OT warehouse fire intensity.

In this video:

shows the battery charging station. Each robot has a big battery isolator switch on the top, as well as an emergency stop button, a couple of antennas and a pair of D-sub connectors (COMMS and SAFETY OVERRIDE). There's also a giant recovery truck that runs on the grid.

According to this:

"The robots are battery powered, which simplifies some of the other issues with having hundreds of washing machine-sized bots rolling around a warehouse at high speed. The average energy consumption per robot is only about 200 watts, which is bolstered by regenerative braking. The power pack itself is about the size of a car battery and features a cell chemistry that lets it charge up in a few minutes and run for several hours. Energy efficiency was a key design consideration but not just for endurance: when the bots are charging or moving goods around, it was important to ensure they wouldn?t generate enormous amounts of heat."

The robots have CAUTION: HOT BATTERY SURFACE written on one side.

(not quite clear enough to read the data panel on the side)

Hmm, fast charging... I wonder how good their battery management is.

Theo

Why would they use 4G instead of WiFi (or even a proprietary ISM band protocol)?

If occado get the M&S food gig, I can hear the voiceover now ...

"We don't just hang your Prosciutto-wrapped, Honey-roast Venison Joint for 14 days at the perfect temperature, we also bathe it in an atmosphere of the finest flue gasses"

Yeah saw that, is there some "step change" coming in September that makes it uneconomic from that point?

The RF environment is challenging, being a large surface (N football fields) with robots roaming over the whole area. WiFi isn't designed for hundreds of APs (which you need because you can't get line of sight from an AP on the low ceiling to more than a few tens of metres of robot surface) with non-interference between APs and rapid channel handovers as the client traverses from one AP to another. Their application needs continuous low latency comms; the robot can't stop while it re-associates with a new AP, and if it does so on the move none of the other robots know where it is.

They use a 4G PHY at 5GHz, but with custom upper layers. 4G, being cell based, is designed for reliable handover at speed from one cell to the next. They aren't doing voice calls, SMS or LTE data - that bit is proprietary.

See "Building a hive mind":

Theo

why they'd want to make themselves dependant on EE/O2/3/voda etc, but they haven't ...