Ocado tests robotic assistant for use in its warehouses
Online home delivery supermarket Ocado has revealed the first prototype of a robot to assist staff in its warehouses.
The project, dubbed ‘SecondHands’, is designed to maintenance technicians working in Ocado’s automated warehouses, and will learn through observation how to complete tasks that require a level of precision or physical strength too great for humans. This is in addition to handling fragile or dangerous goods and maintaining and repairing automation equipment
The robot has been developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) by Tamim Asfour and his team at the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab of the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics.
The prototype has been delivered to Ocado’s technology robotics research lab where experiments to evaluate the integrated research components are currently taking place.
