Online Supermarket Ocado 3D-Prints Fast, Lightweight Bots To Pack Your Groceries
Going to the grocery store, picking out items from shelves to put in your basket, and carrying the bags out of the store—these are all things firmly embedded in the daily routine, a part of everyday life that’s hard to imagine going without.
But with futuristic automation inching its way into almost every industry, this habit might soon begin to fade away.
Online grocery shopping platform Ocado has unveiled its ‘600 series’ bot, the successor of the previous 500 series. It was designed with topology techniques, widely used in the aerospace industry, which optimizes the distribution of material in a product.
The new design, poised to be five times lighter than the previous make as well as being a lot more cost-effective, has more than half its parts 3D-printed with HP’s MultiJet Fusion technology.
This also means that if the bot encounters a problem, a replacement part can be printed on-demand at the warehouse, no delays required.
Ocado CEO and founder Tim Steiner, speaking at the Ocado Re:Imagined event, explained that the bots will improve packaging efficiency as well as dramatically reducing day-to-day labor costs by up to 40%.
Because the 600 series is so light and portable, the grid it works upon can also be redesigned for a lighter, simpler design than its previous design. These can be built in weeks instead of months, per 3D Printing Industry, and can also be installed in a more flexible range of buildings for convenience.
Alongside the 600 series bot, Ocado has also revealed the design for a new picker, which chooses items in grocery orders with the precision of a human hand. The Robotic Pick then loads it onto the bot, who whisks it away for further packing.
These innovations come as part of Ocado’s Smart Platform, described by the firm as a “world-class suite of solutions for operating online grocery businesses.”
20 years ago we imagined a different way to do online grocery. Now, from the forefront of the industry, we're doing it again. This is #OcadoReimagined.
— Ocado Group (@OcadoGroup) January 26, 2022
Watch the full video to see the innovation that will change the game for OSP partners: https://t.co/GwmWGLo01m#OcadoGroup pic.twitter.com/wO4fukLAjj
[via 3D Printing Industry and T3, images via Ocado]
