The online supermarket retailer claims that this is the first time the wireless protocol has been used for warehouse automation and said that the technology guarantees a connection ten times per second to each of the robots roaming around the warehouse, which are all working within a 150-metre radius.
The protocol works in the licence-free spectrum and also has the potential to be used for other purposes in the future including Internet-of-Things applications, vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity for smart cars, air traffic control systems or large-scale industrial systems.
Ocado said that controlling and locating over 1,000 robots in such a small area posed some difficult challenges.
Initially the project aimed to use Wi-Fi to maintain radio contact with the robots but most Wi-Fi access points can only support a maximum of 256 concurrent clients, which wasn’t sufficient for the scale of the project. In addition, the more robots that were attached to the...