larkeith 8y ago
I agree - humans are able to collate generally disparate, individually insignificant events to identify issues and unexpected events, but the entire idea behind ML is that AI is trained to react appropriately to the specific range of possibilities it is provided with. While ML allows for significantly better generalization within the trained problem set, it still flounders anywhere beyond predicted/tested parameters. Hopefully, developing gaming AIs such as AlphaGo and AlphaStar will help us with this, but for now I remain dubious - AlphaStar, at least, has trouble reacting at all to the unexpected.
orf 8y ago
We clearly just need fire smelling and fire fighting robots. And robots to repair and maintain said fire fighting robots.
- vidarh 8y ago
  So better smoke detectors and better sprinkler systems, in other words.

ucaetano 8y ago

> But let's not forget there's a good reason why data centres full of computer servers are often built inside icy mountains or under oceans. Electronics get hot. Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies here. This is pretty bad reporting.

zeristor 8y ago
Thanks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
close04 8y ago
Your objection is probably to the usage of the word "often" which is... debatable. It's probably also unrealistic. Otherwise yes, nobody ever built a DC underwater [0] or in the icy mountains [1] or underground [2]. [0] https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-for-years/ https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-... [1] https://greenmountain.no/ https://greenmountain.no/ [2] https://royal.pingdom.com/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/ https://royal.pingdom.com/the-worlds-most-super-designed-dat...
- 7j 8y ago
  Reporter was claiming that warehouse was freezing cold to keep electronics of robots cool. It's total nonsense. These robots probably emit less heat than regular forklifts. The only reason for the freezing temperatures is to keep foodstuff fresh. Also datacenters underground is only a marketing trick (we keep you servers in a bunker). If anything it only complicates getting rid of extra heat (eg. problems with London underground [1] ) [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/london-central-line-hot-why-underground-tube-stations-tfl-science-a8422456.html https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/london-...
  - mhw 8y ago
    Given that the article also has no information about the cause of the fire ("The firm has not yet commented on the probable cause of the blaze and the investigation could go on for quite some time") it's also fairly easy to read the earlier "electronics get hot" as trying to point towards a suspected cause. As you say, it's total nonsense - even if the cause does turn out to be an electrical fire, it's unlikely to be due to insufficient cooling of the whole warehouse.

Theodores 8y ago

I don't really care about this story. I don't feel compelled to care as it is not like other warehouse fires, e.g. the Asos one where you wondered about people and their jobs. When it is just robots and when you know the customers will just place their orders with one of the other click and pick outfits, e.g. Waitrose, Sainsbury's or whatever there isn't that requirement to give a damn. In retail there are thieves who don't care about stealing from big companies like how they might care about stealing from small businesses as there is an assumption everything is insured. I am sure Ocado have insurance and I don't care too much about the shareholders of the insurance companies as I am sure they have their losses 'insured'. File under 'expensive mistake' rather than 'human tragedy'.

Pharmakon 8y ago
There are some holes in your argument. Most glaringly, this fire presents a risk to everyone who has to fight it, and anyone else in the area.
- bpye 8y ago
  If, and I know in this case it wasn't, your no-people warehouse was far from homes and was on fire, wouldn't one option be to just let it burn itself out? No risk fighting that fire...
  - Pharmakon 8y ago
    Then I’d agree, but when you think of how far burning cinders can be carried on the wind, it would have to be very very far away. There would also need to be some legal framework to allow firefighters to say, “No thanks, we’re not risking our lives for your property, and we are 100% sure there isn’t a kid or homeless guy who snuck in for the night.” http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
- Theodores 8y ago
  Not really. It is not like they are heroically going in there to save cabbages and Pot Noodles. "Just think of those poor nectarines...!" doesn't cross my mind. On a scale of 1 to Grenfell it scores zero. Let the venture capitalists money burn... In the UK we do have a huge amount of respect for those in the emergency services but it doesn't have the patriotic edge that Americans have in the post 9/11 world. Our firefighters are down to earth heroes yes, but not Hollywood glamorised patriot heroes. My grand dad was a firefighter so I am naturally inclined to think highly of everyone in the fire service, perhaps more so than most people. Feelings are not strictly rational, my original comment was an observation that the incident lacked the feeling of awful that goes with a Grenfell or empathy that goes with things like the Asos fire where people were having their lives in jeopardy.

kleton 8y ago

That's hilarious that a journalist thinks that datacenters are "often built inside icy mountains or under oceans".

abainbridge 8y ago
It'd be funny if it wasn't entirely normal for the BBC's technology output.
- setquk 8y ago
  BBCs reporting is nothing short of dire on everything at the moment. Random people on twitter are better journalists.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    The BBC do seem to have realised this, considering a lot of their "stories" recently are literally just cobbled-together lists of tweets from these random people.
    - pja 8y ago
      IIRC BBC Online was deliberately gutted by the top brass to keep the (Conservative) government happy because it was perceived as competing too effectively with commercial news providers.
      - setquk 8y ago
        So basically not lining up with the Daily Express?
        pja 8y ago
        Not so much about political positioning, but simply that the quality of the straight news reporting was high & there were no ads, so viewers were flocking to the BBC website in preference to other commercial news providers. This was deemed unacceptable by the Conservative government during a crucial time in the negotiation of the renewal of the licence fee, so the website was quietly gutted to appease them. That’s the story I’ve been told at least.

arde 8y ago

Next time their plans should include some firefighting robots.

