Ocado Reveals More Details of 4G Warehouse Automation Project

Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer, is developing 4G-based protocol to communicate with thousands of robots powering its new automated warehouses – and today, the UK-based company is revealing more details about the project. These highly-automated warehouses will be offered as part of a managed service called the Ocado Smart Platform which enables international partners to build scalable, sustainable and profitable online retail businesses.

The protocol marks the first deployment anywhere in the world to use the unlicensed 4G spectrum for warehouse automation and guarantees a connection ten times per second to each of the 1,000+ robots roaming around the warehouse – all working within a 150m radius.
“While building a robot can be a relatively straightforward task, creating a swarm of thousands of robots and making sure you can communicate with every single in a tenth of a second is a whole different ball game. We have worked closely with Cambridge Consultants to develop an innovative system that takes advantage of modern wireless communications principles but has secret ingredients that tailor it to our specific environment. Since the protocol works in the license-free spectrum, we can also deploy it at a moment’s notice in any location around the world,” said Adam Green, wireless team leader at Ocado.

Moreover, the wireless protocol can be repurposed for other IoT applications that mandate reduced communications delay between many devices: vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity for smart cars, air traffic control systems or large scale industrial systems.

The article below provides more details and images:
http://www.ocadotechnology.com/our-blog/articles/teaching-robots-to-talk-over-4G