Ocado’s robotic hand technology is about to be put to work
Ocado is set to go into production on the robotic hands technology developed with the SOMA project. The hands will be combined with the vision systems Ocado developed in-house and will put the resulting robots to work in the company’s warehouses.
That’s according to Graham Deacon robotics research fellow at Ocado, speaking to Computing about the company’s robotics research work.
“We already have one device that’s going into production. This uses a simple suction cup on the end of it, but the clever bit is really the vision system. The way these systems typically work is that you need to have a model of the object the robotic arm is picking up in order to calculate the ‘grasp point’.
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“Our system just needs to be able to detect in ‘the scene’ patches that are large enough and horizontal enough for the suction cup to work,” Deacon told Computing.
Deacon continued: “It characterises what needs to be seen in the scene for the suction cup to work, which means that we can be agnostic about what it is that we are trying to pick up. We’re still arranging how many things it can handle. We expect it to be able to handle a few thousand objects – and this will be going into production imminently.
“Is it better than the way [a person would] pack? At the moment, the way that we operate, we give it an empty tote to start with. As the tote becomes more and more full, it becomes more challenging for the robot,” said Deacon.
The robotic hand is the culmination, so far, of several years of work on robots by Ocado in a bid to create a device capable of picking and packing a diverse range of goods in the warehouse. These systems must both be able to handle different kinds of goods without squashing or damaging them in any way, as well as packing them in a logical sequence and manner so they can be safely transported, too.
We expect it to be able to handle a few thousand objects – and this will be going into production imminently
It was part-developed under the European Union SOMA – soft manipulation – project, with the Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), German Aerospace Center, the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Università di Pisa in Italy, Institute of Science and Technology Austria and Disney Research Zurich.
However, such devices must also be married up with ‘vision systems’, which Ocado has also been working on for many years, together with the compute power to underpin the robot’s decision-making power.
News of the latest developments at Ocado comes just two weeks after Amazon founder showed off some of the robotic arms that the online commerce giant is developing at its invitation only re:MARS event – MARS standing for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space.
The robotic arm developments shown off by Bezos, though, are not yet ready for practical usage, while analysts have suggested that Amazon lags Ocado in the development of warehouse automation technology.
Tomorrow: Read Computing’s interview with Graham Deacon about Ocado’s research into robotics
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