Symbiote 8y ago
The article says they had a world class sprinkler system. https://ocadoengineering.com/ocado-engineering-awarded-prestigious-highly-protected-risk-award/ https://ocadoengineering.com/ocado-engineering-awarded-prest...

zeristor 8y ago

Isn’t this what the learning curve is about? Although we’ve heard of hover boards, and the rare steals bursting into flames it is odd that battery robots on rails weren’t thought to be a fire risk. That added to the fact that it wouldn’t be simple or safe to get to a fire in the middle of the grid.

zeristor 8y ago

I wonder how much building fires are a source of pollution in urban areas. Whilst commuting into London Liverpool St I’d quite often see huge plumes of thick black smoke from fires in tyre dumps, which must be a huge source of pollution even with all the diesel lorries and cabs.

setquk 8y ago

As an Ocado smartpass customer who is expecting an order today, this appears to just be manifesting itself as a few items out of stock. Slightly disappointed though if I’m honest. This was the future. And now it’s going to be looked down on by every semi critical person as a complete failure even though the actual picking process was working very well. For those who don’t know, Ocado was the only supplier in the UK that pretty much have a 1:1 correlation with what you order and what you get and haven’t been sitting on a shelf for days. All the other supermarkets are picked from local stores by hand and are quite frankly terrible with 2-15 items (from experience) missing on every order and some things very near expiry dates. Sainsbury’s for example substituted me some bread which was out of stock with a fresh loaf expiring on the day it was delivered. The delivery turned up at 22:00...

benj111 8y ago
Its not that night and day. Ocado will for example substitute some things that I don't really need, and aren't really substitutable. but if they don't have the nappies you ordered? No substitute, nadda. And it isn't like you can wait a week for nappies if you're running out. Sainsburys I've always found ok, even for our Christmas shop, there weren't any substitutes. Where Ocado is better is search. If I search for 'juice' in Sainsburys I very quickly get 'quinoa with juice of jojoba'. Ocado gives me actual fruit juices.
- vidarh 8y ago
  In case you don't realize: If they substitute something and you don't want it, you can just ask the delivery person to take that item back. I've not done that often, but when I have they've never had an issue doing it. (the real big thing for me is that I have a weekly shop set up, and if I forget to look on their site, they'll send me something based on a tolerably ok prediction of what I usually buy; it far from perfect, but good enough that I occasionally doesn't bother log in on purpose, because I know it will be close enough to what I need to be ok)
  - benj111 8y ago
    You can reject things you ordered too, like the £40 of toilet roll added to reserve the delivery...... So I've heard of course.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago

I appreciate that "robotic warehouse" makes for a good headline but I just wanted to point out that only the part the retrieves the goods from the shelves is robotic. Humans are still packing and dispatching the orders. It's amazing how many people in this thread are looking at the headline and jumping to the conclusion that there were no humans present at all.

teh_klev 8y ago
> Humans are still packing and dispatching the orders. Perhaps not for long, according to the article they're now training robot arms to perform the packing tasks.
- IshKebab 8y ago
  That is a much harder task than just picking up boxes that are all the same size. It's essentially still a research task that many universities are working on. I'd say we're at least a decade away from a robot that can pick up irregular items like a person can.
  - lnsru 8y ago
    Is it that hard when you know, what are you picking? I mean, each box contains only one type of objects. Weight, shape and package type is known.
  - teh_klev 8y ago
    There's a finite number of SKU's it'll need to be trained to pick up and pack. It's not like it's having to learn to pick up and pack unknown things, it just needs to know how to pick and pack whatever Ocado carries in stock. I reckon they'll have this mostly working in under a year.
Nexxxeh 8y ago
Hopefully there were no humans present when the fire went up!

pja 8y ago

So their award winning sprinkler system clearly didn’t work. Will be interesting to read the investigation report & see what actually went wrong.

janekm 8y ago
A sprinkler system... for a giant lithium batteries fire? If it was an actual water sprinkler system that may have been an issue.
- pja 8y ago
  One hopes that they had thought of that, but who knows? Looking at the warehouse videos, it’s clear that under the robots is a vast sea of individual towers of plastic boxes, all packed in tightly. I suspect that once that plastic was burning merrily, it would be very hard to stop & the heat would start cooking off the lithium batteries in the robots above. Hard to see how a sprinkler system can prevent fire from taking hold deep inside those towers of boxes, if that’s what happened.
  - kylegordon 8y ago
    A fire detection camera system could have picked out the heat plume in a short amount of time, and parked the robots as far away as possible from it. The article even comments on how cold the warehouse was, so any heat from fire in 'the hive' should have been easily detectable. My bets are that it started somewhere totally different and unrelated to the robot system. Will be interesting to see why their system failed.
    - smileypete 8y ago
      Could the robots bring buckets of water to dump on the fire? :) I guess there's a lot of isocyanate foam insulation, once that gets going no sprinkler is going to help.

matthewfelgate 8y ago

Was it arson?

baybal2 8y ago

I have some criticism for Ocado. They were a freaking successful business in a no brainer industry... and then they decided to make robots out of a sudden. Not only their risky robot venture cost them a lot, but they ended up burning more by operating them than regular warehouses. Why?

verytrivial 8y ago

For some reason I really felt for the engineers hearing about this. They've presumably lived and dreamed this for years. A bit like watching say a model railway go up in smoke: sure, no-one is dying, but what a waste of best-efforts.