Robot swarm runs hive of online grocery activity

The 240,000 sq ft facility is situated on Walworth Business Park in Andover and is called a customer fulfilment centre (CFC) by Ocado, the online grocer targeting relentless growth through its application of automation and technology.

The Andover CFC provides consumers with a choice of 45,000 products and is set up to handle the picking of 3.5 million items to fulfil up to 65,000 orders a week.

To make this possible, Ocado has created a 4D hive  - three physical dimensions plus a complex communications network - with battery-operated robots at the summit. They manoeuvre over a grid at a top speed of 4m/s - and to within 5mm of one another - to pull crates into a cavity within them. They then move around the grid to lower crates to humans assembling orders for customers who’ve signed up to Ocado’s home delivery service. The crates are then fed back into the system and the process continues on a 24/7 basis.