On Friday, a warehouse of the Ocado online grocery store got blazed when the robots in the warehouse collided at the Erith site. They had canceled thousands of their orders because of the accident.
Ocado, a UK Based online grocery store, is under Ocado retail, which is a joint venture between Marks & Spencer Group and Ocado Group. Ocado’s online platform runs on the innovative technology of the Ocado group. Ocado has a fully automated warehouse for groceries at Erith, East London. It has two types of robotic systems developed from San Francisco-based kindred systems and Las Vegas-based Haddington Dynamics. The Ocado group adopts the robot sorting system from the kindred system, and it chooses the highly efficient robotic arms from the Haddington dynamics. Robots are employed to grab and serve the employees with packages to fulfill the orders fastly.
The below video shows a glimpse on how Ocado warehouse functions:
On Friday, its warehouse was on fire because of the collision of three robots. While it doesn’t cause much damage to staff and other members, it took quite a while to evacuate them. Ocado has canceled nearly thousands of orders because of this accident. It is the second incident happening to Ocado after a fire incident at its Andover facility in 2019.
Also, Ocado’s share price dropped off to 3% after this incident on Monday.
Since online orders are increasing rapidly, grocery stores are now investing in robots to increase productivity. Earlier, Robomart has launched snacks and a pharmacy mart, an autonomous Robomart that serves people at their location. It has plans to launch a grocery mart in the future.
Ocado has mentioned that the total damage was nearly 1%.while their operations got disrupted now. They have said in their official statement that they are continuously working on it and would revive their functioning by the earlier of the upcoming week.
Source: BBC
