TCT
On the latest Innovators on Innovators episode of the Additive Insight podcast, Matt Whelan, Ocado Technology Head of Engineering for the 600 Series Bot, is joined by nTopology CEO Brad Rothenberg.
The pair have worked together through Ocado Technology's deployment of the nTopology platform as it developed a fleet of swarm robotics within its warehouses. Ocado Technology operates within the same group as the Ocado online supermarket that delivers groceries to the doors of its customers.
Inside its warehouses, AI-powered swarm robotics - developed with an additive-first approach - are responsible for picking groceries that have been purchased by Ocado's end-users.
Throughout the episode, Whelan and Rothenberg discuss how this infrastructure was developed, the importance of collaboration and the scope for AM applications within robotics moving forward.
When talking about how Ocado Technology has broken through the bottlenecks of traditional processes by leveraging new tools like 3D printing, Whelan said: "My background in software makes me sort of stubbornly refused to accept that any iteration cycle should take longer than about three weeks. Now, I quite blindly applied that mindset when I entered the hardware development space. The new set of tools available, which includes additive, and includes nTopology and includes cloud-based design tools like OnShape [..] when you put all of those things together, the possibility really was there to treat a hardware product, like a sort of Agile software development programme.
"And that's actually really exciting, that has allowed us to build a team that operates in a really different way to other hardware development projects. And again, we're at a bit of a sweet spot with the product, it's really complicated, but it's not a Boeing 777, it doesn't have teams of thousands of people working on it. It is small enough that we can build our own prototypes in house. And that's a really important part of driving that iteration cycle. So, there are little things that are product-specific that allow us to work this way. But it is still generally true that when you put these new design tools in engineers hands and then you enable them to get their own prototypes, proving whether something works or not quickly, you can get phenomenal pace of development into your teams. And that's just incredibly exciting."
More ways to listen:
Ocado Technology's swarm robotics infrastructure inside its warehouse.
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