Aiming to integrate autonomous vehicles into the Ocado Smart Platform
Logistics costs constitute the single-largest line item in the operating cost structure of online grocery.
Through the development of autonomous vehicles in partnership with Oxbotica, we see potential cost savings within core operations and significant opportunities to improve our partners’ customer proposition by:
- being better able to respond to peak delivery demands
- reducing the cost-to-serve of our immediacy proposition
- accelerating a shift to electrically-powered vehicles.
We are excited to develop a wide range of autonomous solutions that truly have the potential to transform both our and our partners’ operations.
Oxbotica
Founded in 2014 by two professors at Oxford University, Oxbotica is one of the world’s leading autonomous driving software companies. They build software for real-world application, drawing on principles of physics, robotics, maths and AI, and were the first in the UK to test self-driving vehicles in public.
The relationship between Ocado Group and Oxbotica began in 2017, when we conducted a two-week trial using an early prototype delivery vehicle doing autonomous deliveries in Greenwich, London.
This is an excellent opportunity for Oxbotica and Ocado to strengthen our partnership, sharing our vision for the future of autonomy.
The autonomous vehicle project
With this new £10m investment starts a multi-year collaboration, enhancing and integrating Oxbotica’s autonomous mobility software solutions to a variety of vehicles that could be used within online grocery.
The use-cases range from vehicles that operate inside of our Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFCs) and the yard areas that surround them, all the way to last-mile deliveries and kerb-to-kitchen robots. Early prototypes are expected within two years.
The ultimate ambition is to enable our partners that use the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) to reduce the costs of last-mile delivery and other logistics operations.
Initial steps
Our existing Advanced Technology division is independent from the engineering team that develops our core OSP software and automation, and it’s from here that we’ll create teams of engineers to work with Oxbotica.
By combining both companies’ cutting-edge knowledge and resources, we hope to bring our Universal Autonomy vision to life and continue to solve some of the world’s most complex autonomy challenges.
Teams will initially outfit a subset of our delivery vans and warehouse vehicles with data capture capabilities, which may include video cameras, LiDAR, radar and other sensing devices. Oxbotica will use this data to train and test its technologies, which will then inform us as to what opportunities exist.
Last updated 16 April 2021
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