Smart Robotics for Crisis Resilient Food Fulfilment Centre Operations

在当前的新冠肺炎疫情中，食品杂货零售业已经不堪重负，及时安全地履行客户订单尤其具有挑战性。在此期间，网上购物增长了74%，大大增加了全国各地履行中心的工作量。其中一个主要原因是，大部分劳动力仍然主要由人类完成，自动化和机器人技术的采用率很低。机器人精通特定的、可重复的任务，这些任务是它们被编程完成的。要让这些系统做其他事情，需要昂贵、耗时的重新编程，并需要一系列复杂、复杂的软件和硬件解决方案。SMARTIA是工业智能和自动化领域的专家，其目标是在该项目中为食品零售行业构建一个成本效益高、可扩展的演示器。这可以通过使用机器人和人工智能将履行中心的吞吐量增加20%，从而减少交付时间。短期内，该项目将有利于零售配送中心的后端活动，但中长期而言，该技术可能会应用于食品加工和先进制造业等其他行业。具体的创新包括使用Smartia的智能平台MAIO将对象检测AI模型与机器人系统集成在一起，用于自动化食品和杂货订单准备的按需挑选和放置任务。建议的解决方案提供了比其他解决方案更高水平的定制化和多功能性，并将允许在自动化系统中添加增量能力。该项目将受益于Smartia的工业智能平台MAIO超过15个人的研究和开发。Smartia完全可以自由开发、集成和销售将开发的解决方案，并可以访问构建演示所需的物理系统。英国食品和杂货零售市场价值400亿GB/年。根据英国1000个履约中心的数据，这项创新的市场估计为1亿GB/年。在全球范围内，这一机会估计为50亿GB/年。进入市场的途径将是通过我们的软件即服务业务模式，向所有客户提供功能。该解决方案的硬件组件将通过联想和Automata Technology等合作伙伴公司提供。Smartia将利用其与联想的渠道合作伙伴关系来发展市场，在这个市场上，它受益于与John Lewis(WaitRose)和Asda等许多大型零售商的牢固关系。

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.