We recently requested a grocery delivery from Ocado in London, and then watched in amazement as the order was delivered right to our door in an electric self-driving “CargoPod” vehicle. Now we’re getting to see the other side of the operation, where a fleet of robots swarm across a grid bigger than a football field, where they complete orders in minutes that would take a human worker hours to fulfill.
Ocado is England’s largest online-only grocery delivery company. It started from the ground up as an online retailer only, so the company had no actual stores to hamper its growth. The robot workers, more than 1,000 of them in all, were developed with the assistance of U.K. manufacturer Tharsus.
To operate efficiently, the robots need to accelerate and decelerate quickly, be able to carry and deliver heavy payloads, and operate for several hours on only a single electric charge.
The vast grid has containers underneath each opening filled with all the products advertised on the Ocado website — more than 50,000 in all. The robots speed across the rails at 13 feet per second, passing within millimeters of each other, retrieving items and ferrying them to a drop-off point on the grid. Human workers underneath then assemble the order and prepare it for delivery.
For restocking, the procedure works in reverse — the robots pick up items from the drop-off point and disseminate them to the appropriate containers.
“The level of performance Ocado can now achieve is a revolution for grocery logistics,” the company says at its website. “The new facility can pick a customer’s order of around 50 items in a few minutes compared to several hours at existing fulfilment centres.”
The basic idea for the automated warehouse came from the shipping industry, Paul Clarke of Ocado told the website co.design, describing how “shipping containers are stacked one on top of one another and then moved around by cranes acting above the stacks.”
It seems like this advanced tech could overcome some of the challenges faced by other online retailers. Because the Ocado system was developed exclusively for grocery delivery, it might face some difficulties transitioning to other industries. That’s why the company is offering it as a service platform, rather than selling the technology outright.
Clarke claims that his company is adding jobs, rather then replacing human professions with robots. Its service is continually expanding, but most of the jobs it’s creating may be in building its massive new automated warehouses.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.