Robo shop

IN THE control room at Ocado's automated warehouse in Hatfield, 50 kilometres north of London, the firm's head of research is wielding something rather odd: an Xbox game controller. But Alex Harvey is not about to zap some aliens. Instead, with a deft twitch of his thumb, he zooms into a 3D computer model that looks, at first glance, like some kind of bizarre, multilayered train set. But this is actually an animated, real-time visualisation of the thicket of over 30 kilometres of conveyor systems in a warehouse the size of eleven football fields. It models the movement of thousands of crates around the conveyor belts to workstations where just a few human workers pack them to fulfil hundreds of thousands of online grocery orders every week.