Inside Ocado's giant 'Hive' warehouse in south-east London
Inside Ocado's giant 'Hive' warehouse in south-east London where an army of 2,000 robots pick up to 2 MILLION food items per day – five times faster than a trained human worker
Ocado is using the bots at its 563,000 square ft warehouse in Erith, London
Powered by an algorithm, the bots scoot around on tracks picking up food items
'The Hive' will be revealed on Channel 4's Food Unwrapped show tonight at 8pm
It may look like a nightmare sequence from a science fiction film, but a network of fast-working robots is now hard at work in south-east London.
British grocery giant Ocado is using an army of robots at its 563,000 square foot warehouse in Erith next to the Thames to gather up items for customer orders.
More than 2,000 robots are working there non-stop for 20 hours a day, each picking up to 2 million food items in a shift – far beyond the capability of a human worker.
The eight-wheeled robots scoot around a giant grid-like structure called the 'Hive', so-called for its honeycomb-like holes that contain inventory.
Powered by an algorithm, the robots pick up crates of items to take to a human to put into shopping bags for delivery.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Deliveries are unpacked into crates, which are stored in huge stacks, up to 17 boxes high.
While their position in this stack seems to be at random, it’s algorithmically decided, with frequently accessed items placed on the top and rarer purchases near the bottom.
Each robot uses a set of claws to grab crates, before moving them to a new location or dropping them down a vertical chute to a picking station.
At these stations, human employees grab the items they need from the crate and place them in a shopping bag.
More than 2,000 robots work non-stop for 20 hours a day - far beyond the capability of any human worker.
Although humans are still involved in the process, the robot army replaces hundreds of human staff who would otherwise be walking around the vast fulfilment centre in search of the items on order.
Channel 4 has been granted access to the fulfilment centre for an episode of 'Food Unwrapped', airing tonight (Monday, May 2) at 8pm.
Food Unwrapped presenter Kate Quilton said: 'This is the changing face of the supermarket. I feel like we have whipped away to some crazy game of cosmic dodgems.'
According to James Matthews, CEO of Ocado Technology, the single warehouse is the equivalent of 35 supermarkets under one roof.
At capacity, the bots can pick an order in five minutes, which is around five times faster than a trained human worker.
'Between them, they are covering the distance of four and half times the circumference of the earth every day,' Matthews said.
The Hive is a network of boxes where all of Ocado's products are stored – around 50,000 items on offer in total.
Each box is at the top of an individual stack, which is pushed upwards once the box at the top is emptied.
