Smart Robotics for Crisis Resilient Food Fulfilment Centre Operations

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The food and groceries retail industry has been overwhelmed during the current COVID-19 epidemic and fulfilling customer orders in a timely and safe manner has been particularly challenging. Online shopping has seen a 74% increase during this period, significantly increasing the workload at fulfilment centres around the country. One of the main reasons is that the bulk of the labour is still largely done by humans and the adoption of automation and robotics is low. Robots are proficient at specific, repeatable tasks for which they are programmed. To get these systems to do something else takes expensive, time-consuming reprogramming and requires a series of complex, sophisticated software and hardware solutions. Smartia are experts in industrial intelligence and automation, and aim to build a cost effective and scalable demonstrator for the food retail industry in this project. This could increase fulfilment centres throughput by 20% thus reducing delivery times, through the use of robotics and AI. In the short term the project will benefit backend activity at retail fulfilment centres but the technology could be used across other industries like food processing and advanced manufacturing in the medium to long term. The specific innovation consists of the integration of an object detection AI model with a robotic system using Smartia's intelligent platform MAIO, for on-demand pick-and-place tasks for automated food and groceries order preparation.The solution proposed offers a much higher level of customisation and versatility than other solutions and will allow incremental abilities to be added to the automated system.The project will benefit from more than 15 man-years of research and development in MAIO, Smartia's industrial intelligence platform.Smartia has complete freedom to develop, integrate and market the solution that will be developed and has access to the physical systems required to build the demonstrator. The UK food and groceries retail market worth £40billion/year. The market for the innovation is estimated to be £100million/year based on 1000 fulfilment centres in the UK. Globally the opportunity is estimated at £5billion/year. The route to market would be via our Software as a Service business model, with the capabilities available to all customers. The hardware components of the solution would be offered through partner companies such as Lenovo and Automata Technologies.Smartia would leverage its channel partnership with Lenovo to grow the market where it benefits from strong relationships with many large retailers including John Lewis (Waitrose) and Asda.