Ocado enters non-food retail and logistics sectors with new robot acquisitions

As the coronavirus pandemic accelerates the automation of the retail industry, Ocado Group PLC (LON:OCDO) has stepped up its investment in robotics and machine learning. The FTSE 100 group is now buying a company that specialises in an issue that Amazon's Jeff Bezos has several times stated as perhaps the most difficult and last remaining element in the race to automate the retail industry. Ocado has agreed to buy Kindred Systems Inc, a US company specialising in'piece picking' robots, for roughly US$262mln. Using automated intelligence (AI) and deep learning, robots from Kindred and its rivals are increasingly being used by retail and logistics companies to achieve Bezos's tricky task of picking up and moving items without breaking them. Kindred robots use automated intelligence (AI) to power their vision and motion control, while the piece-picking arms are developed using'deep reinforcement learning', a form of AI that improves the learning process for robots handling a wide variety of large, small, hard and soft items such as in grocery.