If armies of Terminators start wiping out humanity, their ancestors might be traced to an upmarket grocery home delivery service that sells fancy toilet roll.
Ocado Technology, the innovation arm of the grocery retailer, today unveiled the first prototype of its , a humanoid robot called ARMAR-6 that will one day shadow and collaborate with maintenance workers in Ocado’s three warehouses in the UK.
The grocery company wants ARMAR-6 to learn to understand what people are working on, anticipate any help they might need, and step in with manual assistance at the appropriate time. For example, if a technician asks for a spanner, the robot should identify the tool among others in a toolkit, use its natural language skills to ask the technician “Do you mean this spanner or that one?”, and then hand it over.
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This ability to understand its surrounding will be a massive advance, says Joanna Bryson, an AI researcher at the University of Bath, UK. “In a sufficiently limited context, this is already perfectly doable,” she says, pointing to space heaters that shut themselves off when they figure out they are at the wrong angle, or irons that figure out when they aren’t being used. “It does look like they’ve substantially improved a bunch of core technologies required for human-robot collaboration.”
ARMAR-6 consists of a humanoid torso perched atop a four-wheeled chassis. It has two cameras for eyes that can track several different objects moving in a busy environment at once. Its two arms end in dexterous five-fingered hands that will eventually be able to grasp irregularly shaped objects like bananas and spray bottles – “things you can never count on to be the same shape twice”, says  Graham Deacon, who leads robotics research at Ocado as well as the SecondHands project. “The fingers shape themselves to the object so the robot’s programming will need less knowledge of the object.”
The torso can telescope between 1.5 metres and 1.8 metres. When it draws itself to its full height, it can use its long arms to reach objects 2.2 metres from the floor.
Speed workers
There’s still some way to go before the first humanoid assistant starts loitering in the warehouse, though. Ocado has put together its first full prototype but it will take between two and five years before a SecondHands robot makes its proper debut on the shop floor. Ocado is running the project in collaboration with several universities across Europe, including the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and University College London.
Ocado runs food warehouses that aren’t too different from Amazon’s enormous, highly automated and hyper efficient fulfilment centres. They have hundreds of grocery-picking robots speeding along an intricate network of roller coaster-like tracks, whisking the various elements of a customer’s order from far-flung corners of the warehouse. Working in parallel, these grocery robots can assemble 50 items of groceries in 5 minutes.
At any time, several dozen maintenance technicians are keeping this always-on environment flowing smoothly. Doing so often means lifting panels that are too heavy for one person, or doing fiddly work. “Our techs need a second pair of hands,” says Deacon. “You need a companion.”
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