How the Internet of Things is changing grocery retail

Although several analysts have recently downplayed their predictions for the consumer side of the Internet of Things market, IoT adoption in the enterprise segment is currently experiencing a boom.

One of the areas where IoT is set to make a huge impact is the online grocery retail sector. This comes at a time when more consumers are starting to understand the benefits of shopping online.

For example, Ocado has an active customer base that counts over 500,000 users; in addition, we’ve noticed that customers tend to stay loyal to Ocado over time thanks to a combination of great customer service and an easy-to-use shopping platform.

However, we believe there are several areas where IoT is helping us improve efficiency, reduce waste, and enhance the shopping experience for our customers. The two examples mentioned below illustrate some of the projects we’re actively working on and the initial results we’ve achieved thanks to the amazing team of engineers working at Ocado Technology.

Warehouse robots communicating over 4G

The Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) represents the most important breakthrough in online grocery retail. One of the many innovations implemented by the OSP is the use of robots for collecting customers’ groceries; you can find a diagram of how that works below:

To make such a complex system of software and hardware function correctly, we needed a new kind of communications protocol to enable thousands of robots to rapidly communicate over a wireless network. We’ve therefore partnered with Cambridge Consultants to build a wireless system like no other.

This new network is based on the same underlying technology that connects your 4G mobile phone to the internet but operates in a different spectrum that allows thousands of machines to talk to each other at the same time. Each robot integrates a radio chip that connects to a base station capable of handling over 1,000 requests at a time. A typical grocery warehouse can thus use up to 20 base stations to create a small army of connected robots on a mission to ensure that your delivery gets picked in a record time of less than five minutes.

Moreover, since this system uses an unlicensed part of the radio spectrum, it could potentially be deployed for many other IoT applications that require low latency communications between thousands of devices. In addition, it can be deployed quickly too, as there’s no need to submit any form of paperwork related to standards compliance.

Equipping delivery vans with IoT sensors

We employ a large fleet of vans to deliver orders from Customer Fulfilment Centers (CFCs) to Ocado customers who purchase their groceries online. In order to manage this fleet efficiently, we equipped our delivery vans with a range of IoT sensors logging valuable information such as the vehicle’s location, wheel speed, engine revs, braking, fuel consumption, and cornering speed.

The vans then stream back this data in real time and also in greater granularity when they return to their CFCs. Ocado engineers then feed the data into our routing systems so the routes we drive tomorrow will hopefully be even better than the ones we drove today. We can also direct vans to park at the best possible location for a given time of day and take into account factors such as the current day of the week or school holidays.

At a time when inner city pollution is a growing health concern, reducing fuel consumption is not only a wise business decision but also an easy way to cut back on our carbon footprint. Furthermore, having a fleet of connected vehicles that is constantly exploring every corner of the UK enables us to gather lots of useful mapping information, including potential traffic jams and road closures.

This information could then be shared with other connected cars and help drivers manage their journeys more effectively. An example of such an initiative is the recent partnership between Mobileye, GM, Volkswagen and Nissan to create a set of crowdsourced maps that acts as the digital infrastructure for the self-driving cars of the future.