How a grocery delivery service became a red hot robotics company ZDNet

Robots are primed to change the way home shopping services operate, but the most substantive shift will happen in the warehouse, not at your front door. Ocado, a UK-based online grocer that logged $1.5 billion USD in revenue in 2014 and turned its first profit after 15 years this February, recently announced that it's developing autonomous humanoid robots to augment and assist its human workforce. The SecondHands project, as it is known internally, is being carried out in partnership with a consortium of research universities and is part of the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, an ambitious bid to position the EU as a technology hotbed, particularly in the field of robotics. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. "The ultimate aim is for humans to end up relying on collaborative robots because they have become an active participant in their daily tasks," says Dr Graham Deacon, Robotics Research Team Leader at Ocado Technology.